Census 2020

[Clay Shentrup]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/trumps-pick-to-run-2020-census-has-defended-racial-gerrymandering-and-voter-suppression-laws/

[Brian Langstraat]

I think that Thomas Brunell is too inexperienced and apparently biased to be the deputy director of the Census Bureau, but his concept of extreme partisan gerrymandering may be reasonable.

From the above article:

In his 2008 book, Brunell admitted that he was making a “provocative argument” by saying that extreme gerrymandering was preferable to swing districts. “Rather than drawing 50-50 districts, we should be drawing districts that are overwhelmingly comprised of one party or the other (80-20 or even 90-10) to whatever extent possible,” he wrote, because that “substantially increases the number of voters who will be both happier with their representative and better served by this representative.”

In the topics "Voting method with the ABSOLUTE least amount of wasted votes." and "Could representatives choosing their voters be a good way too redistrict?", I proposed that extreme bi-partisan gerrymandering that results in extreme multi-partisan gerrymandering (or even representatives choosing voters) could have positive results. Positive results should include diverse legislatures (with nearly perfect proportional representation) consisting of independents/small parties and minimizing the amount of wasted votes (in the general election).

However, Brunell seems to ignore his concept of extreme BI-partisan gerrymandering when defending Republican state legislatures' UNI-partisan gerrymandering.

The goal of uni-partisan gerrymandering is to pack (70-30) the minority of districts with opponents and make fairly safe (55-45) the majority of districts with proponents.

The North Carolina legislature's uni-partisan (and racial) gerrymandering after the 2010 census resulted in clearly packed minority districts and fairly safe majority districts.

The margins of victory (excluding highest and lowest outliers) in 2012, 2014, and 2016 were an average of 45% for Democratic congressional representatives and 20% for the Republican congressional representatives.

On Wednesday, January 3, 2018 at 2:24:40 AM UTC-6, Clay Shentrup wrote:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/trumps-pick-to-run-2020-census-has-defended-racial-gerrymandering-and-voter-suppression-laws/

[Brian Olson]

pfft, everyone knows that our party should have 60/40 districts and their party should have 80/20 districts.

But seriously, screwing up the Census Bureau could lead to invisible gerrymanders by screwing up the underlying data everyone needs to work with. Simply underfunding the Census could lead to undercounting certain populations and then suddenly there might be 850,000 of them in a district where other areas get more representation per person with the more expected 750,000 people per district. That might be some risky betting though, because really they'd need to know how many 'likely voters' there are in each district so they can get the outcome they want while ignoring as many possible of the gerrymandered-against people. But maybe these are also low-turnout areas so it all fits together neatly. Or, how much do you have to screw up a Census to make an apportionment gerrymander? Some states could lose or gain a whole US House rep if the numbers are close. More reps for red states and fewer reps for blue states? Systematically undercount blue states?

I've been a fan of the Census Bureau for just doing their job reliably and putting out lots of good easy to use data. The politicization of it is a tragedy and a damn shame.

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[Warren D Smith]

It will be a major undercut of democracy if the census bureau becomes about
party-directed lying, rather than finding out the truth about the population.
Indeed if it does then probably it would be better to abolish the
census entirely.

And the whole notion that "extreme gerrymandering" is a good idea, I think is
bogus. It completely removes "democracy" from the picture in the sense that
nobody has any voting power anymore, all elections are
entirely predictable, there no longer is any accountability,
there likely no longer is any original thinking,
and all congressmen are congressmen-for-life.
So therefore congress will love him.
Also, it yields massive permanent polarization and gridlock
as a design goal.

It does yield party balance in the legislature equal to that in the
population if
(1) there are only 2 parties, and (2) all gerrymandering is
maximally extreme (100-0). But so what?

And a different extreme-gerrymandering flavor was described in puzzle 35
here -- "double gerrymandering":
http://rangevoting.org/PuzzlePage.html#p35
and for that flavor it was demonstrated that it does not work if there are more
than 2 parties.

The flavor where all districts are 100-0-0, 0-100-0, or 0-0-100
would work even with 3 parties.

There was a previous occasion in US history where, somewhat unintentionally,
this "extreme gerrymandering" actually was happening.
That was the period immediately before the US civil war.

Great.

And more generally, in case you have not noticed, Trump often appears
to intentionally be appointing, to head agencies, the worst, not the
best, person
he can find, because it apparently is his intentional goal to destroy
the functionality
of the US government.

For example, to head the US dept of energy, he appointed Rick Perry,
whose main claim to fame was that he wanted to ABOLISH the DOE, but
was too stupid on the debate stage to remember that (there were 3
agencies he was going to abolish, but he forgot
the third). Perry later explained that in 2016 he found out what the
DOE actually does, and hence then realized that he does not want to
abolish it. I mean, appointing to head
to DOE, a guy who by his own admission did not even know what it did??!!

And to head HUD, he appoints Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon with no
expertise whatever in housing and urban development.

And to head the EPA, whose purpose is to defend the environment, he appoints
Scott Pruitt, who as far as I can tell wants to abolish the EPA and prevent
it from doing anything, and who has no environmental expertise whatever.

And now to head the Census, Trump wants: an explicit advocate of
"extreme gerrymandering."

I mean, this shit is virtually beyond belief.



--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[Warren D Smith]

> And more generally, in case you have not noticed, Trump often appears
> to intentionally be appointing, to head agencies, the worst, not the
> best, person
> he can find, because it apparently is his intentional goal to destroy
> the functionality
> of the US government.

--more examples:
Appoints as national security advisor, a paid foreign agent,
Michael Flynn.

Appoints as head of OMB, Mick Mulvaney who
in the words of wikipedia was
"previously a stalwart deficit hawk, [but] became
a proponent of large federal deficits after his appointment
to the Trump administration."

Fires all the US attorneys there were -- with zero days notice!
And while other presidents have also fired many or even all
of them too (albeit not with no warning), the difference was -- those
other presidents had replacements in mind. Trump simply fired every one, and
made zero replacements! According to federal vacancy law their
chief assistants then took over their positions, for the next 300
days while Trump (the law intended) found out who to replace them
with. Except...
today is the 299th say, and up to day #298, no replacement had been
announced. Zero! On day #299, Sessions (not Trump)
came with 17 suggested replacements, far
short of the needed number.

I mean, the only possible way I can interpret that is as an intentional
move to cripple the dept. of justice. No other president has even come close to
that behavior, ever.

And the following don't particularly count as government appointees
designed to be
bad, but still, this is amazing:
Appoints as head of his presidential campaign,
Corey Lewandowski. Fires him.
Appoints as head of his presidential campaign,
Paul Manafort. Fires him. Now says Manafort
only "played a minor role" and Trump had
virtually nothing to do with him. Oh.
Appoints as head of his presidential campaign,
Steve Bannon. Later fires him (not from campaign, but from
White House "Chief Strategist") and today he said,
quote, Bannon has "lost his mind."

[NoIRV]

Back on the topic on the Census:
Are there not more people in charge who can try to resist the unfair census attempt?
And how would we know how many reps to send to Congress if there were no census?

[Lonán Dubh]

> And how would we know how many reps to send to Congress if there were no census?

I'm honestly not certain how important the accuracy is for that purpose.

Unless congress decided to increase their number, we know that there are going to be 435 representatives.  It is unlikely that they would, because the increased urbanization over the past century means that the party in power currently (R) likely would lose power (proportionally) by such an increase.  Indeed, that was the explicit argument against increasing congress in the 1920s (since 1913, technically).

As to the apportionment, I'm not certain how easy it would be to fudge the numbers; as it stands with current estimates, about 15 states would lose 1 rep each, and each, NY,NC,VA would gain one, FL, CA, and TX would gain 3,4,5, respectively.  I don't know how much you could fudge those numbers without it being obvious; it's not like you can hide the fact that the Texas population has increased by ~3M people, or that WV has lost about 40k.

...which only leaves Brian's point about "Invisible Gerrymandering."  While only 21 states are likely to gain or lose seats, a full 31 states are expected to have 4 or more representatives.  How those district boundaries lie is going to be the real question, is the real source of power in congress.  Illinois, consistently one of the worst offenders in terms of gerrymandering, will almost certainly continue to have its 18 seats, which (depending on state law) they can redistrict if they choose.  North Carolina, debatably the worst offender presently, will likely be forced to redistrict by their (projected) additional seat.  If the Census screws up the underlying data, even something like Brian's compactness algorithm (ideally using travel distances, rather than absolute geographic measurements, if possible) won't be able to solve the problem, because of the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" problem.

[Warren D Smith]

The trouble is that congress quite likely LOVES the accusation that this guy
is a proponent of "extreme gerrymandering" so that accusation would not stop
them from approving his appointment, but more likely encourage it!
Trump has usually succeeded in appointing the people he wants, even if they are
outrageously unqualified; and also has succeeded in not appointing a
ton of people
at all which apparently he intends to leave vacant.

If the census is planning to intentionally bias things they would
probably go about
it by simply intentionally undercounting and overcounting selected
places, e.g. giving Alabama more seats if they want to bias things in
a pro Roy Moore
direction. There are a lot of ways the head of the Census could play
games to have that kind of effect.

The other main lesson to learn is: DO NOT TRUST "unbiased" individuals
such as the head of the census, with your districting. Need to make sure
things are really unbiased and that we do not need to place our trust
in anybody.

[Phil Uhrich]

"Unless congress decided to increase their number, we know that there are going to be 435 representatives. It is unlikely that they would, because the increased urbanization over the past century means that the party in power currently (R) likely would lose power (proportionally) by such an increase. Indeed, that was the explicit argument against increasing congress in the 1920s (since 1913, technically)."

You might not need congress to increase the number of seats in the house.
http://www.registercitizen.com/opinion/article/Don-Pesci-New-research-shows-Connecticut-signed-12010185.php

"It is commonly thought that Connecticut did not ratify the Bill of Rights Amendments until 1939, a pro forma ratification. But in fact, misfiled documents newly discovered in Connecticut’s archives show that Connecticut ratified the first 12 – significantly, not 10 – Amendments to the Constitution, commonly called “the Bill Of Rights,” in 1790.

The ratification document, discovered by researcher Eugene Martin LaVergne and misfiled under “Revolutionary Documents,” has been reported to Connecticut’s archivist. The newly discovered document — misfiled in the year 1780, rather than in its proper year, 1790 — is itself revolutionary because the earlier ratification dates of Connecticut and Delaware mean that at least one important long forgotten amendment – a reapportionment amendment, the real “First Amendment” to the Bill of Rights reported out for ratification by Congress – must now be considered an amendment lawfully ratified in 1790. In order to make the amendment operational, it must be reported to the U .S. Congress by David Ferrierno, the Archivist of the United States, an office delegated with the task of accepting this amendment and presenting it to Congress. Alternatively, the ratification notice may also be presented to congress by a Connecticut U.S. Senator."

The archivist of CT has accepted and verified this claim. If it were enacted it would cap the number of people represented by each house member at 50k (currently close to 800k). That would increase the size of the house to around 7000. I would love it if this happened because it is a heck of a lot easier to have a grassroots campaign talk to 50k people and it is a heck of a lot harder for Billionaires to bribe 7000 people, and it would be much easier to turf someone out if they were obviously corrupt. This would also obviously be a boon for smaller parties. Currently the US house is the 2nd least representative legislative body in the world that attempts to be proportional to population (India's parliament is 1st).

I talked to two of my state reps in MN to see if they would make a push to ratify it here as a publicity stunt but no dice.

[NoIRV]

You CANNOT be serious. There is just no space for a 16-fold increase in congressmen. And nothing could get done because there would just plain be too many people and they would either have to ignore 94% of the congress or spend months debating just to "give everyone a voice".

Trying to start a grassroots campaign would have the problem that your rep would just be lost in the crowd. Whereas right now WE are lost in the crowd.

I still hate how basically nothing can get done unless the congress person comes up with it himself. That is not democracy, it is a joke.

[Warren D Smith]

7000 congressmen would be a huge disaster that would
instantly destroy the US government. Oh I know, they could move the capitol to
the astrodome.

It boggles my mind that a constitutional amendment could be ratified with
nobody noticing for over 200 years.

[Frank Martinez]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 23:21 Warren D Smith <warre...@gmail.com> wrote:

7000 congressmen would be a huge disaster that would instantly destroy the US government.

Not really, no. For example, mainland China has 3,000 Legislators (and, contrary to popular belief, are not only of the Communist Party; instead, the CCP has only a significant majority). If 3,000 can work together, it’s not completely out of the question 7,000 could do the same.

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[Warren D Smith]

On 1/19/18, Frank Martinez <frankdm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 23:21 Warren D Smith <warre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 7000 congressmen would be a huge disaster that would instantly destroy
>> the
>> US government.
>
>
> Not really, no. For example, mainland China has 3,000 Legislators (and,
> contrary to popular belief, are not only of the Communist Party; instead,
> the CCP has only a significant majority). If 3,000 can work together, it’s
> not completely out of the question 7,000 could do the same.

--suppose each legislator sent out one email once a week addressed to
all others.
It would not be physically possible for those emails to be read, if
it took more than 20 seconds average to read/handle them, assuming at least
50% of a legislator's worktime had to consist of something other than email.

But hey, maybe we should just go for it instantly. After all, it is
"not completely out of the question" that our country would survive!
Sounds like one of the greatest arguments ever!

[Frank Martinez]

I have seen you express a large degree of cynicism over the years. And, in the mind of the cynic, next to nothing can give any improvement. So, if the argument seems weak, it’s because trying to convince you, Warren, is not worth much more of my time. But, please, do carry on convinced you have all the answers, like you so often do.

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[Ciaran Dougherty]

I am inclined to agree that 7k is a bit much, but that's not how that amendment reads. It says not less than 200 total, nor More than one representative per 50k. As such, the only impact it would meaningfully have would be to set an upper bound of 6462 (currently), because no one has seriously proposed having the size of the House

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[Phil Uhrich]

Who says they all need to be in the same building? Some rule changes like needing X cosponsors to propose legislation, and breaking into a dozen caucuses for most things could help. They get staffers to read the emails. With that many people you would be much more likely to have broader specializations rather than just a bunch of lawyers. If some obscure thing comes up one of them is almost bound to know someone who is a specialist in that field. I'm sure it could be done, probably a lot easier than you think. I think 2500 would be a better number but that would be about a million times harder to get passed. They could always do another amendment to change it if they want.

