That is true, but does not help a person who is not building a given website.
I have had financial websites impacted by adblockers, which is why I stopped using them. (I do not work on all of the teams building the financial websites I use.)
3 clicks to disable an adblocker on a financial website seems like a trivial price to pay for mental wellbeing and tens of hours of your life not watching video ads, but you do you.
Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt.
Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.
Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.
There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books
Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai
Disclaimer: I do not like to read LLM-generated text any more than anyone else.
IMHO a big problem with Pangram in particular is that they market it as a reliable tool that can be used to catch students cheating. This can obviously have disastrous effects on young lives, because it is not as reliable as they suggest.
Per their own benchmarks, they do not achieve 100% accuracy even on text that is published on the Internet, and which is likely encoded into the models themselves.
There is validity to their goals, but that is overshadowed by the irresponsible way in which it is marketed.
(All of this, swirling in a context where students are being told that they absolutely must become proficient at using LLMs to do exactly this kind of work by the highest levels of state and federal governments, faculty leadership, as well as the leaders of the workforce into which they hope to graduate. The message to youth is extremely muddled at best.)
The false positive rate for Pangram 4 is something like one in 24,000.[0] To put that in perspective, the wrongful-conviction (false positive rate) for death-sentenced defendants in the US is estimated conservatively to be around 4.1%.[1] The FP rate for death-sentence convictions is 1,000 times bigger than Pangram’s FP rate.
Now, the US criminal system is not a great yardstick for justice. But it goes to show you Pangram is really good evidence that something was LLM generated. It can be an amazing tool for enforcing AI policies in schools, and there ought to be ways to use it with caveats for the rare but inevitable false positives (appeals, etc).
There are a couple of statistical errors in your argument here.
First is frequency. Even using Pangram's claimed numbers, the University of Georgia should expect to see several false positives every week. Remember that the metric is # of assignments run through Pangram, not number of students. A campus of 40k students will see many more than 40k assignments every week, and so should expect honest students to be accused of cheating with some high degree of frequency. You're comparing infrequent events (death penalty sentences) to high-frequency events (students submitting assignments).
And obviously, you are citing a company marketing document as fact, of which we should all be suspicious. (There are also obvious problems with the eval dataset that the paper does not address.)
Second, you're using the upper bound for Pangram's claimed numbers and the lower bound cited in the NIH publication.
> at least 4.1% would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States.
> The false positive rate for Pangram 4 is something like one in 24,000.
Gotta suck to be one of the 8B/24k=~300k people in the world whose writing pattern is falsely labelled as slop by this tool that people say is so accurate so customers are going to feel really sure about your alleged dishonesty about writing your own texts
This false positive rate is a double-edged sword. Please still be careful when accusing people
I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible. Because it's entirely possible that someone would just naturally write the exact same thing as an LLM would write. And after the fact there is no way to distinguish the two. But pangram does have an extremely low false positive rate, which I think does make it useful for detecting cheating students. Assuming the base rate of cheating students is 1%, and assuming pangram has a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000 and a true positive rate of 7,000 in 10,000, that means ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated. Combined with a teacher's familiarity with that student's previous work, which should rule out many more false positives, it should be a very useful tool.
> ~98% of students flagged by pangram actually cheated
That 2% is a large number! Of people who will have their integrity impugned for no good reason! That's not okay!
Your calculations also are mixing assignments and students. The rate of false positives of 1/10k is of corpuses, not students. 10k students might each submit 2-3 written assignments per week. Obviously, this greatly increases the impact of the false positive rate.
And all of these numbers are dependent on lab conditions for usage, which are not the case in the real world.
> I don't think 100% accuracy is logically possible.
Yes. Which is why marketing this product as it currently is, is a deeply irresponsible endeavor.
This seems like it would be an altogether different experience than the common experience of using an LLM, which is characterized by the person spending a lot of time waiting on the machine.
Yeah, it'd be a lot easier to maintain flow, less need to work on more than one session at once, etc. And then tool calls would be the limiting factor, especially network access. I hope AMD keeps the project moving forward post acquisition.
