APP - Isn't the solution higher taxes on the rich?

Bill Fishlore said:
Taxation is a necessary business expense. Taxation makes the economy possible. Without tax revenue there would be no roads, bridges, police, legal system -- all the things without which a modern economy is impossible. In addition, without government health, education, and welfare support a modern workforce would not exist.
Click to expand...

and, according to you, if California raises taxes as much as it wants to and other states aren't forced to match it, it would hurt their economy.....in other words, you want everyone to hurt their economy equally....
 
Bill Fishlore said:
The way that capital is taxed is indeed obsolete and unfair. We need to rethink the basis of all our taxes. Taxes are levied on profit. Profit comes from the action of labor on invested capital. In everyday terms, this means workers using tools, facilities and materials bought by whoever is paying the worker to use them. This is true whether we are talking about a steel mill, a pizza shop, a car factory, a shopping mall or a surgical hospital.

So far, so good. When we consider how much of that taxable profit comes from labor (salaries) versus invested capital, we see that we are in the biggest technological revolution since the invention of the steam engine because of very recent computer and automation technologies.

Computers and robots aren't cheap; neither are workers. But labor costs are shrinking as a creator of profit because money invested in them multiplies the productivity per worker enormously. Computers wiped out the jobs of bank tellers with the ATM machine a generation ago. Now, self-driving trucks are about to take away CDL jobs, some of the best available without a degree. Even lawyers are being cut thanks to new legal software and doctors can perform surgery on the Internet.

So, when we look a dollar of profit, we see that more and more of it comes from capital invested in productivity technology and less and less comes from human labor. Workers are becoming obsolete. Heavy industry has more than doubled worker productivity -- meaning half the workers are needed. Services, even retail is undergoing the same transformation.

What this means in terms of tax revenue is that our system of taxing labor (income tax) is crushing people as wages stagnate and good jobs are harder to find while the robots who are making the real money pay less in taxes on the wealth they create than humans do. It's time to give humans a break and tax robots at the same rate or higher than Americans.
Click to expand...

how about taxing pension disbursements, dividends and interest on saving?.....
 
Bill Fishlore said:
CA is 6th in size but it is not a free-standing economy. The CA economy is integrated within the larger US economy and this constrains its economic options just as federal law constrains its political options.
Click to expand...

What a brainless pile of drivel; but you do it well.
 
Bill Fishlore said:
Taxation is a necessary business expense.
Click to expand...

Businesses don't pay taxes.

Bill Fishlore said:
Taxation makes the economy possible.
Click to expand...

This is not only a false claim; but a moronic one.

Bill Fishlore said:
Without tax revenue there would be no roads, bridges, police, legal system -- all the things without which a modern economy is impossible.
Click to expand...

How did we have roads and railroads before they had Federal taxes?

I am amused by arguments that suggest the behemoth that is now the Federal bureaucracy is necessary or even Constitutional.

Bill Fishlore said:
In addition, without government health, education, and welfare support a modern workforce would not exist.
Click to expand...

We, as a society, were much better educated before the Feds became involved. I am amused by arguments that falsely suggest that we need the Federal government to maintain our health, education and welfare. That's not only specious, but stupid.
 
Bill Fishlore said:
The way that capital is taxed is indeed obsolete and unfair. We need to rethink the basis of all our taxes. Taxes are levied on profit.
Click to expand...

This is false; taxes are levied on income. Once again, corporations and businesses do not pay taxes; they merely collect taxes on their goods and services that are levied on their customers.

Bill Fishlore said:
Computers wiped out the jobs of bank tellers with the ATM machine a generation ago.
Click to expand...

This is flat our false; have you been to a bank recently? There are plenty of tellers still working there. I don't know where you are getting such laughably incorrect information.

Bill Fishlore said:
Now, self-driving trucks are about to take away CDL jobs, some of the best available without a degree. Even lawyers are being cut thanks to new legal software and doctors can perform surgery on the Internet.

So, when we look a dollar of profit, we see that more and more of it comes from capital invested in productivity technology and less and less comes from human labor. Workers are becoming obsolete. Heavy industry has more than doubled worker productivity -- meaning half the workers are needed. Services, even retail is undergoing the same transformation.

What this means in terms of tax revenue is that our system of taxing labor (income tax) is crushing people as wages stagnate and good jobs are harder to find while the robots who are making the real money pay less in taxes on the wealth they create than humans do. It's time to give humans a break and tax robots at the same rate or higher than Americans.
Click to expand...