[NoIRV]

On Saturday, January 20, 2018 at 3:11:56 AM UTC-5, Phil Uhrich wrote:
> Who says they all need to be in the same building? Some rule changes like needing X cosponsors to propose legislation, and breaking into a dozen caucuses for most things could help. They get staffers to read the emails. With that many people you would be much more likely to have broader specializations rather than just a bunch of lawyers. If some obscure thing comes up one of them is almost bound to know someone who is a specialist in that field. I'm sure it could be done, probably a lot easier than you think. I think 2500 would be a better number but that would be about a million times harder to get passed. They could always do another amendment to change it if they want.

But what if I want my legislator to do something about adopting Range Voting and my legislator is in a group that handles, say, criminal justice reform?

[Warren D Smith]

Re my "cynicism"... I have had a lot of experience failing to get
reform accomplished, which indeed causes a "cynical" or "burned out"
psychology. I also pay more attention than most to what is going
wrong in, e.g, Washington, which also tends to make me more and more
cynical the more I learn. I'm reading a pretty good book right now,
"Dark money" by Jane Mayer, maybe you'd learn something from it.
Another problem I have is I'm honest,
putting me at a disadvantage versus those who are not.
I also am fairly good at finding flaws in suggestions, which others do
not always appreciate, but I think it is good to find flaws. (There
is a countervailing tendency in some to propose simplistic ideas and
ignore their flaws and be too optimistic, and I think that is
ultimately a mistake.)

So, yes.

[Frank Martinez]

I have no trouble with finding flaws. I think you use that goal, however, as an excuse to come across as a scared, sad, and (dare I say) pathetic bully.

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[Warren D Smith]

On 1/20/18, Frank Martinez <frankdm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no trouble with finding flaws. I think you use that goal, however,
> as an excuse to come across as a scared, sad, and (dare I say) pathetic
> bully.

--Well, I am unsure what I am supposed to be scared of, and don't think
I am scared, although maybe you know something I do not.
Am I sad? Plausibly. Am I a bully? I had no idea I was a bully and am not
sure even what that means. Am I pathetic? Well, I certainly feel somewhat
pathetic in at least some ways.
Seems a little too much psychologizing?

My view is: US democracy is not working well; democracy in general is
substantially improvable; I happen, due to having studied it a lot, to
know more than almost everybody about some aspects of that (although I
certainly do not know everything); but I can't accomplish reform and
the situation keeps getting worse. Nevertheless I feel I have
accomplished something not entirely negligible.

[Warren D Smith]

Well, to be a bit more positive (?),
it seems to me if you wanted to convince anybody that a huge (7000?!)
legislature would be a good thing, then it'd help to, via
some cross-country and/or cross-time
study, to produce evidence that larger has been better in some
quantifiable historical/economic senses.

There have been such studies, but not about this particular number
as far as I know. I am not seeing such a trend based on the unscientific
non-study of comparing places and times in my mind.

In the USA, Nebraska is unique in having a unicameral legislature, which
sort of counts as smaller. Is it therefore doing discernibly worse
than the other 49 states? Actually, it seems to be better than average,
e.g. in life expectancy is ranked 15th
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the number
of seats in the lower house of state legislatures varies from max=400
in New Hampshire (which I think
also has the lowest population per legislator) to min=40 in Alaska.
So is New Hampshire better than the other 49 states?
It is ranked 8th in life expectancy, which is surprisingly (to me) good.

The highest population per legislator is California, by far. So is CA
way worse than NH?
Actually, it is even better, ranked 4th in life expectancy,

Eh? So no trend at all is apparent.

For countries see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_number_of_members
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

and the UK has the largest legislature among democracies but is ranked 20th
in life, while Japan has one of the smallest yet is ranked top in life.

There might be a trend which a careful multifactor analysis could reveal, but
a casual look reveals no trend so evidently the effect if any is small.

[Phil Uhrich]

I don't think life expectancy should be the sole metric to judge with. I'd go with something along the lines of how often the legislature does what people want as opposed to what the 1% want. How easy is it to bring a matter of importance to the attention of the government. Does the government work in the interests of its citizens or its corporations? The only thing that I can think of that even comes close to measuring that is gini and even that is not all encompassing.

[Warren D Smith]

--life expectancy has the advantage of being objective
and measured to very high precision each year
(virtually every death is known, to within +-1 day).
"Something along the lines of how often the legislature does what

people want as opposed to what the 1% want"

in contrast, is very hard to define+measure and even if you try then
your attempt will
be very easy to attack. Gini is ok, but much less precise than life expectancy,
and it is not clear what the optimum gini is but clear what the
optimum lifespan is.

Anyhow, those kind of studies have been done by gathering an enormous
load of data,
then doing multivariable statistics so that, e.g, we can figure out the
effect of X while controlling for the confounding effects of A,B,C,D...
Only very large amounts of data have any hope to see thru all the
noise to get a statistical signal.

If the people doing those studies keep their huge data trove secret, then it
is hard for you (or anybody) to be a competitor since you need to
redevelop the wheel.
And a lot of them unfortunately like it to be hard for everybody else.

If not, then maybe you can get theirs and restart from there.
Ultimately what would be wanted is a public software+data trove that keeps being
added to. Unfortunately, as far as I could tell last time I looked,
that was not happening.
But maybe I am unaware of something.

[Clay Shentrup]

I'd say the Gini index is an extremely poor measure of anything. What matters is not inequality but absolute welfare. We instead want something like the sum of the log of each individual's wealth.

[Warren D Smith]

--I'm still liking life expectancy :)
Why rely on THEORIES about log(wealth) or some unknown function(wealth)
when you can have REALITY: death.
Plus measuring wealths is hard, imprecise; while deaths are very precise.

So in particular, the sum log(wealth) would be maximized when all
wealths are equal. However, I doubt the true optimum for society is
exact equality.
I suspect people better at handling money, ought to be richer;
that'll improve society more. Mind you, that too can be taken too far, but
my point is that the optimum for society is not going to be simply
understandable
purely in terms of wealths, even if you knew everybody's wealth, which nobody
does.

What might be good is some "happiness survey" asking people to try to
rate how happy
they are on an arbitrary scale, but this is certainly going to be far
less precise
and more debatable than deaths.

[Ted Stern]

A number of people have been pushing for the 1915 & 1929 cap of 435 representatives to be lifted, with the consensus leaning toward a cube root of population rule, based on studies done in the 1970s and continually re-validated since then:

https://fruitsandvotes.wordpress.com/category/electoral-rules/cube-root-law/

Using a projection of 334.5M for the 2020 census, and rounding up to the nearest odd number, would yield 695 representatives for the 2022 election.

This would still put nearly 500k people in each congressional district, but it would go a long way toward redressing the current gross overrepresentation of low population states.

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[Jameson Quinn]

Sum of log wealth would correlate well with log median wealth, because wealth is approximately lognormally distributed.

Log median wealth is just a monotone transform of median wealth.

Median wealth has a reasonable, though far from perfect, correlation with gini-corrected GDP.

So even if what you really care about is sum of log wealth, Gini is not "extremely poor". May not be the best measure, but far from worthless.

2018-01-21 19:19 GMT-05:00 Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com>:

I'd say the Gini index is an extremely poor measure of anything. What matters is not inequality but absolute welfare. We instead want something like the sum of the log of each individual's wealth.

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[Phil Uhrich]

I'm not trying to paint gini as a panacea, it is just one of several criteria I would consider in an effective government measurement. If you want to put life expectancy in there too fine, but not the only criteria because things that the government has no influence over can be a factor. I'd also include surveys of citizens on how responsive they think the government is to their needs, and voter turnout rates too. The main reason I would push for gini to be in there is because inequality of outcomes dramatically increases inequality of opportunity through a number of avenues.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/what-matters-inequality-or-opportuniy/393272/

I'm not calling for total equality of outcomes but when you allow society to create billionaires and allow those billionaires to pass down wealth for generations they ALWAYS corrupt the government to intrench their power. Just look how corrupt the process is to get support for the party that is nominally supposed to be looking out for the least among us.
https://theintercept.com/2018/01/23/dccc-democratic-primaries-congress-progressives/

That is why we have a government that the vast majority of people think is completely indifferent to their needs. Surveys that ask people why they don't vote always find the number one response to be no matter who wins nothing in my life gets any better. To run and win all that matters is how many billionaires you can get checks from. When you win you still need those checks so you think twice about doing anything that would cross them no matter how helpful it would be for the society writ large. That is why we live in the country that pays twice as much per capita for much worse results in health care. Over the Obamacare fight no one dared mentioning single payer despite it's OBVIOUS success in every other country.

If we were a society that cared about our fellow citizens we would guarantee a job and benefits to anyone ready willing and able to work. If we were a society that cared about maximising productivity we would offer free college and trade school to all of our citizens because a more educated society is a more productive one. We would have a safety net for people who get injured or have a medical problem. We would use incentives for productivity rather than the fear of job loss and destitution for failure.

There is NOTHING harder to do in politics than to kill entrenched wealth. I want a top tax rate of 90% on income from any source over $1 million and an estate tax of 90% of anything over 2$ million. That is just to discourage wealth accumulation since taxes don't fund government spending. I'd be fine with eliminating taxes on corporations (with the exception of using taxes to make incentives like a carbon tax, a tax on monopolies, a tax on outsourcing, or a tax on stock buybacks) as long as any shareholder was taxed when cashing out. Wealth may not be entirely zero sum, but it isn't entirely elastic either.

[NoIRV]

I think 90% is ridiculous. Something more like 30-40 is more reasonable, and maybe I would go for 50-70 if you convinced me. But I agree with the ideas behind what you are saying.

(Rhetoritcal: Who is easiest to convince. General public, IRV propagandists, or the strict GOP?)

[Phil Uhrich]

It's only 90% on income above $1 million.

"Almost half of the top 1 percent, or 1.4 million taxpayers, make $344,000 to $500,000. More than 1.1 million make $999,999 or less."
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2011/10/25/beyond-the-1-percent/

I can barely decipher that word salad but that would be less than 0.5% of the population that would be in that bracket.

I'd be fine with 40% on $250k-$1mil
20% on $100k-$250k
5% on $50k-$100k
0% on <$50k

Because Federal Taxes don't fund spending.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-mosler/taxes-for-revenue-are-obs_b_542134.html

[Warren D Smith]

Top tax rates of about 90% actually occurred at one point in US history
and indeed the US did quite well during that era, maybe indeed better
than at any other time.

I personally have a theory that the top rates ought to approach 100%,
causing there to be (effectively) a "soft" maximum wage,
as well as (which there currently is although there
seem to be exceptions built in for certain classes of workers)
a hard "minimum wage."

One advantage of this min- and max- wage interval existing is that
it eliminates inflation & deflation forever by linking the value of
the dollar to the value of
human labor. If you just have a lower bound but not an upper bound
then perpetual inflation is not stopped (and if we just had an upper
bound deflation
would not be stopped). One can devise simple "soft max-wage" tax formulas which
have the property that there always is positive incentive for any person
to get more money; the incentive never vanishes although it does diminish.

I also would advocate this especially for inheritance taxes.

[Clay Shentrup]

Minimum wage is irrational, because it's "naive bundling"—it combines a subsidy (to the employee) with a tax (to the employer), creating a market distortion.

Rational utilitarian policy dictates that you only have Pigovian taxes/subsidies, or taxes and subsidies based on the party's wealth.

https://medium.com/effective-economics/what-to-tax-or-subsidize-42cd7dc5c726

Practically, this means that even if we agree that people should have their wages subsidized to insure a welfare floor, it in no way follows that the way to pay for that subsidy is by taxing their employers. "Employing people" is not a negative externality. This is why you want something like a basic income.

Minimum wage in the current form is basically as crazy as saying we should subsidize poor people by putting a tax on people who happen to be standing near them. Totally arbitrary.

One advantage of this min- and max- wage interval existing is that it eliminates inflation & deflation forever

How are inflation and deflation inherently bad, and shouldn't those be addressed through monetary policy anyway?

I also would advocate this especially for inheritance taxes.

Again, this is in no way utilitarian/optimal. Giving money to my kids isn't negative externality.

Sorry for the blatantly non-voting-related posts, but this kind of talk is brutally out of step with basic welfare economics principles.

[Warren D Smith]

> Minimum wage in the current form is basically as crazy as saying we should
> subsidize poor people by putting a tax on people who happen to be standing
> near them. Totally arbitrary.

--well, suppose your utility for getting wage W is a function that
grows suddenly, kind of like a cliff, at some value of W (e.g. "enough
to live").
If so, a min-wage law could cause a lot of utility for society.
"Totally arbitrary?" No, it then would not be.

(Also, I do not see your analogy.)

Another thing that happened, historically (which by the way seems a
lot better analogy
than yours), was such laws as "the 40 hour work week,"
e.g. trying to limit employers' ability to work people like slaves. That was
caused by the rise of labor unions. Anyhow, I suppose that and everything like
it could be attacked as "totally arbitrary." Yet, for some strange reason, it
is nearly universally regarded today as a good idea. Why?

> One advantage of this min- and max- wage interval existing is that it
>> eliminates inflation & deflation forever

--which, incidentally, would be another benefit even if it *were*
totally arbitrary.

> How are inflation and deflation inherently bad, and shouldn't those be
> addressed through monetary policy anyway?

--Uh, weren't you, at an earlier time, trying to tell me we needed to return to
the gold standard to stop inflation?

How are inflation & deflation inherently bad?
Well, inflation is effectively a regressive (flat) wealth tax. That's
inherently bad,
I guess, but I suppose could be considered more
progressive than having no wealth tax at all.
It also can cause a runaway like in pre-Nazi Germany, which
is catastrophic.

Deflation? That is a lot rarer historically and I don't understand it.
It, paradoxically, could benefit the rich (who have savings) vs the
poor (who do not).

Intuitively it seems like economy would work better if the basic stuff (money)
is something predictable and with a knowable inherent value.

> I also would advocate this especially for inheritance taxes.
>
>
> Again, this is in no way utilitarian/optimal. Giving money to my kids isn't
>
> negative externality.