According to the video, 2/3rds of that range is for loiter and divert capability. It's illegal to fly a route without the capability to loiter and divert. You need 30-60 minutes of loiter + 100 miles of divert. This plane cannot be used on any route longer than about ~200 miles. Which can be driven in 2 hours, although obviously the OP was referring to the 120 mile electric range.
> This plane cannot be used on any route longer than about ~200 miles. Which can be driven in 2 hours.
Huh, perhaps then it wouldn’t be suited to places where people drive at that speed. In the US I doubt people drive 200 miles routinely in 2 hours. It would be closer to 3.5 h I think going by the routine 6 h it takes SF to LA which is about 350 mi.
I think if you have very high speed road/rail transportation that dominates this across fixed routes. Road at 100 mph average definitely wins for flexibility.
There's a small but real market for < 120mile flights where geography makes a road between the two destinations impossible. "Puddle jumpers" is the standard term.
However, the real market is for connecting flights to nearby small cities. For a transfer, you're already at the airport, you're already through security and you don't have your car. I'd never fly from Ottawa to Montreal (200km), but I do that flight quite regularly when I'm going to Europe.
To repeat: the market is filled with fuel-driven turboprops. This only wins if it's better, and it's only better if it's cheaper. Is it cheaper? If it's cheaper they should say, and not spend time talking about "all electric" range in a regime that doesn't want aircraft at all.
And sure, there are places in the world that don't have limited access highways. But the 125 mile range is already served very well by piston-driven lightplanes! Again, who's going to buy one of these vs. just continuing to run their 40+ year old Beavers or Caravans or whatever?
Also: if the only market for your high tech electric superplane startup is backcountry work in Alaska, you're probably never going to get funded to begin with.
I think you would be pleased at the very first selling points on their website, as well as on the product page. It seems they have at least considered the most obvious issue in their product space.
It might be cheaper when internalizing the externalities of CO2 emissions. Once/If we start properly taxing the impact of these emissions, this plane could offer much cheaper flights then fossil fuel driven competition.
I mean, for the all-electric distances it's pretty much a given that it's cheaper: fuel consumed is the largest item on airlines' expenditure. The bigger question is at what distance you start having to burn more fuel than if you weren't lugging batteries round with you. If it's [eventually] commercially competitive at 400m range it's going to be useful on a variety of routes currently operated by ATR-42s and Saab 340s etc, the sort of thing that's definitely not operated by 40 year old 9-seaters. If it isn't... well islands still exist, they're just a fairly small niche
Both of you are misunderstanding the point: I was responding (pretty clearly I thought!) to the ridiculous "all electric" range.
Yes, it can go farther if you burn fuel. But so can a Dash-8, very effectively. No one is interested in hybrid range per se, only if the hybrid mode is more efficient.
I live in Germany. 500 miles is more than essentially all domestic flights in Germany. Two hours driving by car from Berlin gets you nowhere all that interesting. You'd probably spend close to an hour just getting out of the city. Two hours might get you as far as Magdeburg or Dresden when traffic is mild. Good luck with that on a busy weekday. Dresden would be about 200km. Magdeburg is a bit closer to 160km. And much of the way you'd be facing speed limits. And traffic jams.
There are cars with engines that will bring you to 250 mph without burning out, like the Bugatti Chiron. Unfortunately you will burn through your $40k set of tires after 15 minutes at that speed. But don’t fret, because your fuel tank will be empty after 9 minutes anyhow.
For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.
Economists have been championing Georgism for more than a century and we still refuse to consider it. I would argue that unreasonably expensive land prices are the most serious economic and social issue in the West today. It's a systemic problem, from which so many other issues are caused: homelessness, poverty, suppressed economic activity, inflation, class stratification, "failure to launch," fertility rates, inequality, etc.
The problem is that we've taught generations that the best retirement plan is a home, and now if we allowed home prices to fall, generations of people would be without their retirement plans. Voters don't like that very much. It's absurd that we allowed things to progress to this point, and unwinding it is going to be extremely painful. I think this only resolves when renters outnumber home owners to a material degree and vote for land value taxes. Things will get much worse before they get better.