This is a bunch of gobbledygook and crapola. We are not displacing human jobs with computers and equipment; we are merely changing the skills needed and increasing productivity.

What the hell this has to do with a discussion on taxes beats me.
 
Bill Fishlore said:
I appreciate your effort to understand what you think I am trying to say but please remember that what you think I am trying to say isn't what I said. Your are correct that CA could restrict a free housing program to California residents; the issue of how the state defines its citizenship isn't quite as simple as it might appear. In any event, the very high cost of a free housing program would require taxation which could adversely effect the CA economy if other states had no such burden. State economies aren't closed systems.
Click to expand...

Oh no. High taxation has zero negative effects. Just ask any liberal. They assure us that taxing the rich and redistributing that wealth to the poor is the only way to create prosperity.

You are mistaken. Californians are just greedy
 
PostmodernProphet said:
and, according to you, if California raises taxes as much as it wants to and other states aren't forced to match it, it would hurt their economy.....in other words, you want everyone to hurt their economy equally....
Click to expand...
No, I never wrote any such thing. The correlation between tax rates and economic strength is complex. Higher taxes, when used to improve education and infrastructure, function as capital investment and strengthen state economy. Poor states have crap schools and real problems attracting new investment. Cities like Boston and San Francisco have sky-high tax rates and crazy real estate prices yet they continue to grow and to attract businesses. Nobody likes paying taxes but taxes are a key part of economic development.
 
Bill Fishlore said:
No, I never wrote any such thing. The correlation between tax rates and economic strength is complex. Higher taxes, when used to improve education and infrastructure, function as capital investment and strengthen state economy. Poor states have crap schools and real problems attracting new investment. Cities like Boston and San Francisco have sky-high tax rates and crazy real estate prices yet they continue to grow and to attract businesses. Nobody likes paying taxes but taxes are a key part of economic development.
Click to expand...

you did say it, you just hadn't thought through what you said......as for crap schools, look to big cities to find the worst......and your original premise was that California would have a disadvantage in attracting new investment if they raised their taxes as much as they wanted and other states weren't required to do the same......
 
Right said:
Tax robots?
Click to expand...
Well, you are right of course that having robots fill out a IRS 1040 is a bit awkward, the idea I had is that taxing people through income tax and taxing robots through corporate and capital gains taxes is not working out very well and will continue to work out worse and worse as more of the nation's GDP comes through robots rather than human workers.

Our GDP has grown very significantly since the Great Recession of 2007. The DJIA has more than doubled. Have wages doubled? Has the number of jobs doubled? Nope, those numbers have hardly moved at all. Why is that? It's because it isn't workers that are fueling the big economic growth, it is productivity technology represented by computer-driven robots. Good thing? Bad thing? Doesn't matter. The new technology and the new world economy are here to stay no matter what we think.

And a lot of Trump voters don't think they like it. Those Appalachian coal miners have a point. Since 1970, the number of workers needed to produce a ton of coal has declined by over 80%. Not only that, we don't need as much coal because of advances in energy technology. Theirs is an extreme example of a very widespread trend: companies need fewer workers to do the same job if they invest in productivity technology, that is, robots which, once on the job, cost less than human workers to operate.

If this keeps up, profits will continue to climb while wages and jobs stagnate until there aren't enough people with money to spend, causing our economy, which is about two-thirds consumer economy, to keel over and die. Not good.

So what are we going to do? We are going to have to make a lot of jobs, jobs that don't necessarily create direct profits for the employer, and expand the social safety net. Where is the money going to come from? The money has to come from where the money went -- those danged robots!
 
Bill Fishlore said:
Our GDP has grown very significantly since the Great Recession of 2007.
Click to expand...
actually, adjusted for inflation its slightly lower than it was before the 2007 recession, isn't it?......

Those Appalachian coal miners have a point. Since 1970, the number of workers needed to produce a ton of coal has declined by over 80%
Click to expand...

robots did not put them out of work......demmycrat ideas about environmental controls put them out of work......
 
Bill Fishlore said:
Well, you are right of course that having robots fill out a IRS 1040 is a bit awkward, the idea I had is that taxing people through income tax and taxing robots through corporate and capital gains taxes is not working out very well and will continue to work out worse and worse as more of the nation's GDP comes through robots rather than human workers.