--whatever that meant.
At one point you (Clay) claimed to me to be a "libertarian." (Right?)
Well, I thought the libertarian ideal was society was to be a "meritocracy"
where if you are more able you get more money.
The exact opposite of that is a society where the rich people are rich just
because they had the right parents.

Assuming you think a meritocracy would be superior, then you need to
have something that stops the world from turning into a caste system where it
all has nothing to do with merit and all is entirely about having the right
parents. Large taxes on largest inheritances are the obvious solution.

That actually is a bit interesting.
See, the truth is that in the USA, the "libertarians" are largely fake
hypocrites.
The whole libertarian thing was all about rich people. It was sponsored by them,
created by them, and part of the self-serving notion they were rich
because they were the best finest people. It was not really about a
meritocracy.
For example, the Cato Institute was created by a few rich people as a front
group to push their personal needs on Washington, disguised as idealism
and economic principles. Whenever anybody at Cato actually was mainly about
that, and not about being a flunky for those rich string-pullers, they
were fired.

What I just said is a cynical view of libertarianism.

But there is a simple test you can do to see how true it is. And that is:
find out what the "libertarians" think about the estate tax. If one advocates
abolishing it, then you know, with 100% certainty, that they are just
hypocrites. Because this is 100% the opposite of true libertarianism.

[Warren D Smith]

And I do agree with you (Clay) that Pigovian taxes are good way to
go, and from that view my whole idea with min- and soft-max-wages implemented
via progressive taxation, is not the best plan.

But IF you are restricted to have to use income taxes as the main
revenue source
(like the USA now) then I suspect it is a good plan.
And I also think that econo/social inequality that grows to very large
levels is a dangerous societal evil that therefore is something that a
Pigovian would want to stop via some taxation method. And the USA
right now has record or nearly inequality levels -- so
the immediate response of the Trump administration was to do something
to increase that problem (their new tax bill and their rollback of,
e.g, the EPA, regulatory
agencies).

[Phil Uhrich]

Arguing that minimum wage creates an externality requires the assumption that always and everywhere without externalities the economy would be at full employment. Indeed that things like child labor laws and 40 hour work weeks are considered externalities. It also means that capital reigns so supreme that if they should want to offer someone $1 an hour we, as a society should subsidize that low wage work with an UBI. Sort of like what we do now with food stamps for walmart employees. If your company can't afford to pay its staff a living wage, your company doesn't deserve to exist. The government, which can print money or bonds as much as it wants and not generate any inflation until there are real resource shortages should set up an employer of last resort program, offering a living wage to anyone ready willing and able to work. The private sector should have to bid up wages to pull workers away. And yes, that would be an anchor on inflation too. But if you are worried about optimal taxation the only thing we should tax is land, and it would be a very high tax.
http://michael-hudson.com/2018/01/could-should-jubilee-debt-cancellations-be-reintroduced-today/

[Clay Shentrup]

--well, suppose your utility for getting wage W is a function that
grows suddenly, kind of like a cliff, at some value of W (e.g. "enough
to live").
If so, a min-wage law could cause a lot of utility for society.
"Totally arbitrary?"  No, it then would not be.

I'm not saying the subsidy as arbitrary. I'm saying that choosing to pay for it via a tax on employing people is totally arbitrary.

A more general simple rule: you shouldn't link expenditures and subsidies. If you think an employee should be subsidized the difference between his actual wage and the amount of 15$/hr, then do it. But where you get the money is completely irrelevant. (If you have multiple income streams, you don't specifically select one of them when you pay for your groceries. You just have a single pool of money.)

Same thing with other price controls like rent control. Even if you agree that some people should have their rent subsidized (which is already basically irrational, because you should subsidize the people and let them figure out how to spend the money in the way that most benefits them), it does not follow that you should tax "being a landlord". Price controls couple a subsidy to a tax, which is inherently irrational.

Another thing that happened, historically (which by the way seems a
lot better analogy
than yours), was such laws as "the 40 hour work week,"
e.g. trying to limit employers' ability to work people like slaves.

No, that's not analogous to the point I'm making about naive bundling and tax-subsidy linking.

Also, the only reason you could work people like that is because they don't have a better alternative. A smarter way to fix that would be a basic income. Similar to how the government controls interest rates. They don't dictate by fiat what interest rates shall be. Instead they force it via "competition" through T-bills.

How are inflation & deflation inherently bad?
Well, inflation is effectively a regressive (flat) wealth tax.  That's
inherently bad,

Unless you're in debt.

 

It also can cause a runaway like in pre-Nazi Germany, which is catastrophic.

You really need to get off this inflation hysteria.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773

Intuitively it seems like economy would work better if the basic stuff (money)
is something predictable and with a knowable inherent value.

Well, yeah, there is some value in predictability. But if everyone got twice as much real wealth tomorrow, we wouldn't say that was bad because it was unpredictable.

> I also would advocate this especially for inheritance taxes.
> Again, this is in no way utilitarian/optimal. Giving money to my kids isn't
>
> negative externality.

--whatever that meant.

You shouldn't tax it because that wouldn't be Pigovian. If it's not an externality, then it's not Pigovian. 

 

At one point you (Clay) claimed to me to be a "libertarian." (Right?)

I am a utilitarian.

 

Well, I thought the libertarian ideal was society was to be a "meritocracy"
where if you are more able you get more money.
The exact opposite of that is a society where the rich people are rich just
because they had the right parents.

Let's try to distill this into something economically meaningful instead of hand wavy gobbledygook. To reiterate, there are two reasons to apply any tax or subsidy:

1) To internalize an externality (Pigovian).

2) Based on the recipient's wealth; utility is something like log(money) so if I transfer money from Warren Buffett to Warren Smith, I increase net utility. You have to be a little careful here because this distorts the market instead of correcting the market like a Pigovian tax. But you have to figure most insanely wealthy people are already driven to make more money than they can ever spend, so it shouldn't be too bad... as long as it's not so severe that they just take their business out of your jurisdiction.( Of course that's all complicated and in practice you get into offshore bank accounts and all that stuff.)

Now, one can further add a third consideration here, which is that if you tax away money that can't drive behavior, you won't distort the economy by taking it. E.g. if a briefcase falls out of the sky with a million dollars in it, you could take it from me and it wouldn't disincentivize me from working hard and maximizing GDP—because it was random.

Presumably, what your brain is subconciously gravitating toward here is something like this third category. You see inherited wealth as a briefcase out of the sky, and you reckon it therefore makes sense to take it. But this is pretty myopic, because 1) It affects the incentives of the living who will make decisions about how much wealth to earn, spend and save (e.g. to pass on to their heirs), and 2) You still have the utility=log(money) issue from #2—so if you take that briefcase from me instead of taking an equal amount of money from Warren Buffett, you're probably doing something incredibly stupid from a utilitarian standpoint, because even if taking it from Buffett distorts the market a tiny bit, it'll still reduce his utility a lot less than it would mine.

So, your whole idea about taxing inherited wealth (presumably) because it's a briefcase out of the sky is just flawed. You should be arguing to take wealth from the richest people, period. It doesn't matter very much how they got it, whether it was from inheritance or any other means.

Assuming you think a meritocracy would be superior, then you need to
have something that stops the world from turning into a caste system where it
all has nothing to do with merit and all is entirely about having the right
parents.

You shouldn't even be thinking about things like "meritocracy". You should be thinking about correcting externalities, and utility/money curves. If you do that, then you can just "let the market work".

 Large taxes on largest inheritances are the obvious solution.

This statement is absolute idiocy, because it's not about net wealth or an externality. You are missing basic econ concepts and flailing here.

The whole libertarian thing was all about rich people. It was sponsored by them,
created by them, and part of the self-serving notion they were rich
because they were the best finest people.  It was not really about a
meritocracy.

When I was a libertarian, it had nothing to do with that. I remember being a kid growing up in poverty in rural Kansas, and when I heard about taxes in like 2nd grade, I told my mom I'd never pay taxes, and I'd go arm myself and fight the government if I had to. It's about believing in "rights". The solution is understanding that rights are just "a utility increaser", and there are lots of other utility increasers, and you should just be a utilitarian. But it took voting theory and Dawkins books to get me to understand that.

I never met any libertarians who cared much about what rich people think.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 1:27:53 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

But IF you are restricted to have to use income taxes as the main
revenue source
(like the USA now) then I suspect it is a good plan.

Well, no. The "good plan" is to subsidize people, e.g. a Basic Income. You just give people money and let the market work. You do not stupidly tax the act of employing people. As for taxes, you tax people based on their wealth (or the best proxy/estimate of wealth you can find).

And I also think that econo/social inequality that grows to very large
levels is a dangerous societal evil that therefore is something that a
Pigovian would want to stop via some taxation method.

I see essentially zero evidence of this. We have massive inequality in the USA and still have relative stability because absolute welfare is pretty good. People are pretty rational here about being okay with the existence of billionaires, so long as they can have a decent life. The focus should be on net utility not inequality.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 6:11:54 PM UTC-8, Phil Uhrich wrote:

Arguing that minimum wage creates an externality requires the assumption that always and everywhere without externalities the economy would be at full employment.

A) I did not say anything about full employment.

B) That's just not correct. Taxing the act of employment *is* a market distortion, period. 

Indeed that things like child labor laws and 40 hour work weeks are considered externalities.

No. If you think working over 40 hours a week creates a negative externality, then you correct that negative externality by taxing employers for working their employees over 40 hours. You "internalize the externality".

It also means that capital reigns so supreme that if they should want to offer someone $1 an hour we, as a society should subsidize that low wage work with an UBI.

You're not subsidizing "that work". You're subsidizing "that person". It is simply erroneous to imply that we are subsidizing the employers. That is just mathematically false.

People have said similarly erroneous things about how taxpayers subsidize Walmart or McDonald's employees via food stamps and such. This is just flat out wrong.

Sort of like what we do now with food stamps for walmart employees.

Oh my god, I typed the previous sentence before I read this. This is a cliche. It is wrong wrong wrong.

If your company can't afford to pay its staff a living wage, your company doesn't deserve to exist.

There is absolutely no economically rational basis to that claim. This is an emotional/tribal argument, not a rational economic one.

You do not get good policy by eschewing numbers in favor of gut feelings like this.

[Clay Shentrup]

I'll try to be a little more sophisticated in my rhetoric here.

Imagine there is a job that's really easy and worth 8$/hr to a company. Bob is a retired guy who wants to take it. Maybe it's something like being a greeter at a store or something, whatever. The point is, it benefits net GDP, and Bob's happy to take it, and the company's happy to give it.

Now suppose you say, "No, we want to outlaw this voluntary transaction by making it illegal to employ someone for less than 15 an hour."

Well, congratulations, you have just caused harm to Bob and this company. This job is now eliminated.

But okay, on the other hand, let's say it really had been a job that was worth, say, 20/hr to the company, and raising the minimum wage from 8 to 15 actually increased net welfare, because it moved money from richer (company) to poorer (Bob).

But that's effectively just like a basic income!  You're just subsidizing Bob's wages. Only it's massively suboptimal, because there are people even richer than the owners of that Company's stock. There are lots of millionaires and even billionaires out there you could be taxing to get the money to subsidize Bob's wages.

So to say that we should get the money via a tax on Bob's employer is bad because:

1) It distorts the market (employing people is not a negative externality)

2) It doesn't specifically take money from the richest people with the smallest marginal utility to their dollars.

But when you ignore all this precise rational microeconomic analysis and just shake your head and demand that company's paying less than X$/hr don't deserve to live, then you just create worse outcomes for humanity. This is bad. Being rational is good.

[Clay Shentrup]

And one last point...

people will cite a lot of evidence that raising the minimum wage has been helpful in many cases. And I fully acknowledge that. It's because there really are so many cases where the job was worth more to the company than they were paying for it, and so that transfer of wealth from richer to poorer improved human welfare so much that it more than made up for the lost efficiency caused by distorting the market for those jobs.

But... that doesn't mean the minimum wage increase is the best most optimal policy. You should strive for as much net welfare as you can get.

To use a blunt analogy, if we took half of some billionaires' private assets and destroyed it, and gave the rest to the poor, we'd cause a net improvement to human welfare. But dear god, why not just give 100% of it away if you're going to take it? Why burn any of it if you don't have to?

[Warren D Smith]

> A more general simple rule: you shouldn't link expenditures and subsidies.
> If you think an employee should be subsidized the difference between his
> actual wage and the amount of 15$/hr, then do it. But where you get the
> money is completely irrelevant.

--irrelevant to what?

> you should subsidize the *people* and let

> them figure out how to spend the money in the way that most benefits them

--well, ok:
if we subsidized all poor people, then there would be little to no incentive
for any employer to pay anybody any wage, and then also
little to no incentive for anybody to work.
So everything would collapse.

So no, I am not buying your claim. (That didn't take long, I only had to
read the first few paragraphs of your immense tome before
encountering massive failure...)

[Clay Shentrup]

On Monday, January 29, 2018 at 9:56:52 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

> A more general simple rule: you shouldn't link expenditures and subsidies.
> If you think an employee should be subsidized the difference between his
> actual wage and the amount of 15$/hr, then do it. But where you get the
> money is completely irrelevant.

--irrelevant to what?

To the subsidy! You should get the revenue as if you have no idea how it's going to be spent.

Think of it as the inverse "briefcase rule". You should spend money as if you found it in a briefcase and have no idea what tax generated it. And you should tax money as if you were given a bill and have no idea what it was for. That the money is going to be used on subsidizing an employees wages should not even be known.

This is incredibly simple: don't link expenditures to revenues. You have to make sure that the totals match, but you shouldn't tie any specific two inputs and outputs.

There are minor caveats like where you may want to spend money on roads based on the revenues from a gas tax, because the gas tax is a pretty good proxy for the amount of wear and tear on roads, but that's a huge caveat.

--well, ok:
if we subsidized all poor people, then there would be little to no incentive
for any employer to pay anybody any wage

The complete opposite is true. If I have less need of your job, you have to pay me more to want to do it. A basic income drives up wages.

and then also little to no incentive for anybody to work.

You obviously don't want to set the basic income too high or yes, that might happen. There's actually evidence that setting it appropriately increases productivity, because people are more likely to engage in work that pays off more but takes longer. E.g. to advance their education or start a business.

You might actually want to read some experts on basic income here, which debunks a lot of the fear that wages would go down.