I think even when renters outnumber they're still less likely to be involved in local government. Current owners have a vested interest. Only nimbys show up
Some (few, heterodox) economists have been championing Georgism for more than a century. Some other economists[1] take it seriously enough to write refutations, explaining why they consider it to be a very bad idea.
Your post seems to consider Georgism to be obviously correct. You've got a lot more proving to do before that can be considered settled.
[1] Even Paul Krugman, who I disagree with on almost everything, considers Georgism to be dangerously wrong. This despite Krugman being no friend of the economic powers that be.
It's fair to criticise my absolute language but if I add up the top 100 most influential economists of the last century, the vast majority were in favour of LVT. There are notable exceptions, like Krugman, but let us not characterise him as representative of an equally large cohort of dissent. They are the firm minority.
Low cost of wealth accumulating snowballs those that have alot of said wealth accumulated. Look at swedens wealth inequality (gini coefficient) statistics to get a somber example.
Counter intuitive enough; making borrowing harder, and wealth holding more costly may reduce land and housing costs.
Can you explain what, if any, difference there is between LVT and georgism? How do we know simply building more wouldn't lower the returns on real estate and naturally disincentive using real estate as in investment vehicle? I guess maybe federal level taxes are basically un-repealable whereas construction has a strong local component? I understand there's complicated feedback effects here. For example, buildings be effectively illegal precisely where it's needed most.
Would decoupling education funding from local taxes do anything? I'm thinking maybe it decreases the incentive to hold on to a house thus increasing effective mobility/geographic diffusion? Probably a small effect but it seems possible it could have second order effects.
No matter the type of tax (LVT, income, wealth, carbon, etc…) the money goes to the same place: the government.
From there, hopefully the government uses it wisely in ways that redistribute wealth and stimulate growth, but that is orthogonal to how the money is raised.
So instead... What? The high price right now to live near work or relocate is regressive. I don't know what proof there is that "money not going back in to the economy"* is a larger effect than increased housing affordability?
*btw, if the money went toward interest on debt, all else being equal, that is money back in to the future economy via reduced tax demand. Of course this won't actually happen and the government will spend every cent it gets and more. So maybe your opposition should be with the government and not LVT?
The big difference between holding land vs gold/stock is that land is finite. If the price of gold spikes then people will build more gold mines. That's economic activity. If the price of land goes up then people can't make more so there's no economic activity.
If the price of stocks go up then more companies will IPO which directly funds economic activity (those companies's operations).
Granted, it doesn't as well into the economy as directly as if it were tax'd and then spent improving bridges and whatnot.
I'd like to see both an automatically adjusting dynamic tax on owning more than one property in the same municipal or arbitrarily useful region, as well as dynamically banning the ownership of more than one. Everytime I mention this, I get "blah blah we have a democracy blah blah freedom" etc.. but it's no such a democracy if one particular age-range dor demographic of people owns all the assets and politically protects them from diminishing in value or facing competition. Pending presumably complex implementation details, but a healthy system that prevents generational fiefdoms would probably adjust to severely disincentivise even the possibility of acquiring more than one of the most important finite resources in urban areas.
If I'm not mistaken there is a tax on secondary residences in France.
I am not an accountant, but my understanding is there is a "taxe d'habitation" from which primary residences are exempt, but which must be paid on secondary residences.
Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.
Right, but it's still kind of a joke because that's just what you would pay on any normal investment's appreciation. Land is treated as a commodity that can't go down in price.
Pied-à-Terre Taxes are pretty easy taxes to implement, because usually the ones affected may not even live in the town/state to vote against it to begin with. But ultimately this only covers a very small slice of homeowners.
In australia we have housing as an investment that pays off big. The more homes you own the richer youll be. Theres not much else here that pays off that well.
If a land value tax would fix rich people from parking money in real estate, it would price regular people out of real estate.