Our GDP has grown very significantly since the Great Recession of 2007. The DJIA has more than doubled. Have wages doubled? Has the number of jobs doubled? Nope, those numbers have hardly moved at all. Why is that? It's because it isn't workers that are fueling the big economic growth, it is productivity technology represented by computer-driven robots. Good thing? Bad thing? Doesn't matter. The new technology and the new world economy are here to stay no matter what we think.

And a lot of Trump voters don't think they like it. Those Appalachian coal miners have a point. Since 1970, the number of workers needed to produce a ton of coal has declined by over 80%. Not only that, we don't need as much coal because of advances in energy technology. Theirs is an extreme example of a very widespread trend: companies need fewer workers to do the same job if they invest in productivity technology, that is, robots which, once on the job, cost less than human workers to operate.

If this keeps up, profits will continue to climb while wages and jobs stagnate until there aren't enough people with money to spend, causing our economy, which is about two-thirds consumer economy, to keel over and die. Not good.

So what are we going to do? We are going to have to make a lot of jobs, jobs that don't necessarily create direct profits for the employer, and expand the social safety net. Where is the money going to come from? The money has to come from where the money went -- those danged robots!
Click to expand...
Seriously, you need to read more about history in economic terms. Technological advances have occurred throughout history and have always acted to improve people's lives: The Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin, the railroads, the personal automobile, the personal computer, the internet. And now, robotics.

Then you have to understand an important fact about capitalism. When corporate profits are high, it becomes an incentive for competition to flourish, and drive down prices and profits. It's a dynamic system.

Finally, there is the fact that Government itself is a corporation, and FedCo owns the market at the national level: they are a monopoly. And being a monopoly, they have little incentive to become efficient. In fact, preservation and expansion of their little fiefdoms is the goal of most bureaucrats. So while Ford Motor Company churns out more and better cars with less labor, FedCo churns out less and less of it's "products" with increasing amounts of labor.

Then there is the medical field, 1/6 of the economy. GovCo money has poisoned this industry by financing it through hundreds of programs. Thus it has little incentive to increase efficiency and productivity. For example, it's only been two years or so since medical records have been recorded electronically. Other industries made that basic step 30 years prior.

So the solution isn't to tax the producers. The solution is to make government smaller and more efficient.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
actually, adjusted for inflation its slightly lower than it was before the 2007 recession, isn't it?......



robots did not put them out of work......demmycrat ideas about environmental controls put them out of work......
Click to expand...
Do you dispute my statement about worker-hours per ton of coal? If so, please cite your source.

Environmental controls have reduced coal burning because the pollutants are responsible for the preventable or early deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year; however coal is also more expensive to produce, more expensive to transport and more expensive to burn than natural gas. All this was true and getting worse even before Obama took office. The facts are the facts.

Is it necessary to your position to misspell "Democrats"? It's a low-level style of trolling and causes me to lose interest in our dialogue.
 
Right said:
Seriously, you need to read more about history in economic terms. Technological advances have occurred throughout history and have always acted to improve people's lives: The Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin, the railroads, the personal automobile, the personal computer, the internet. And now, robotics.

Then you have to understand an important fact about capitalism. When corporate profits are high, it becomes
an incentive for competition to flourish, and drive down prices and profits. It's a dynamic system.

Finally, there is the fact that Government itself is a corporation, and FedCo owns the market at the national level: they are a monopoly. And being a monopoly, they have little incentive to become efficient. In fact, preservation and expansion of their little fiefdoms is the goal of most bureaucrats. So while Ford Motor Company churns out more and better cars with less labor, FedCo churns out less and less of it's "products" with increasing amounts of labor.

Then there is the medical field, 1/6 of the economy. GovCo money has poisoned this industry by financing it through hundreds of programs. Thus it has little incentive to increase efficiency and productivity. For example, it's only been two years or so since medical records have been recorded electronically. Other industries made that basic step 30 years prior.