So everything would collapse.

Yeah, that's not true.

[Phil Uhrich]

If you are so concerned with optimizing utility then paying perfectly capable people and then letting them decide to work or not seems counterproductive. I agree with the point that taxes should only be to further public policy as I pointed out in this link: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-mosler/taxes-for-revenue-are-obs_b_542134.html
What Taxes Are Really For
Federal taxes can be made to serve four principal purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:

As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;
To express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income, as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;
To express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups;
To isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security.

The other big implication of a fiat currency is that the only limit on government spending is inflation which will only happen when there is a real resource (labour, oil, sand, water) shortage at which point either spending needs to decrease or taxes increased. To optimize welfare, society should offer a job for anyone ready willing ready and able to work. This should not replace social security or disability, nor should it be mandatory. There are literally trillions of things that would be a huge benefit to society but are not profitable so currently are not being done. Infrastructure, child care, ecosystem repair, ect. Currently we have a reserve army of the unemployed who feel rejected by society, isolated, and useless. You can't imagine what that does to someone. This program negates the need for a minimum wage because it requires the private sector to bid up wages to pull people out of the Job Guarantee program. It is inherently countercyclical because the JG expands in a recession and contracts in an expansion. An economy at full employment is leaps and bounds more efficient than any permutation of an UBI plus it would go a long way in rebuilding community bonds that have completely eroded lately. If the techno utopian fantasies about robots taking all our jobs come true than the correct policy response is to shorten the work week, which could easily be done by just implementing it in the JG program.

This is nothing new; Michal Kalecki, the economist who published most of Keynes General Theory in Polish a few years before Kaynes did, wrote in 1943 the most elegant explanation of why business leaders and rich people will never let it happen despite the fact that it would benefit their bottom line. He also predicted that their preferred policy intervention, interest rate manipulation, would end in the inevitable limit and failure of ZIRP. As well as proposing an annual capital tax as the preferred non distortionary tax.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/kalecki-on-the-political-obstacles-to-achieving-full-employment.html

[Clay Shentrup]

On Tuesday, January 30, 2018 at 9:36:46 AM UTC-8, Phil Uhrich wrote:

paying perfectly capable people and then letting them decide to work or not seems counterproductive.

Productivity is "market efficiency", and the alternative, a minimum wage, has notable market distortions that reduce efficiency. So I expect basic income to be more productive.

You seem think that buy giving people money, you're decreasing their incentive to work. But the flip side of that argument is that by instituting a minimum wage, you're decreasing the employer's incentive to employ too. Some jobs will no longer make economic sense and will be priced out of existence. Advocates of increased minimum wage often point out cases where a minimum wage increase improved employment and other indicators of economic activity. This seems to follow from lifting people up the income brackets. But UBI has a similar effect, and arguably much bigger effect. So it's impossible to look at "incentive to work" in isolation.

In any case, this topic has been discussed a great deal and there are good arguments against the intuitive fear that it would cause reduced productivity.

https://qz.com/765902/ubi-wouldnt-mean-everyone-quits-working/

Federal taxes can be made to serve four principal purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:

As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;
To express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income, as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;
To express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups;
To isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security.

This is confusing the issue, muddling together different concepts.

#1 - This is, proper/y understood, just Pigovian. You don't want to promote specific policies like "keeping the purchasing power of the dollar (or any asset) at X". You just want to fix externalities, and let the market work. If there's no externality to fix, then the purchasing power of the dollar is exactly where it should be. If you are saying it's not where it should be then that's equivalent to saying there's some externality that needs to be corrected.

#2 - This is "based on the recipient's wealth", as I previously stated.

#3 - Pigovian again

#4 - Just a muddled statement of the combination of taxes and subsidies. It boils down to the exact same two factors I listed: Pigovian, and utility/money curve.

The other big implication of a fiat currency is that the only limit on government spending is inflation which will only happen when there is a real resource (labour, oil, sand, water) shortage

Inflation is about the ratio of dollars to wealth. Inflation can happen if resources decrease or dollars increase.

 

To optimize welfare, society should offer a job for anyone ready willing ready and able to work.

This is an extremely counterproductive notion. It requires policymakers to determine what jobs are most productive. A vastly better way to measure productivity is to see how much people will pay for something. I.e. let the market determine what jobs should be produced, using empirical data on value creation, not the estimation of biased and corruptible third parties.

Considering you started off by talking about productivity, it is quite astonishing you would argue for a jobs guarantee over a basic income.

 

There are literally trillions of things that would be a huge benefit to society but are not profitable so currently are not being done.

If something isn't profitable, then it by definition shouldn't be done.

Infrastructure, child care, ecosystem repair, ect.

My son's Montessori school is almost 2000$/mo. Seems pretty profitable.

Infrastructure is perfectly profitable, but it generally creates huge positive externalities. So you have to correct those externalities by subsidizing it beyond any per-use fees you may be able to collect. So yes, government should spend lots of money on infrastructure.

But not "to create jobs". You should not even be thinking about jobs or job guarantees. You should simply be thinking about what actually needs to be done.

 

Currently we have a reserve army of the unemployed who feel rejected by society, isolated, and useless. You can't imagine what that does to someone.

This is a specious argument. There are plenty of things people can go do to feel useful and occupied, it's just that many of them don't pay enough. If you have a basic income, people can go start voting reform organizations, or teach kids how to do woodworking, or play music at the train station, or whatever else gives them joy—and still have a roof over their heads. You want jobs that are actually wanted by the market, not jobs that a policy maker decided we should have.

 

This program negates the need for a minimum wage because it requires the private sector to bid up wages to pull people out of the Job Guarantee program.

So does a UBI, only it produces jobs the market actually wants. It will beat a jobs guarantee program in terms of productivity.

An economy at full employment is leaps and bounds more efficient than any permutation of an UBI

Having 100% employment doing 60% optimal work is not better than having 95% employment doing 100% optimal work.

 

plus it would go a long way in rebuilding community bonds that have completely eroded lately.

If people value "community bonds", then UBI will let them spend their time strengthening those bonds. They do not need a policy maker to specifically design work that he thinks will strengthen community bonds because he speculates that they want stronger community bonds. UBI lets the market actually work, so people can get what they really want, not what a policy maker speculates they want.

If the techno utopian fantasies about robots taking all our jobs come true than the correct policy response is to shorten the work week, which could easily be done by just implementing it in the JG program.

I see no evidence that a JG is a good policy response. UBI is leaps and bounds more rational and efficient.

[Clay Shentrup]

Scott Santens has a great Twitter post about the job guarantee proposal.

https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/954059540688965632

[Phil Uhrich]

'keeping the purchasing power of the dollar stable' is just shorthand for stable inflation.

"Inflation is about the ratio of dollars to wealth. Inflation can happen if resources decrease or dollars increase"

Not true. First off the distribution of wealth can affect inflation. Second you could pay off the entire national debt by printing off dollars and it would actually be deflationary because bonds pay interest and dollars don't. You could print off another billion dollars and hand it to Jeff Bezos and not see any hint of inflation. Inflation is caused by people trying to buy more of something than is available and bidding up the price as a result. That can happen by just increasing the money supply but it won't necessarily. QE didn't do anything for inflation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-push_inflation

"This is an extremely counterproductive notion. It requires policymakers to determine what jobs are most productive. A vastly better way to measure productivity is to see how much people will pay for something. I.e. let the market determine what jobs should be produced, using empirical data on value creation, not the estimation of biased and corruptible third parties."

I never said it had to be some bureaucrat deciding what jobs get funded.
http://www.levyinstitute.org/files/download.php?file=pn_14_1.pdf&pubid=1991
And have you never heard of market failures and externalities? Markets work great for some things but not for everything. They are currently the reason the US pays twice as much for much worse healthcare that doesn't cover everyone. Turns out the price people are willing to pay to stay healthy and alive is pretty inelastic. Pollution, of all kinds, is an externality that companies get to dump without paying. We are currently set to have 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100, and that is the optimistic version where we stay under 2C. But fossil fuels are still profitable. Imagine if instead of doing nothing to stop the recession Obama hired everyone that didn't have a job to build solar panels and wind turbines. Then we might not have to deal with displacing millions of people this century. But not in markets are magical land. It is absolutely ridiculous to pretend that the market will produce the most socially optimal result.

Markets couldn't exist without governments deciding the rules; and when you live in a corrupt oligarchy those rules are always written to favor the biggest players. Pretending markets are any better at producing socially optimal results than a mixed economy with lots of public oversight is to completely ignore everything that has happened since 1980.

And that tweet is completely irrelevant to everything I have said. 1. It's a Job Guarantee, not a mandate. 2. I explicitly countered the robots are coming for our job 'Therory' (which was such a big threat back in the 60's congress requested a special report on how to avoid it https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924050772056;view=1up;seq=3) by saying we should decrease the work week when and if that happenes.

You'd think that ardent capitalists would appreciate the increased competition among firms that would come with having to bid employees away from JG jobs. It's all a power balance and A JG empowers workers while an UBI empowers employers. It would help felons re-enter the workforce. It would eliminate the racial unemployment gap. It would be a way for workers to build skills to use in the private sector. It would be one stop shopping for employers looking to hire. Argentina implemented a limited JG program that was very popular and when a more conservative government tried to kill it because it was taking too many women out of the household they offered a fixed higher payment to not work, many took the higher pay and just kept working because they liked it.
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/04/mmp-blog-47-the-jg-elr-and-real-world-experience.html

Compare that to Speenhamland, the closest thing we've had to an UBI:
"The Poor Law Commissioners' Report of 1834 called the Speenhamland System a "universal system of pauperism". The system allowed employers, including farmers and the nascent industrialists of the town, to pay below subsistence wages, because the parish would make up the difference and keep their workers alive. So the workers' low income was unchanged and the poor rate contributors subsidised the farmers"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

You are insane if you think the country that stigmatized welfare queens and is so hopelessly attached to a Horatio Alger pull yourself up by your bootstraps fantasy is going to have no problem with tons of people 'living on the government dole' without horribly discriminating against them.

[Warren D Smith]

Clay, you seem to be arguing that it is "irrelevant" where the money comes from
for a min-wage, and then also arguing that it matters a great deal. Oh.

In my view, one of the ways in which capitalistic economies work --
and by "work" I
am praising them -- is that with enough competition they automatically
self-adjust to make the value of something, be pretty accurate,
meaning its value is related to the number of human work-hours
required to create it. That is what I'll mean by economy "working."
If we enact a minimum wage law, then the economy will still work. If,
however, we replace low-wages with government stipends, then this
crucial link is cut, and the economy will cease to work. Why
sacrifice this great accomplishment of money+capitalism? Surely
the damage caused by that sacrifice will far outweigh any benefit.

Now I would like it better, if the "value" of something, were related
to more than just human labor. It also should be related to the damage
to the ecology, and the damage to society
in terms of things like corruption-risk, famine-risk, and
economy-breakdown-risk. That additional benefit, if attained, would
cause the economy to automatically work to preserve
the environment, stop pollution, stop corruption, reduce risks of
catastrophes, stop ever-increasing economic inequality, etc. The way
in which such benefits can be attained is by adding "pigovian taxes"
to the present economic system. Unfortunately, that idea in the USA
has been implemented only to around 1% to 10% of how much it should
be.
And it only could work if those devising the taxes were actually
fair-minded people, not
totally corrupted tools of special interests.

[Jameson Quinn]

I'm sorry, since I've participated in this discussion too. But can we take it off the list? It really has nothing to do with voting theory at this point.

[Toby Pereira]

Quite a lot of discussions on here don't have anything to do with voting theory. I'm finding this quite an interesting read, and it is still related to social welfare more generally.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to electionscien...@googlegroups.com.

[Warren D Smith]

Actually, the post JQ quoted was leading back toward voting.

See, WHY is it in the USA, that the minimum wage laws have certain
classes of people
who do not get to enjoy the (small) wage-floor? E.g. agricultural
workers, newspaper delivery. Answer: because there are special
interests who get congress to do that,
and also because those workers are in large part exploited classes of
comparatively powerless people.

It is not because the work they do is somehow less valuable, or they are somehow
less-useful people.

And WHY is it that pigovian taxes have never worked in the USA? It is because,
again, congress is totally corrupted. To the point where carbon taxes
never even make it
to the floor for decades, global warming is denied by our leaders,
giant subsidies are paid
to ultraprofitable fosdil fuel companies while a tariff is placed on
solar panel imports, etc. The largest single donor to congress is the
Koch brothers, who made over 150 congressmen sign a "no climate taxes
ever" pledge. Koch industries generates more toxic waste than any
other company in the USA, so they want the EPA shut down, and voila,
that is now exactly what is happening. The Koch's are also dead
against inheritance taxes, and progressive taxes generally, and voila,
in 2008 a study found the top 400 richest people in the USA were
paying a tax rate of below 20%, i.e. below that of
people make $39K/year. That was viewed as too hard on the rich so now the
Trump "tax reform" bill is going to fix that "problem." Again, it is
hard to see
how this makes economic or social-welfare or pigovian sense. It is about
rich interests influencing congress, that is all.

(The Koch's also were the largest donor to the Libertarian party of
all time, plus
one got their US vice presidential nomination, so
I do not want to hear any more bullshit about how the libertarians were
in favor of inheritance taxes.)

My point is: an improved economy via min+max wages, and pigovian taxes,
it is not possible to have if the stewards of that are the tools of
special interests.

And with an unimproved corrupted economy, we sacrifice a great deal of
human potential
not to mention endangering the entire world.

Which brings me to my point -- how do we make congress LESS a tool of
special interests?
Better voting methods would help...

[NoIRV]

So do we need to have Clay Shentrup and Warren Smith run for congress?
Do we need to send the Iowa and New Hampshire Dems and GOP emails about using range voting in the primary?
Do we need to create a series of videos that can appeal to the general public so they write to their congressional representatives?
Or do we wait until people Have Had Enough and try to physically destroy this broken government.

I hope that last option never happens or needs to happen.

[Phil Uhrich]

My money is on the last one. 6 feet of sea level rise puts NYC, Miami, NOLA, Bangladesh, and millions of other people's houses underwater; not even mentioning the other weather chaos that entails. One hurricane takes out a relatively small island (Puerto Rico) and we have a massive shortage in saline IV bags. Multiply that times thousands of other incidents at once and it's almost funny that anyone thinks we will have a functioning economy by the end of the century.