I know LVT is the libertarian dream, but in practice it means only the rich can own real estate long-term, in most cities. It also means the rich can drive out the poor by driving up land values around them, to the point where the taxes are too much to afford.
LVT simply wouldn't be a good system, if applied in the real world.
You may be confusing LVT with property transfer tax? LVT is a tax on ownership of land - driving down land value, not up.
In practice it disincentivises investment in land (rent-seeking and speculative land hoarding) while incentivising land development. In cities this manifests as more, cheaper, homes, and lower rents, and is highly progressive.
I say in practice because we have over a century of explicit and implicit LVT implementations in the real world to demonstrate this. Most implementations of LVT have gone down as described. Estonia is a pretty fantastic case study - 90% of property is owner-occupier! And you might find this new study of implicit LVT in the US interesting - LVT correlates with higher earnings and demographic diversity: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
The challenges for LVT are really about how to transition the tax in for areas that are occupied, but severely underdeveloped. If a low-density inner-city area ought to be high-density, the owners are being charged accordingly. Long term, it stimulates development and the new housing surplus (splitting the tax burden of LVT across a much greater number of owners) balances things out. But that's no consolation to the people being told they have to pay tax on their backyard as if it's already a block of flats.
Whether carrying cost is higher or lower depends on the taxation LVT is substituting and the counterfactual utilisation of the land. In practice it is usually lower in rural and suburban and highly developed urban areas and (where substituted property taxes are higher or there are more properties to tax per unit of land), and higher in underdeveloped urban areas (with fewer properties to tax per unit of land).
This is, of course, the point. The carrying costs properly incentivise appropriate land use and development, and the land value is reduced, freeing up the capital locked into ownership (i.e. thin air) for productive use.
The better developed land also ends up with more properties per unit of land, so the carrying cost of property decreases universally.
I think you just have a misunderstanding of how taxes work. The person or company that "pays" the tax does not bear the full burden of the tax. That burden is usually widely distributed throughout the economy. In the example of LVT, a landlord would pass on the LVT in the form of increased rents to their tenants. A power company that pays a carbon tax charge more their electricity. An income tax makes it more expensive to give people jobs, so even if the earner pays it, that burden is also bore by the unemployed. Whoever pays the tax, they just pass it on to the rest of the economy.
But that's ok, because taxes can be paired with other methods like cash transfers or social programs that can effectively redistribute wealth. We should try to raise taxes with methods that have good side effects (LVT, carbon taxes), and then redistribute as necessary.
If your cost of living is higher (due to LVT), the minimum wage you will work for is higher. The amount of discretionary spending (someone else's income) or investment you can make is lower. Obviously these effects on an individual level are small, but when aggregated across the entire economy are very large.
In a world of LVT, everyone pays LVT because everyone lives somewhere. You either pay it as an owner or its passed through to you in rent prices. It will be passed onto you in the food you eat (which was grown on land), in the products you use (which were manufactured in a physical place), in the internet services you use (which are run on data centers on physical land), and so on.
In this way, it is much like all other taxes. What is special about LVT, and not other taxes, is that LVT create a disincentive against land speculation (using land as an investment rather than for living or productive use).
What prevents this system from resource exploitation for more taxable profits? I want to have systems in place that encourage nature and long term sustainability.
Does LVT create a moral hazard? I don't think so. Have we seen municipal governments with liquor taxes rush to run pro-alcohol ad campaigns and relax night life restrictions in order to maximize tax revenues? No. Have carbon taxes motivated governments to promote carbon use? Again, we have no evidence of that. Indeed, for pretty much ever tax ever studied, we find the relationship you would imagine: increasing taxes on X, reduces X.
So in that way, since LVT just adds to the cost to exploit any resource, it will reduce exploitation of nature.
But more importantly, LVT is in no way incompatible with other regulations or restrictions on land use. i.e. you can have LVT and a law against strip mining.
I am wondering what protects normal people. I hear a proposal what prevents the ultra wealthy from hoarding, but I am not seeing how this doesn't negatively impact normal, single family residences.