So the solution isn't to tax the producers. The solution is to make government smaller and more efficient.
Click to expand...
I'm afraid your argument, interesting as it is, is more a political one based on ideology rather than one well rooted in economic history. The argument that the technologies of the cotton gin and personal automobile created more new jobs than the old ones they destroyed has been extensively analyzed in regard to the effect on the labor market of the newest technologies. As a generalization, the argument that new technologies always increase labor demand simply isn't true. It may have been the case for the automobile but it most certainly is not the case for the computer. Consider the economic growth represented by dozens of companies like Google or Facebook. Their value is in the billions but the number of employees is miniscule. A steel or automotive plant with a similar book value back in the good old days would have needed hundreds of thousands of workers. Information technology and its allied industries is simply different in its employment impact than anything we have seen before in modern times. And this is only the beginning. The self-driving car technology will scale up to displace most CDL jobs within a lifetime, yet the experts forecast that the number of workers the industry will hire will be scarcely an order of magnitude bigger than it is today. The new technology is gobbling up retail jobs at a frightening rate. The number of worker hours per million dollars of retail sales in Amazon is tiny compared to the worker hours required under the old retail model; to think that new jobs making computerized robots would make up for the hundreds of thousands of retail jobs being reduced each year is wishful thinking that has shown no sign of actually happening.

The idea that private industry creates wealth and government spends it wastefully is ideological not something that has been persuasively argued by economists. If you have economists on your side, please cite them; politicians and radio personalities don't count. Thanks
 
Bill Fishlore said:
I'm afraid your argument, interesting as it is, is more a political one based on ideology rather than one well rooted in economic history. The argument that the technologies of the cotton gin and personal automobile created more new jobs than the old ones they destroyed has been extensively analyzed in regard to the effect on the labor market of the newest technologies. As a generalization, the argument that new technologies always increase labor demand simply isn't true. It may have been the case for the automobile but it most certainly is not the case for the computer. Consider the economic growth represented by dozens of companies like Google or Facebook. Their value is in the billions but the number of employees is miniscule. A steel or automotive plant with a similar book value back in the good old days would have needed hundreds of thousands of workers. Information technology and its allied industries is simply different in its employment impact than anything we have seen before in modern times. And this is only the beginning. The self-driving car technology will scale up to displace most CDL jobs within a lifetime, yet the experts forecast that the number of workers the industry will hire will be scarcely an order of magnitude bigger than it is today. The new technology is gobbling up retail jobs at a frightening rate. The number of worker hours per million dollars of retail sales in Amazon is tiny compared to the worker hours required under the old retail model; to think that new jobs making computerized robots would make up for the hundreds of thousands of retail jobs being reduced each year is wishful thinking that has shown no sign of actually happening.

The idea that private industry creates wealth and government spends it wastefully is ideological not something that has been persuasively argued by economists. If you have economists on your side, please cite them; politicians and radio personalities don't count. Thanks
Click to expand...
Walter E. Williams: Technology and innovation kill some jobs but create many more
Click to expand...

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...tion-kill-some-jobs-but-create-many-more.html
 
Right said:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...tion-kill-some-jobs-but-create-many-more.html
Click to expand...
Professor Williams makes a clear case for the way that new technologies in the 1790s and 1950s made jobs in various sectors obsolete. He's right about that and nobody disputes it. Then he comes to the second part of his thesis, that the new technologies which abolished those jobs creates others. Here, unfortunately, his argument fades off into a rhetorical speculation that begs the question:

If there hadn't been the kind of labor-saving technical innovation we've had since the 1950s — in the auto, construction, telephone industries and many others — where in the world would we have gotten workers to produce things that weren't heard of in the '50s, such as desktop computers, cellphones, HDTVs, digital cameras, MRI machines, pharmaceuticals and myriad other goods and services?

His assumption workers laid off in older sectors supply the labor for the production of innovative products needs proof. He doesn't offer any because there isn't any. It takes far fewer worker hour to produce a computer than an automobile and laid off construction workers don't get jobs in MRI factories.

But there is an even bigger loss due to technology than changes on the product assembly line. The new technologies have far greater impact on the labor market outside the manufacturing sector, The computer replaces tellers and accountants because one accountant with a computer does the work of fifty paper and pencil accountants. Those unneeded accountants don't get jobs in computer factories. And banks are small beans compared to on-line retail giants like Amazon which don't have a store and whose warehousing and shipping are heavily automated. The best all those obsolete clerks can hope for is a delivery truck job -- and those are about to be automated as well.

In the earlier stages of our on-going Industrial Revolution, jobs lost in agriculture and blacksmith shops were more than replaced by factory work. In the current information revolution, a similar shift isn't happening because the huge impact of the new technologies is limited to production, it is happening in white collar and even suit jobs as well.


 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top