As important as I think reforms like this are they will be too little too late. The amount of CO2 we would have to emmitt to build green infrastructure is already more than enough to put us past the tipping point.
https://beyondthisbriefanomaly.org/2016/09/22/navigating-the-energy-transition-landscape-summary-findings-from-a-dynamic-systems-view/

The only real chance I see is a break in the log jam of public resistance to newer, safer, nuclear plants (there has been some movement in Russia and India here but woefully underfinanced). Or the most recent rumblings in Japan about cold fusion actually pan out for once. In other words, huge longshots.

Or we could have a nuclear war with Russia if the democrats get their way, that might let the rest of the world have a shot.

This really was Obama's fault. He sold the country on one idea of him and did nothing but sell out to wall street. He didn't even try to move on anything climate related until 2012.

In the meantime though I don't know about how to move forward. I live in Minneapolis and since we already have RCV there isn't much appetite for another change. I do try and push range variations with the few political action groups I'm involved with, but it's a hard sell since everyone already understands RCV (even though it just totally botched our nominating poll). I'd say the best bet we would have is to convince the mayor/city council of a small city to give it a shot. So get in touch with your local elected officials. Everyone hates to be first though.

[Felix Sargent]

It's marketing. That's the next job for CES and for everyone who's interested in voting science. Get the word out. Write papers, articles, and give presentations. Appear on college campuses. Give guest lectures. Attend Summits and fundraising breakfasts. If we are nice, smile, listen, and advocate, our message will get out there. 

CES is working hard to develop a new image for voting reform - not just around a specific method, but to spread the knowledge that voting is hard and we need to consider what our goals and values are so that we can use the appropriate voting method in the right place.

Design and marketing is the next big step in the community. That means that we need to learn how to use CSS. Get designers on board. Make catchy videos. And yes... memes. I love the ReformFargo Pizza/Burger ad. Have you seen it?

We shouldn't (only) take on FairVote or debate the best method, but make sure that people understand that Voting is complicated. We can help.

Just because Minneapolis has RCV doesn't mean we can't re-start the debate. We got this!

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[Warren D Smith]

Those pizzas and hamburgers look remarkably unappetizing...

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 4:52:18 PM UTC, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

Clay, you seem to be arguing that it is "irrelevant" where the money comes from
for a min-wage, and then also arguing that it matters a great deal.  Oh.

I'm saying there should be no relationship between where it comes from and where it's spent.

Suppose I tell you, "Warren, the government has 5M$ in our account and you're in charge of figuring out where to spend it." Do you need to know by what means that revenue was generated in order to determine how to most optimally spend it? No, of course not.

Or suppose I tell you, "Warren, the government needs to raise 5M$ and you're in charge of figuring out what to tax to get it." Do you need to know how it's going to be spent in order to determine the most optimal way to raise that money? Again, certainly not.

When you institute a price control, like minimum wage or rent control, you end up bundling a specific tax with a specific subsidy. That doesn't make sense.

with enough competition they automatically
self-adjust to make the value of something, be pretty accurate,
meaning its value is related to the number of human work-hours
required to create it.  That is what I'll mean by economy "working."

The definition of "working" is maximizing net utility.

 

If we enact a minimum wage law, then the economy will still work.

Minimum wage is not an optimal solution by any stretch of the imagination. If you want to subsidize Bob's wages, it would be better to get the money from a billionaire than to tax Bob's thousandaire small business owner. Because the marginal utility of Warren Buffett's dollars is way less. Or it would make sense to get the money by taxing an externality, because then you're correcting a market externality.

To tax Bob's employer for employing Bob is utterly insane. Employing people is not a bad negative externality that you want to correct for. You do not want less employment.

If, however, we replace low-wages with government stipends, then this
crucial link is cut, and the economy will cease to work.

You haven't cited any evidence for that, and there's a lot of evidence going the other way, and even a simple theoretical model says it should work better. So what are you talking about?

Why sacrifice this great accomplishment of money+capitalism?

This is virtually identical to defending Plurality Voting, because it "works".

Surely the damage caused by that sacrifice will far outweigh any benefit.

What sacrifice?

Now I would like it better, if the "value" of something, were related
to more than just human labor. It also should be related to the damage
to the ecology, and the damage to society
in terms of things like corruption-risk, famine-risk, and
economy-breakdown-risk.

It sounds like you're talking about negative externalities. Which I've specifically cited as things to correct for with taxes.

That additional benefit, if attained, would
cause the economy to automatically work to preserve
the environment, stop pollution, stop corruption, reduce risks of
catastrophes, stop ever-increasing economic inequality, etc.

This is precisely my point. You want to tax externalities. Or you want to tax "wealth" (because wealthier people are harmed less by the tax, and by transferring the wealth to poorer people, you cause a net increase in utility). You DO NOT want to tax people for the sheer coincidence of being the person who happens to be Bob's employer. "Employing Bob" is not a negative externality.

The way
in which such benefits can be attained is by adding "pigovian taxes"
to the present economic system.

This is precisely what I'm advocating for.

https://medium.com/effective-economics/what-to-tax-or-subsidize-42cd7dc5c726

Your last argument seems to be that Pigovian taxes are politically unviable, and perhaps there's the suggestion that this is why increasing the minimum wage is better. Just the mere fact that it seems more politically viable. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 1:42:01 AM UTC-8, Phil Uhrich wrote:

"Inflation is about the ratio of dollars to wealth. Inflation can happen if resources decrease or dollars increase"
Not true. First off the distribution of wealth can affect inflation.

You're right, and I was oversimplifying. My point is that inflation doesn't only happen because of resources decreasing. There's a logarithmic relationship between wealth and the marginal utility of each dollar. So if you add more dollars to the economy, you can also cause inflation, with no decrease in resources.

 

Second you could pay off the entire national debt by printing off dollars and it would actually be deflationary because bonds pay interest and dollars don't.

This only holds if you're paying off "debt", where there's a pre-agreed-upon price, that can't be bid up.

But say the government wants to buy a bunch of computers, and can print money all day to pay for them. They'll bid up the price, taking many of those machines off the market and causing cost push inflation.

You could print off another billion dollars and hand it to Jeff Bezos and not see any hint of inflation.

No. If you make PersonX richer, you'll cause the same effect I just described. The marginal utility of his dollars becomes lower so he's willing to spend more of them to buy the same things, which bids up the price others have to pay. You can't simultaneously make this argument and argue (as you did at top) that the distribution of wealth can cause inflation.

 

Inflation is caused by people trying to buy more of something than is available and bidding up the price as a result.

Inflation is caused by taking resources off the market, either by reducing the amount (e.g. famine) or by decreasing the marginal utility of some people's dollars, causing them to purchase more stuff that other people must now pay more to get. The latter can be caused by redistributing wealth or printing dollars.

Then there's demand pull inflation, which arguably isn't a "problem", because it doesn't mean that utils become any more expensive.

 

 That can happen by just increasing the money supply but it won't necessarily.

Inflation happens if you increase the money supply in isolation. If you increase the money supply but also improve GDP, then sure, you may not get inflation.

I never said it had to be some bureaucrat deciding what jobs get funded.

Then please outline an alternative that's better than the market at determining how much people value a job. Please outline it without requiring me to read a long PDF.

And have you never heard of market failures and externalities?

I repeat: externalities are one of the two pillars of my Effective Economic Policy school of thought. 

https://medium.com/effective-economics/what-to-tax-or-subsidize-42cd7dc5c726 (three paragraphs)

Markets work great for some things but not for everything.

Markets work if you correct for externalities.

They are currently the reason the US pays twice as much for much worse healthcare that doesn't cover everyone.

There's a deep fallacy underlying this general line of reasoning. Suppose I invent a cancer cure that costs me 1$ per treatment, but it's worth 100,000$ per treatment to patients. The naive way to fix this problem would be to force me to provide it for less. But that's economically identical to letting me sell it at market price, then subsidizing the patients' expenses with a tax on my personal wealth. Even if you agree that those patients should be subsidized, it does not follow that I should be taxed. Go tax Warren Buffett or an externality.

So, the fact that health care is expensive here isn't necessarily a "problem". It depends on whether it's a cost push issue (our system is inherently less efficient) vs. an issue that we're not enforcing price controls. If it's the latter, then what's actually a problem is that we don't give people the money to access the (correctly priced) healthcare.

I also know a very smart and liberal guy in the biotech industry who says countries like the US massively subsidize health care costs around the world, because they create the financial incentive to make drugs that can be sold for a fortune, but eventually become generics. I don't know the details of that line of reasoning, but it sounds plausible.

Pollution, of all kinds, is an externality that companies get to dump without paying.

Thank you for repeating one of my core arguments.

 

We are currently set to have 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100,

Tying this from New Orleans. I hear you. Again, the very argument I'm making.

and that is the optimistic version where we stay under 2C.  But fossil fuels are still profitable.

It's not clear that a CO2 tax fixes that. If I have a million dollars worth of oil on my land (after all drilling/transport/refining costs have been accounted for), and you tax me 900,000 to sell it, I'm still going to sell it and make that 100k. A tax only affects behavior if there's some alternative thing I can do with the product, ideally one that's less harmful to the environment. Not sure what that is for fossil fuels.

 

Imagine if instead of doing nothing to stop the recession Obama hired everyone that didn't have a job to build solar panels and wind turbines.  Then we might not have to deal with displacing millions of people this century.  But not in markets are magical land.  It is absolutely ridiculous to pretend that the market will produce the most socially optimal result.

If you fix externalities, the market should already incentivize those renewable jobs to exist. You don't need Obama to decide which specific jobs to create.

Markets couldn't exist without governments deciding the rules; and when you live in a corrupt oligarchy those rules are always written to favor the biggest players.

How is this relevant to debating which policy is better? All policy requires government to enact it.

Pretending markets are any better at producing socially optimal results than a mixed economy with lots of public oversight is to completely ignore everything that has happened since 1980.

I'm pretty sure you didn't read my short blog post about what to tax or subsidize, because you keep missing that correction of externalities is practically the central theme of my argument.

 

1. It's a Job Guarantee, not a mandate.

That's irrelevant. The point is of that tweet is, I don't want a choice between going hungry and doing some terrible digging fenceposts. I want to enjoy my life.

 2. I explicitly countered the robots are coming for our job 'Therory' (which was such a big threat back in the 60's congress requested a special report on how to avoid it

Please. I see self-driving cars and robots on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco on the way to work. This is not the 60's.

 

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924050772056;view=1up;seq=3) by saying we should decrease the work week when and if that happenes.

Decreasing the work week is just another market distortion. Stop distorting the market. Fix the market. If I want to work 80 hours and get the pay that comes with it, let me do that. Give me enough money that I have an alternative if you're so worried that's bad.

 

You'd think that ardent capitalists would appreciate the increased competition among firms that would come with having to bid employees away from JG jobs.

What I appreciate is rational policy that corrects externalities. Not policy that adds externalities.

It's all a power balance and A JG empowers workers while an UBI empowers employers.

I'd say the opposite. The more money a worker has, the harder an employer has to compete to hire her. A JG may be a guarantee of a crappy backbreaking job I don't even want.

The system allowed employers, including farmers and the nascent industrialists of the town, to pay below subsistence wages, because the parish would make up the difference and keep their workers alive. So the workers' low income was unchanged and the poor rate contributors subsidised the farmers"

No, the system didn't allow them to pay below subsistence wages. Adding a UBI increases the negotiating power of the employees.

And no, they didn't subsidize the farmers. Removing an unwarranted irrational tax is not the same as giving a subsidy.

You are insane if you think the country that stigmatized welfare queens and is so hopelessly attached to a Horatio Alger pull yourself up by your bootstraps fantasy is going to have no problem with tons of people 'living on the government dole' without horribly discriminating against them.

You can talk about political viability. That's orthogonal to merit. 

[Clay Shentrup]

The pizza burger graphic is incredibly confusing to me. I started at it for like 10 seconds trying to figure out if the things on the right were scores, or totals, or what. You need the burgers and pizzas to be voters not candidates.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 5:06:11 PM UTC, Jameson Quinn wrote:

I'm sorry, since I've participated in this discussion too. But can we take it off the list? It really has nothing to do with voting theory at this point.

Alrighty. Where would you suggest?

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/2/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 4:52:18 PM UTC, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> Clay, you seem to be arguing that it is "irrelevant" where the money comes
>>
>> from
>> for a min-wage, and then also arguing that it matters a great deal. Oh.
>>
>
> I'm saying there should be no relationship between where it comes from and
> where it's spent.

--that is somewhat true, although certainly not true. For example,
if I am working 30 miles away, then I will probably spend my money
differently than if I am not.

In any event, I never contended, nor did anybody ever contend, that
where somebody got the money was going to influence how they spent it; nor did
anybody besides you ever contend that that mattered.

> with enough competition they automatically
>> self-adjust to make the value of something, be pretty accurate,
>> meaning its value is related to the number of human work-hours
>> required to create it. That is what I'll mean by economy "working."
>>
>
> The definition of "working" is maximizing net utility.

--well, if the economy "works" according to my definition, then that evidently
constitutes considerable human progress. Societies that use money,
have historically outcompeted those with no money. There has been no
real contest.
It has been a total rout.

>> If we enact a minimum wage law, then the economy will still work.

--indeed, it will actually work better.

> Surely the damage caused by that sacrifice will far outweigh any benefit.
>>
>
> What sacrifice?

--the sacrifice of preventing the economy from working according
to my definition of linking values of everything, to human labor.

[Warren D Smith]

>It's not clear that a CO2 tax fixes that. If I have a million dollars worth of oil on my land (after all drilling/transport/refining costs have been accounted for), and you tax me 900,000 to sell it, I'm still going to sell it and make that 100k. A tax only affects behavior if there's some alternative thing I can do with the product, ideally one that's less harmful to the environment. Not sure what that is for fossil fuels.

--No, that is not the point of a carbon tax.
The idea of a carbon tax is as follows.

Every time some oil driller or coal miner extracts carbon from the rocks, they
pay a big tax. This will be a very easy tax to collect because there
are FEW oil drillers
and coal miners, compared to all other kinds of people, so
collecting taxes from fewer people is an easier collection job
requiring less total
human effort to fill out tax forms etc etc.

Of course they still are motivated to sell their oil & coal, albeit they will
sell it at a higher price in order to pay their expanses plus the tax.
That will cause everything else in the economy that depends upon oil &
coal, to cost more. Agriculture uses a lot of diesel fuel and
fertilizers produced with fossil fuel energy, so food will cost more.
Transportation, especially planes and cars, uses a lot of fossil fuel
so it will cost more. Heating your house. Etc etc. It all will cost
more to everybody, albeit
by varying amounts. For example, if you have a gas-guzzling car and drive
a lot because you live far away, it will hurt you more than somebody else.

So then what? The answer is, everybody will CARE MORE about lowering
their now-honest bigger costs. You will no longer choose to buy the
gas guzzling car.
You will no longer buy the kinds of food that cost a lot. Industry will no
longer want things delivered by truck, they will try to get them more
locally by train.
You will no longer choose to buy a house far away. Builders
of houses will no longer want to build them far away because then they
cannot sell them. Manufacturers of cars will no
longer want to build gas guzzlers because they cannot sell them.
You will care more about insulating your house.
It will be more worth it to get solar panels.

The entire economy will restructure, with everybody making different choices
everywhere. The entire force of humanity, just driven by the desire to save more
money and make more money, without need for them to do anything
special and unusual,
will automatically cause the entire world to become more efficient and
use less fossil fuel to do everything everywhere.

It is very simple.

But this takes 100 years. For example, General Motors systematically bought up
USA city transit systems and then destroyed them, in an effort
approximately 100 years long intended to enhance their profits while
as a side effect massively hurting the entire country, which they did
not give a shit about. This as they intended caused everybody to be
forced to buy cars, then to live in suburbs not cities, etc etc. It
takes
a long time for an entire economy to restructure. But don't you think
the world should enjoy
some measure of planning on a time scale longer than merely 1
generation? GM certainly was willing to plan on that time scale. Why
shouldn't our government?

Or: we can stupidly urge "drill baby drill" and focus on trying
to extract the most fossil fuels the cheapest and fastest we possibly
can, and artificially urge everybody to make all life-choices based on
an assumption of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. That is what has
been going on in the USA for over 100 years.
Unfortunately it is a recipe for disaster because it means the USA is
hell-bent on
turning itself into a status of total dependency on a nonrenewable resource.
Not only is that a recipe for USA disaster, it also is a recipe for
worldwide disaster because the USA is the most powerful military and
seems to be willing to use it to continue
the fossil fuel dead end as long as possible. In particular, the
entire US military
will mostly not even operate at all without a huge amount of oil, and
the US keeps
on sponsoring one of the world's worst kleptocracies and top sponsor
of terrorism, Saudi Arabia purely for reasons of oil. And also, the
climate is changing due to burning carbon,
which is going to be somewhere between "difficult to deal with" and a
"disaster" -- it
is not clear at all to me which.

[NoIRV]

I still want to know what Clay and Warren think about trying to run for congress or a state legislature.
And if we want to do the Iowa 2008 plan on rangevoting.org (oh sorry the Iowa 2020 plan) then we need to write some open letter to the crew in those state parties.

[Warren D Smith]

I am not going to run for congress or statehouse.
I was willing to run for delegate to NY state constitutional convention,
but concon is no longer going to happen so that question is moot.

[Clay Shentrup]

Happy to take this to an economics forum if you have one you like, Warren. Or another Google Group for these tangential topics.

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 8:49:51 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

> I'm saying there should be no relationship between where it comes from and
> where it's spent.

--that is somewhat true, although certainly not true.  For example,
if I am working 30 miles away, then I will probably spend my money
differently than if I am not.

That has absolutely nothing to do with my point. I am talking about government taxes and expenditures. It is very very simple.

Another example was how Berkeley added a soda tax, with the revenue earmarked instead of just going into the general bucket. This means that the amount of money spent on some school lunch program is dependent on how much soda people buy, which is insane. These two things are virtually unrelated.

I want a law that outlaws this linking. You can only specific expenditures as a function of your net revenues, not any specific revenue source. And vice versa. This is rational.

In any event, I never contended, nor did anybody ever contend, that
where somebody got the money was going to influence how they spent it; nor did
anybody besides you ever contend that that mattered.

Then you're against minimum wage and price controls, because those policies absolutely do link the expenditure (wage subsidy to the employee) with the tax (tax to the employer for the act of employing people). Great!

>> If we enact a minimum wage law, then the economy will still work.

--indeed, it will actually work better.

That policy X is better than Status Quo, does not mean it is ideal. Minimum wage is still horrendously flawed compared to basic income.

> Surely the damage caused by that sacrifice will far outweigh any benefit.
>>
>
> What sacrifice?

The suboptimal naive linking of the tax and subsidy. Specifically, putting a tax on employing people, which is not a negative externality.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/4/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Happy to take this to an economics forum if you have one you like, Warren.
> Or another Google Group for these tangential topics.
>
> On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 8:49:51 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> > I'm saying there should be no relationship between where it comes from
>> and
>> > where it's spent.
>>
>> --that is somewhat true, although certainly not true. For example,
>> if I am working 30 miles away, then I will probably spend my money
>> differently than if I am not.
>>
>
> That has absolutely nothing to do with my point. I am talking about
> government taxes and expenditures. It is very very simple.

--Look, I just quoted your own words, then refuted them. It may be,
you did not actually mean your own words, but if so, do not blame me
for your failure. I am merely
trying to follow what you say, which is hard because whenever I do I
soon find a contradiction or refutation, and then I point it out, and
then you blither on about
some other random thing which you also later claim you did not actually mean.
What you do mean, I now have no idea.

> In any event, I never contended, nor did anybody ever contend, that
>> where somebody got the money was going to influence how they spent it; nor
>>
>> did
>> anybody besides you ever contend that that mattered.
>>
>
> Then you're against minimum wage and price controls, because those policies

> *absolutely
> do* link the expenditure (wage subsidy to the employee) with the tax (tax

> to the employer for the act of employing people). Great!

--Clay, if I do not contend something, then you are not allowed to
infer anything
from my non-action. For example, I also did not contend that the moon
was made of green cheese. Please do not infer anything from that non-action.

>> Surely the damage caused by that sacrifice will far outweigh any benefit.
>>
>> >>
>> >
>> > What sacrifice?
>
>
> The suboptimal naive linking of the tax and subsidy. Specifically, putting

> a tax on employing people, which is *not* a negative externality.

--Clay, the question "what sacrifice?" was asked BY YOU, not by me.
Presumably you asked because you wanted to know the answer.
You now are pretending I asked that question, and supplying an answer!
This is a strange move by you. If you knew the answer, why did you ask?

--And finally, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase "negative externality"
means. It sounds really hifalutin.

[Phil Uhrich]

A negative externality is when a person making the decision doesn't have to pay for all the outside costs that decision creates. A classic example is CO2, which is emitted freely by everyone who uses petroleum and the costs of a warmer planet are born by everyone no matter how much they used. Clay is trying to say increasing the minimum wage will increase the cost of doing business for all firms causing them to raise prices which will affect the poorest the most. He would prefer we use an UBI so that employers have no incentive to increase pay for unskilled labour since they know that their employees will have basic subsistence to fall back on. Thus decreasing the cost of doing business resulting in lower prices for all which helps the poor the most.

He defines poor people as maximumly happy when things are cheaper with no change in the power dynamic of employees and bosses. The only way an UBI would help workers is if it were large enough so that they didn't need to work and employers had to bid up wages to entice people into the workforce which is self defeating for the goals Clay wants because then the cost of business has to go up. It also wouldn't do very much at stopping the recessions.

I define poor people as maximumly happy when they have leverage to negotiate with their employers over working conditions and a 0% chance of involuntary unemployment. I don't care if this increases the cost of doing business for the private sector because I think people will be happier even if it means higher prices. It also will create some big incentives to innovate in the private sector which has only had meager productivity gains lately and sorely needs to do better. A job guarantee program is several orders of magnitude more effective at maximising utility simply by eliminating involuntary unemployment, a guaranteed feature of any system that doesn't offer a job to anyone ready willing and able to work. He hand waves this away by saying government jobs are not as efficient as market jobs, which is probably true if we went with 100% government jobs but is very debatable if we were to even double our roughly 17% of the labour force in the government sector bringing us in line with economic basket cases where everyone is miserable like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but they are certainly more efficient than having people who want to work not have jobs. Since the JG will naturally expand in a recession and decrease in a boom it would dramatically reduce the severity of recessions.

[Warren D Smith]

well, why depend on theoretical mutterings when you can examine
the actual world? We actually have different
states with different min-wages. What happened in those states?

[Warren D Smith]

http://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-tracker/?gclid=CjwKCAiA-9rTBRBNEiwAt0Znw55BNX0s0UnZuS52mLqVcis7vrJHzIwGQyc0ZOXQ3VVltvSxejB2_BoC3p8QAvD_BwE

tells you min-wages in different US states, while

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate

tells you different poverty rates in US states. And golly gee,
the 5 lowest states for minwage (MS,AL,LA,TN,SC)
overlap the 5 worst states for poverty (MS,NM,LA,KY,AL)
in 3 states.

The 6 highest states for minwage (WA,MA,CA,NY,AZ,VT)
include zero in the worst 8 states for poverty, and
seem to be fairly uniformly distributed across the remaining
42 states as far as poverty is concerned.

Amazing how those high minwages do not actually seem to
to making it worse for the poor. It's almost as though it is making it
better for them.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/5/18, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A negative externality is when a person making the decision doesn't have to
> pay for all the outside costs that decision creates. A classic example is
> CO2, which is emitted freely by everyone who uses petroleum and the costs of
> a warmer planet are born by everyone no matter how much they used. Clay is
> trying to say increasing the minimum wage will increase the cost of doing
> business for all firms causing them to raise prices which will affect the
> poorest the most.

--well, no. It will increase the cost for firms that use a lot of cheap labor.
Some other firms will be virtually unaffected. As a result, the prices
of all goods will change, by different amounts, causing those new
prices to more-accurately
reflect the true labor costs that went into them.
This in turn will cause the entire economy to readjust over time, to try
to reduce prices, i.e. to try to reduce human labor hours.
(Sounds like a good outcome?)

Meanwhile, one could add to this picture my suggestion of a soft max-wage...
I had been suggesting the combined package, which started this whole
kerfuffle...
the combined suggestion seems unlikely to hurt "the poorest the most."

[Clay Shentrup]

[Let me start by saying I'm happy to take this convo elsewhere, but I don't want to put an unreasonable burden on Warren or anyone else who might want to jump in, because then they won't do it and the conversation will just die. And I don't think I'm bothering any uninterested parties too much, as they can just avoid this thread. Let me know if you disagree. Anyway, I'm happy to create a second Google Group or a Loomio Group or whatever, if people will actually use it.]

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 9:15:43 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--No, that is not the point of a carbon tax.
The idea of a carbon tax is as follows.

The definition and purpose of "Pigovian tax" is not controversial in my view. A Pigovian tax corrects for a negative externality, making the market efficient.

As I understand you here, you're raising the notion of incorporating the cost of recovering a tax. So even if tax X is better than tax Y, it may be better to collect tax Y instead if X is too costly. That's perfectly valid, but it's orthogonal to the concern over the concerns I'm raising, about not linking taxes and subsidies.

Of course they still are motivated to sell their oil & coal, albeit they will
sell it at a higher price in order to pay their expanses plus the tax.

I see this to be a common misunderstanding. Let's start with an example where I think we'd agree.

Say you produce widgets and gadgets, and they're identical in that they cost the same to produce, and have the same supply and demand curve. So of course they sell for the same price. But then the government imposes a 10% tax on widgets. Now you're incentivized to only produce gadgets. But that reduces the supply of gadgets, which causes the price to be bid up until it's again equally profitable to produce gadgets and widgets. So this is exactly like what you said—the tax on gadgets reduces the production of gadgets.

But suppose instead that the raw materials you already bought are useful only for producing gadgets. The new tax on gadgets cannot be passed along to the consumer, because you have no alternative avenue for your raw materials. So the supply of gadgets won't change, therefore the market price won't change. It'll will simply "feel" as though the government reached into your bank account and took away an amount of money equal to 10% of the value of the gadgets you're able to produce.

Put another way, if you could sell gadgets for a higher price, you would have already been doing it. So no, this new tax will not increase the cost of or decrease the supply of gadgets.

Now back to fossil fuels. If you add a tax to the extraction of the assets, you're effectively just reaching into the property owner's bank account and taking out a tax, because you've instantly decreased the value of those assets. It doesn't even matter if you actually do extract the fossil fuels—just the fact that the tax is there is enough. Just like with widgets and gadgets, the only way you'll increase the cost (or decrease the consumption of) fossil fuels, is if there's some alternative way of profiting from them. If there isn't, then the fossil fuels will still be extracted and produced, and there won't be any less supply, and so the cost won't be bid up, and so the demand won't decrease. QED.

The only caveat that comes to mind is that the extraction of the assets actually requires additional costs in manpower and machinery. Suppose you have cash that can give a return (with equivalently low risk) of 5%. Then the extraction of those assets has to yield a greater than 5% return in order to be economically viable.

Let's pencil out an incredibly simplistic example.

- You purchase some land that has 1M$ worth of fossil fuel (FF) on it, for 800K [This is now a SUNK COST.]

- The new CO2 tax is 80%, reducing the value of that FF "one million dollars worth" of FF to to a paltry 200K — you are now in the red!

A sale price of 200k means that in order to make at least a 5$ rate of return with any additional capital, you have to spend less than $190,476 to extract the FF. As lang as that's the case, you'll be incentivized to sell the FF, so the supply won't decrease, so the cost won't go up.

It is very simple.

I agree. But clearly so counterintuitive that you and myriads of other Very Smart People got it wrong. And continue to get it wrong.

Now the one possible rebuttal to this is that maybe there actually are other things they could do with that petroleum that don't emit CO2, and therefore will evade the tax. If you charge for the CO2 emissions, instead of for the FF extraction. But as you said, the further you go down the supply chain, the harder it gets to do that.

So, this is a very troubling situation. The world's hopes are riding on a CO2 tax, but it won't even particularly work.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Monday, February 5, 2018 at 12:11:55 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

tells you different poverty rates in US states.  And golly gee,
the 5 lowest states for minwage (MS,AL,LA,TN,SC)
overlap the 5 worst states for poverty (MS,NM,LA,KY,AL)
in 3 states.

This in no way refutes anything I've said.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Monday, February 5, 2018 at 12:27:49 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

On 2/5/18, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Clay is
> trying to say increasing the minimum wage will increase the cost of doing
> business for all firms causing them to raise prices which will affect the
> poorest the most.

That is not at all my argument. My argument is that you do not want to put a tax on "employing people". That is irrational. Employing people is not a negative externality. It would be like putting a tax on "selling pizza" or "playing with yoyos". There is no basis for it. You want to tax negative externalities and wealth. It is that simple.

--well, no.  It will increase the cost for firms that use a lot of cheap labor.
Some other firms will be virtually unaffected. As a result, the prices
of all goods will change, by different amounts, causing those new
prices to more-accurately
reflect the true labor costs that went into them.

Well no, not more accurately, but less. Because you're distorting the actual market value of that labor.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 1:06:03 PM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--Look, I just quoted your own words, then refuted them.

No, you didn't. You don't even seem to be following the argument I'm making, which I think is really very straightforward.

Simply picture being a policy maker, tying to maximize welfare. I give you a million dollars and ask you to determine how it be spent. You do your utilitarian calculus and give me your decision. Then I tell you the source of those funds—like literally what tax we instituted to get the money. Should you now change your decision about how to spend the funds? If you say "no", then good job—you are rational.

Or reverse. You are told to raise a million dollars and are allowed to tax whatever you want, using your utilitarian social welfare maximizing calculus. Presumably you will really go after the 1%, and big negative externalities. Regardless, once you've made your determination, if I then tell you how the money is to be spent, that should in no way cause you to second guess that determination. That would be simply crazy.

--And finally, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase "negative externality" means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

[Clay Shentrup]

I apologize for screwing up the widgets/gadgets discussion by reversing the two terms in one case.

On Monday, February 5, 2018 at 2:26:00 PM UTC-6, Clay Shentrup wrote:

Say you produce widgets and gadgets, and they're identical in that they cost the same to produce, and have the same supply and demand curve. So of course they sell for the same price. But then the government imposes a 10% tax on gadgets. Now you're incentivized to only produce widgets. But that reduces the supply of gadgets, which causes the price to be bid up until it's again equally profitable to produce gadgets and widgets. So this is exactly like what you said—the tax on gadgets reduces the production of gadgets.

But suppose instead that the raw materials you already bought are useful only for producing gadgets. The new tax on gadgets cannot be passed along to the consumer, because you have no alternative avenue for your raw materials. So the supply of gadgets won't change, therefore the market price won't change. It will simply "feel" as though the government reached into your bank account and took away an amount of money equal to 10% of the value of the gadgets you're able to produce with your current raw materials.

[Warren D Smith]

> --well, no. It will increase the cost for firms that use a lot of cheap
>> labor.
>> Some other firms will be virtually unaffected. As a result, the prices
>> of all goods will change, by different amounts, causing those new
>> prices to more-accurately
>> reflect the true labor costs that went into them.
>>
>
> Well no, not more accurately, but less. Because you're distorting the
> actual market value of that labor.

--Minwages are not "distorting" the value of labor, they are "more accurately"
causing all labor hours (for min-wage employees) to be worth the same.
If all labor hours are worth the same, then costs of products will
more accurately
reflect the number of labor hours that went into them.

And Clay's notion that the "actual market value" of labor really truly
was an unlivably small wage, is confused.

That happens NOT because of fair markets, it is because of
exploitation. Specifically,
exploiters have set up a system in the USA where undocumented immigrants
can be intimidated and exploited and thereby effectively forced to
work for subminimum
wages on farms. However US citizens refuse to work under those circumstances
(or anyhow not enough would). The fair market value, as is shown by US
citizen behavior, is above the wages being paid, which are an unfair
market value, which is caused by unfair
predatory practices, which are caused by a system of exploitation because
any worker who complains is kidnapped and removed at gunpoint.

Other large exploited classes in US history were called "slaves" and
they did not do their
work because of fair market values, but rather for other reasons.
Similarly for "women."
And nowadays, "minors." The idea was to identify a class of people who could
be exploited by setting up a system of laws, discrimination, and
enforcers with guns.
Then keep them being an economic underclass forever. There are cases
on record, though, of some women who found a way out of that by going
through their entire lives pretending to be a man, only being revealed
when they died.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/5/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 1:06:03 PM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> --Look, I just quoted your own words, then refuted them.
>
>
> No, you didn't.

--yes I did.

> You don't even seem to be following the argument I'm
> making,

--you got that right. That is partly because, whenever I read your
"argument" I find
a contradiction or falsehood soon, usually about 10% of the way thru, then I
quote your own words verbatim back to you to prove that, then I stop
reading because the refutation renders the rest irrelevant. Then you
say you did not mean your own words.
Then iterate. Kind of a strange way to proceed.

> which I think is really very straightforward.

--well, so far, every single reader of your "argument" has failed to
understand it, according to you yourself. Despite how incredibly
"straightforward" it supposedly is. Phil even
helpfully explained to me what you were trying to say, only to be told
you were not trying to say that.

> Simply picture being a policy maker, tying to maximize welfare. I give you
> a million dollars and ask you to determine how it be spent. You do your

> utilitarian calculus and give me your decision. *Then* I tell you the

> source of those funds—like literally what tax we instituted to get the
> money. Should you now change your decision about how to spend the funds? If
> you say "no", then good job—you are rational.

--for some unknown reason, you seem to think the above paragraph
should have some logical impact on my thinking about something.

> Or reverse. You are told to raise a million dollars and are allowed to tax
> whatever you want, using your utilitarian social welfare maximizing
> calculus. Presumably you will really go after the 1%, and big negative
> externalities. Regardless, once you've made your determination, if I then
> tell you how the money is to be spent, that should in no way cause you to
> second guess that determination. That would be simply crazy.
>
> --And finally, I have absolutely no idea what the phrase "negative
>> externality" means.
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/5/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

--well, it goes toward refuting what Phil said you said.
But since you then claimed you had not been arguing what Phil thought you
were arguing, who knows. I still have no idea what the hell
you are arguing (well, aside from a random jumble
of illogic).

[Warren D Smith]

>
> On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 9:15:43 AM UTC-6, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> --No, that is not the point of a carbon tax.
>> The idea of a carbon tax is as follows.
>>
>
> The definition and purpose of "Pigovian tax" is not controversial in my
> view. A Pigovian tax corrects for a negative externality, making the market
> efficient.
>
> As I understand you here, you're raising the notion of incorporating the

> *cost* of recovering a tax. So even if tax X is better than tax Y, it may

> be better to collect tax Y instead if X is too costly. That's perfectly
> valid, but it's orthogonal to the concern over the concerns I'm raising,

> about not *linking* taxes and subsidies.

--several points of a carbon tax:
1. carbon pollution is bad for us all, and the tax causes the market to
try to stop that badness; without it the market will increase the badness
as fast as possible.
2. carbon tax happens to be far easier to collect/enforce than present taxes
(e.g. income tax).
3. fossil fuels are nonrenewable and the economy, to make human civilization
have a future, needs to prepare itself to operate without them. There is no
market incentive to do that preparation without the C-tax.

>
> Of course they still are motivated to sell their oil & coal, albeit they
>> will
>> sell it at a higher price in order to pay their expanses plus the tax.
>>
>
> I see this to be a common misunderstanding. Let's start with an example

> where I think we'd agree....
> But suppose instead that the raw materials you *already bought* are useful
> *only* for producing gadgets. The new tax on gadgets *cannot* be passed

> along to the consumer, because you have no alternative avenue for your raw
> materials.

--I have no idea what you are talking about.

> Now back to fossil fuels. If you add a tax to the extraction of the assets,
> you're effectively just reaching into the property owner's bank account and
> taking out a tax, because you've instantly decreased the value of those

> assets. It doesn't even matter if you actually *do* extract the fossil

> fuels—just the fact that the tax is there is enough.

--so for example, the land & continental shelf in the USA used to produce oil
is largely owned by the US govt, and the US govt by imposing a carbon
tax would be decreasing the value of its own land. Which would be
irrelevant because the US govt charges INCREDIBLY LUDICROUSLY small
extraction fees.

(For some reason you seem to think your argument has some relevance to reality?)

> *Let's pencil out an incredibly simplistic example.*

>
> - You purchase some land that has 1M$ worth of fossil fuel (FF) on it, for

> 800K *[This is now a SUNK COST.]*

> - The new CO2 tax is 80%, reducing the value of that FF "one million

> dollars worth" of FF to to a paltry 200K — *you are now in the red!*

>
> A sale price of 200k means that in order to make at least a 5$ rate of
> return with any additional capital, you have to spend less than $190,476 to
>
> extract the FF. As lang as that's the case, you'll be incentivized to sell
> the FF, so the supply won't decrease, so the cost won't go up.
>
> It is very simple.

--Wow, that is amazing. You have just "proven" that no matter how high
a tax on carbon extraction is imposed, the supply will not decrease and
therefore the cost of fossil fuel will not rise.

Your capability to convince yourself of the most obviously ludricrous
crap is impressive.

Back in reality, the cost of FF would rise, and the market then will
prefer alternatives,
such as solar, wind, hydro, and more efficiency -- assuming those are,
in contrast, not taxed. Without the carbon tax, however, the market
would not go for that
extra efficiency or would not choose solar.

[Warren D Smith]

By the way, after exhausting me by telling me at great length over and over that
any intelligent person would not care about the source of their costs
when making
a decision about what to do next (you seemed to think
that argument should have some impact on my thinking about something,
I have no idea why) --

you then told me that because some cost was a
"SUNK COST" (your capitals) that for some reason would massively
change their thinking about what to do next, versus if it had been some
other kind of or source of cost.

A typical Clay contradiction.

(You also seemed to think it would matter what that sunk person did,
whereas what actually matters is what the market wants to buy, which
is another refutation, but there are so many.)

[Clay Shentrup]

> --for some unknown reason, you seem to think the above paragraph
should have some logical impact on my thinking about something

Suppose I *agree* with you that Alice should be subsidized to increase her utility. OK?

Now, that DOES NOT imply where the money for that subsidy should come from. It could come from anywhere. You decide that based on what causes the most good for society. It could come from a carbon tax or a tax on the 1%. Whatever is best.

But what I am fairly certain of is that it SHOULD NOT come from a tax on the employer for God's sake.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/5/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> --for some unknown reason, you seem to think the above paragraph
> should have some logical impact on my thinking about something
>
> Suppose I *agree* with you that Alice should be subsidized to increase her
> utility. OK?

--I have no idea who "Alice" is. I do not recall arguing she ought to
be "subsidized."
Again, very first sentence of your drivel, and I have no idea what you
are talking about, again, rendering rest of what you say, irrelevant.

> Now, that DOES NOT imply where the money for that subsidy should come from.
> It could come from anywhere. You decide that based on what causes the most
> good for society. It could come from a carbon tax or a tax on the 1%.
> Whatever is best.
>
> But what I am fairly certain of is that it SHOULD NOT come from a tax on the
> employer for God's sake.

--Looking a back a few of your posts, as far as I can tell, you were claiming if
you, Clay, owned an oil well & refinery, and were busy selling
gasoline at $2/gallon market rates...

then if the govt came to you (clay) one day and said it would put a tax of
$100/gallon on the gas you sell, payable by you, then you claim
that you would respond by not altering your $2/gallon selling behavior.

Because, you claimed, you'd "SUNK COSTS" (your caps) into that drill rig
and refinery and land, and the tax was somehow effectively just altering
your land valuation, so you for some reason did not care, so for some
reason you were
then going to keep on selling your gasoline at $2/gallon despite the fact you;d
then lose $98 per gallon you sold.

I'm trying to see how this makes sense, you insist it does and it is
"very simple" and
I by not seeing it am just falling into a "common misconception" about
carbon taxes
or thinking this is somehow about "a tax on employment for God's sake"
(whatever that was).

But for some reason, I am not following.

If I had to guess, my guess would be you are not actually this stupid
by yourself,
and probably therefore read some drivel from a Koch-brothers-sponsored
pseudoscience "libertarian economics" website, and figured it was
sensible.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/5/18, Warren D Smith <warre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/5/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> --for some unknown reason, you seem to think the above paragraph
>> should have some logical impact on my thinking about something
>>
>> Suppose I *agree* with you that Alice should be subsidized to increase
>> her
>> utility. OK?
>
> --I have no idea who "Alice" is. I do not recall arguing she ought to
> be "subsidized."
> Again, very first sentence of your drivel, and I have no idea what you
> are talking about, again, rendering rest of what you say, irrelevant.
>
>> Now, that DOES NOT imply where the money for that subsidy should come
>> from.
>> It could come from anywhere. You decide that based on what causes the
>> most
>> good for society. It could come from a carbon tax or a tax on the 1%.
>> Whatever is best.
>>
>> But what I am fairly certain of is that it SHOULD NOT come from a tax on
>> the
>> employer for God's sake.

--I think I see something of what you mean now -- you think at some point
I, or somebody else arguing with you, claimed "Alice" would be influenced
in her spending behavior of that money, by the fact she got it from
a carbon tax, versus a wage, or a tax on 1%.
Then you, at great length, over and over, refuted that horribly false
allegation by me or by some other guy.

But the thing is, I never made that allegation. Nor did anybody else make it.
So you can stop refuting it now. Nobody cares.

The reason min wages need to be wages, obtained from the employer and
from some other source,
is that this causes prices of goods to be linked to labor cost, not unlinked,
and thus a min- and max-wage floor & ceiling would prevent inflation &
deflation for
all goods. That was my original point, which I originally made. I
did not try,
then or later, to depend on any claim a wage earner's behavior would
be influenced by where that money came from (although in fact, as I
showed by example just
to further refute your annoying irrelevant bull, it can be).

[Warren D Smith]

> The reason min wages need to be wages, obtained from the employer and
> from some other source,

--correction: "and NOT from some other source"

[Clay Shentrup]

> --I think I see something of what you mean now -- you think at some point
I, or somebody else arguing with you, claimed "Alice" would be influenced
in her spending behavior of that money, by the fact she got it from
a carbon tax, versus a wage, or a tax on 1%.

No, more like the opposite of that. You should pick the tax WITHOUT EVEN KNOWING how it will be spent.

If you were tasked with raising X dollars of revenue, would you say, "Gee, I know, let's tax people for every hour they employ someone"?

> The reason min wages need to be wages, obtained from the employer and
from some other source,
is that this causes prices of goods to be linked to labor cost

It does the opposite. It causes the price to be linked to a lossy *transform* of the labor cost. It is literally a market distortion of the actual cost of that labor.

> would prevent inflation &
deflation for
all goods.

You should not be trying to directly affect either of these. Neither are intrinsically "bad".

[Clay Shentrup]

> --Wow, that is amazing. You have just "proven" that no matter how high
a tax on carbon extraction is imposed, the supply will not decrease and
therefore the cost of fossil fuel will not rise.

Only if you think "$190,476" is synonymous with "infinity".

[Clay Shentrup]

> then if the govt came to you (clay) one day and said it would put a tax of
$100/gallon on the gas you sell, payable by you, then you claim
that you would respond by not altering your $2/gallon selling behavior.

100$ is vastly in excess of the actual negative externality cost of the associated carbon emissions, so this is a ridiculous statement to begin with.

[Clay Shentrup]

Here's a question.

Do you think the harm caused by burning a barrel of oil exceeds the benefit?

[William Waugh]

There has been a lot of traffic tagged with the subject header, "Census 2020". I suspect that some of it is not really on that subject. If you are talking about something else, please set subject headers accordingly, so that if it is about something I might be interested in, I will know to read it.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/6/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> --I think I see something of what you mean now -- you think at some point
>>
> I, or somebody else arguing with you, claimed "Alice" would be influenced
> in her spending behavior of that money, by the fact she got it from
> a carbon tax, versus a wage, or a tax on 1%.
>
> No, more like the opposite of that. You should pick the tax WITHOUT EVEN
> KNOWING how it will be spent.
>
> If you were tasked with raising X dollars of revenue, would you say, "Gee, I
> know, let's tax people for every hour they employ someone"?

--you seem to think I am interested in taxing to raise revenue. But
the topic was
paying people a minimum wage, without raising any revenue.

>> The reason min wages need to be wages, obtained from the employer and
> from some other source,
> is that this causes prices of goods to be linked to labor cost
>
> It does the opposite. It causes the price to be linked to a lossy
> *transform* of the labor cost. It is literally a market distortion of the
> actual cost of that labor.

--no, it causes it to be linked directly to undistorted, actual, true,
labor cost, namely the actual, true, wages that worker
is being paid.

If, however, you were to work for $1.01 per hour, of which $1.00
was provided by a government subsidy and $0.01 by
your employer -- i.e. what you want --
then there would be an enormous distortion factor of 101.

>> would prevent inflation &
> deflation for
> all goods.
>
> You should not be trying to directly affect either of these. Neither are
> intrinsically "bad".

--well, there have been historical examples, where they were
intrinsically bad. Such as hyperinflation
in pre-Nazi Germany, which ultimately led to a worldwide disaster
via Hitler and WW II. And yes, I should be trying to prevent WW III.
So should you.

Congrats, you scored zero out of three.

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/6/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

--that depends on what the benefit for that particular act of burning, is.
For example, it was once standard practice in the USA, to drill for
oil but thereby obtain both oil and natural gas, and then simply BURN
all the natural gas, for no benefit at all, except to dispose of it
since they did not want it since they wanted to get the oil, not the
gas, because they'd get more profits faster that way.

So, in my view the harm from this unquestionably exceeded the benefits.

On the other hand, maybe I burn the oil to fuel an ambulance ride to
save my life.
In that case, it was worth the harm.

The point of a carbon tax, is that if it is set at the right level to correctly
monetarily reckon the harm, then the market will automatically
try only to go for beneficial uses of oil and not harmful ones.

What is the "right level"? My rough guess is somewhere around $20 to $30 should
be the price for a gallon of gasoline, as opposed to present prices
where I live
of $2 to $3. The government could then eliminate income taxes
on everybody making less than $50K/year or so (very roughly) to raise same
revenue.

[Warren D Smith]

And incidentally, Clay's idea (if it was), namely the government pays
everybody an equal subsidy, in fact has been tried, and continues to happen
right now, in Alaska. The source of the money is oil companies
paying the govt of Alaska. As far as I know no other US state does this.

How well has that free money been working out for Alaskans?
Well, Alaska's life expectancy is ranked 33rd, i.e worse than average,
among the 50 US states. The only three states with minwages >=$11/hour
(CA, MA, and WA) are in contrast ranked 3, 5, and 13.
(CA,MA,WA all also outdo AK for infant mortality.)

So, golly gee, looks like having a minwage, even the highest minwages,
work well, and works better than giving everybody free money. I mean, just
based on reality. (Only 4 datapoints is not enough for a confident
conclusion, but if it is what you have to go on...)

On the plus side, not surprisingly Alaska's poverty rate is low.
It is 10%, which puts AK among the best 5 US states.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 8:50:22 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--you seem to think I am interested in taxing to raise revenue. But
the topic was
paying people a minimum wage, without raising any revenue.

No, you are raising revenue. From the employers. Minimum wage is effectively just like taxing the employer and then writing a check to the employees. It is mathematically/economically the same thing. You're getting the money from the employer, but you could get it from infinite other places.

It is trivial to prove this is irrational. Like I said, you clearly wouldn't suggest an employment tax if you were tasked with raising some funding for roads or schoolbooks. So then it would be just as insane to tax employment in order to fund wage subsidies to humans.

This is 2+2 level mathematics.

--no, it causes it to be linked directly to undistorted, actual, true,
labor cost, namely the actual, true, wages that worker
is being paid.

You want it to be connected to the actual cost of the labor not the wage paid.

You seem to understand this on carbon. Oil is artificially cheap because the cost you pay for it doesn't include the external harm felt by the rest of the world—the cost you pay doesn't match the "real" cost. That's an externality. You seem perfectly capable of understanding this.

Well, that is exactly the same as the wage situation. Minimum wage is like an artificial externality. It causes the cost of the employees to not match their "real" cost.

If, however, you were to work for $1.01 per hour, of which $1.00
was provided by a government subsidy and $0.01 by
your employer -- i.e. what you want --
then there would be an enormous distortion factor of 101.

Yeah, it's obvious to me now why you're so confused. You think the employer should be paying as much as the employee is earning instead of as much as the employee costs.

--well, there have been historical examples, where they were
intrinsically bad.  Such as hyperinflation

That's a case where the inflation was the result of something bad. It wasn't bad in and of itself.

For instance, there is "demand pull" inflation, where things cost more because they become inherently more valuable to people. Like if everyone just starts LOVING strawberries tomorrow, so they become more expensive. Nothing is bad there. The cost of a util hasn't necessarily gone up. People aren't "poorer".

Inflation is not bad qua inflation.

Here's a primer on inflation for you.

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3773

Congrats, you scored zero out of three.

Well no. More like, you are stumbling over econ 101. Or more like, math 101.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 9:01:18 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--that depends on what the benefit for that particular act of burning, is.

Just use the "market value" of a barrel of oil for simplicity's sake.

So, in my view the harm from this unquestionably exceeded the benefits.

Well, maybe the cost to contain it is greater than the negative externality cost. Did you evaluate that or much less even consider it?

On the other hand, maybe I burn the oil to fuel an ambulance ride to
save my life. In that case, it was worth the harm.

Yeah, but the market cost is an aggregate over all use cases of course.

The point of a carbon tax, is that if it is set at the right level to correctly
monetarily reckon the harm, then the market will automatically
try only to go for beneficial uses of oil and not harmful ones.

Yes, exactly.

 

What is the "right level"?  My rough guess is somewhere around $20 to $30 should
be the price for a gallon of gasoline

And it may be that even at that cost, it doesn't change demand one iota. For reasons I previously explained. Because, the current petroleum owners have already "sunk the cost" of buying the land. So you'll only reduce the consumption if that tax is enough that they wouldn't want to expend any additional cash to extract those (now stranded) assets. Maybe 20-30 a gallon would be enough. Maybe not. I don't have the data to do a back of the napkin calculation.

In any case, the fact that you can understand carbon pricing shows there's hope for you to grasp minimum wage.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 9:45:23 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

How well has that free money been working out for Alaskans?

This is in no way an argument about whether the fundamental policy proposal is sound. The Alaska fund is $1000 and $1500 per person, which comes to between $5000 and $7500 for a family of five. Many UBI advocates think it should be about that much per month.

So, golly gee, looks like having a minwage, even the highest minwages,
work well, and works better than giving everybody free money.

What a massive non sequitur.

[Clay Shentrup]

P.S. Basic income researcher Scott Santens has talked about Alaska.

http://basicincome.org/news/2017/08/18767/

[Warren D Smith]

On 2/6/18, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 9:45:23 AM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV
> cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:
>>
>> How well has that free money been working out for Alaskans?
>>
>
> This is in no way an argument about whether the fundamental policy proposal
>
> is sound. The Alaska fund is $1000 and $1500 per person, which comes to
> between $5000 and $7500 for a family of five. Many UBI advocates think it

> should be about that much *per month.*

--well, I am resorting to the data I have, rather than (your method) none.

US federal minwage is $7.25/hour, which
for 40 hours/week, 50 weeks/year, is $14500.
So your $5000 figure is not insignificant by comparison.

If Alaska were indeed to be multiplied by 12, as you suggest,
then I presume its life expectancy, currently 0.45 years worse
than USA as a whole, would become 5.4 years worse, making
it by a good margin the worst state in the USA.
Your defense against this presumably would have to be that this signal was
overwhelmed by noise. Which might be true - that is the problem
with only having 1 datapoint. Still, with the data we have, it
is not looking good for you.

[Warren D Smith]

> So, in my view the harm from this unquestionably exceeded the benefits.
>>
>
> Well, maybe the cost to contain it is greater than the negative externality
> cost. Did you evaluate that or much less even consider it?

--The "harm" was that somewhere on the order of 1/3 of the USA entire
natural gas reserves, were (1) intentionally destroyed, hurting future
generations who might want to use that fuel, and (2) hurting the global climate.
The "benefit" was that it would have been costly to build/buy gas
pipelines or compressors, whereas for zero of that cost they could
just burn off all the gas and sell their oil, which was easier for
them to handle,
e.g. they could just literally use barrels.

>> What is the "right level"? My rough guess is somewhere around $20 to $30
>>
>> should
>> be the price for a gallon of gasoline
>
>
> And it may be that even at that cost, it doesn't change demand one iota.
> For reasons I previously explained. Because, the current petroleum owners
> have already "sunk the cost" of buying the land. So you'll only reduce the
> consumption if that tax is enough that they wouldn't want to expend any
> additional cash to extract those (now stranded) assets. Maybe 20-30 a
> gallon would be enough. Maybe not. I don't have the data to do a back of
> the napkin calculation.

--so you claim that multiplying the market cost of gasoline by a factor 10,
quite likely would not "change demand one iota."

Oh.

Then you seem to think that the calculations made by producers (who by
the way are
capable of doing arithmetic & logic, unlike you) somehow have
something to do with "demand" which is about consumers.
Look, I'm afraid you are just so loony, I'm going to stop arguing with you now.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 2:21:38 PM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--well, I am resorting to the data I have, rather than (your method) none.

Well there is empirical data, but that's irrelevant since you're getting stuck at even the basic logical principles that would lead a rational person to _expect_ UBI to outperform minimum wage. It is definitely true that minimum wage is flawed because it distorts the true cost of labor. You seem to understand distortion of costs on the subject of carbon tax, but can't see the same thing when it's staring right at you on the subject of minimum wage.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 2:31:25 PM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--so you claim that multiplying the market cost of gasoline by a factor 10,
quite likely would not "change demand one iota."

If you have a million dollars worth of fossil fuels, and it costs you 5% of their worth to extract them, and I tell you I'll tax you 80% of their value, then you can get a million dollars by spending 850,000 dollars, for a massive 17% return.

Who do you know who'd pass up a 17% rate of return?

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 2:31:25 PM UTC-8, Warren D. Smith (CRV cofounder, http://RangeVoting.org) wrote:

--so you claim that multiplying the market cost of gasoline by a factor 10,  quite likely would not "change demand one iota."

If I have 100$ worth of oil, and you decide to tax oil consumption at 99% of its value, then it will "feel" to me like you've just taken 99$ out of my bank account. Because anyone who now buys that oil from me will discount the purchase price by that tax amount, i.e. will pay me 1$ for it.

You seem to think I'll pass that tax on to the consumer, but that is impossible. The sale price is a function of supply and demand, and neither of those are changing. (Ignoring demand pull inflation here.)

Now, if you can understand that elementary example, then the next step is to see that the unextracted FF example we previously discussed is only trivially different. It's different because the sunk cost of the land is not the only cost; I still have to pay more money to extract the FF. And if your tax is big enough to incentivize me not to do that, then I'll invest that "extraction capital" elsewhere. And then the supply of FF will go down, which will cause the price to  be bid up, which will reduce consumer demand.

I just cited a simplistic example where the fossil fuel owner can make a massive 17% return by extracting the fossil fuels, even after your massive 80% CO2 tax. He's actually making a massive loss if you count what he paid for the land, but that's a sunk cost that cannot factor into his equation. Unless you can get that 17% down to something like 4%, he's still going to extract the fossil fuel, so the supply won't go down, so the cost won't go up, so consumption won't go down.

[Clay Shentrup]

On Wednesday, February 7, 2018 at 10:51:11 PM UTC-8, Clay Shentrup wrote:

And then the supply of FF will go down, which will cause the price to  be bid up, which will reduce consumer demand.

I admit I'm butchering terminology and causality here, though not in a way that affects my point. This is probably what you were getting at earlier, so let me clear this up.

What I should say is that the supply goes down, period. Then the price is bid up because of that. But the price going up does not reduce demand. The demand curve stays the same. I meant "reduce demand" like, if I'm willing to pay 100$ for something and the price goes up to 101$, then I won't purchase it. This was sloppy on my part and I apologize.