It seems the goal is maximizing tax revenue, punishing hoarders of land, and pushing for communal living. The exact case I think it is imperative to avoid is removing the elderly (cough, less useful) from their forever home in the guise of progress.
The obvious way would be tax relief on land used for primary residences up to some limit. But the point is the tax wouldn't dis-incentivise land acquisition so long as it wasn't left vacant.
“Most economists” haven’t the faintest clue how money works. Relying on their pronouncements is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
The LVT doesn’t work for the fairly simple reason that value is in the eye of the beholder and requires a bureaucracy, tax is paid from income and rich people have power and therefore just put the prices up to recover the extra cost, which they can do because there are fewer jobs than people that want them.
Legal tax incidence != economic tax incidence
Taxation by estate agent is a non-starter in any democracy. Nobody likes real estate people to start with.
- economists have a good idea of how economies have worked _to date_
- they posit new policy to achieve goals
- these policies introduce second-order effects that they failed to predict
I mean, Friedman's criticism of Keynes was excellent, and forsooth, his policies made stonks go up. But i don't think there economy is any better for them; i think we are, broadly, worse off.
I support LVT, but there will be second-order effects. I guess we are doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis, at a higher level than economic boom-and-bust.
That's probably somewhat better than the current status quo but one of the obvious side effects would be screwing smaller landlords out of the market and replacing them with typical "faceless corp gives no shits about you or anything beyond the legal minimum" type property management companies. Worth it? IDK.
Taxes are not just money taken from people in the abstract. They are, quite concretely, used for specific purposes. In the US (because the OP is about the US), property taxes in particular are used to fund local services like schools.
So if you eliminate taxes on primary homes, you will cripple the public schools.
I disagree with your analysis, but putting that aside, you are ignoring the fact that LVT has been applied in the real world. Denmark, Estonia, Singapore, Taiwan...
Obviously disentangling effects is hard, but there is no evidence that suggests it has the deleterious effects you mention.
LVT: You own the land, you just have to pay these taxes on it every year or we will force you to sell it so we can collect our taxes.
Leaseshold: We own the land, but you can buy a 99-year leasehold, and you can use the land (or sell your leasehold on the open market) as long as you continue to pay the rent. You might also be able to extend your leasehold when it expires, but that is up to the government.
So the expiration part is different, but "taxes" vs "lease rent" is just semantics.
Unfortunately that doesn't really help. It has the effect of eroding the asset value such that it quickly means the owner can't sell.
In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.
Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)
And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.
I guess that it can be rented or built upon. It's easy to imagine renting a field to a farmer but money is money, so why not letting somebody else build flats over one's land?
I understand where you are coming from here. And there are multiple levers in play here.
The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.
There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.
If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.
Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.
This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.
A wealth tax would also be beneficial in reducing wasteful stock buybacks. Without any benefits from high stock prices, boards and shareholders will be less inclined to impose those price targets on CEOs, CEOs will be less incentivised to "cheat" on quarter-based performance and the myopic share price performance view of their companies, hence will reduce stock buybacks and returning money to shareholders. That leaves very few options - either reinvest into the company or pay out dividends, and the latter is unfavorable for shareholders compared to the former.
i did recently see something interesting where if you look at buybacks from the Mag7, they basically almost entirely offset vesting employee RSUs. which kind of makes sense, those RSUs have to come from somewhere or they dilute the current shares.
i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.
Fair point, and explains why I was downvoted. My focus was on mostly the usual slew of companies that don't reward their employees in stock options, but handsomely reward their CEOs - O&G, pharma and biotech, advanced manufacturing, etc.
Currently equity appreciation is desirable for HNWIs because wealth isn't taxed, only income realized is. The more their wealth appreciates, the more viable it becomes as collateral they can borrow against, raising their borrowing capacity. CEOs, the board and the major shareholders fall under this group too.
Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy that cash and prop up their equity value. CEOs love this easy trick because it increases their equity holdings' value, and also lets them hit quarterly share price targets which allows them to accrue more equity options. But at the end of the day, this money isn't benefiting the company, so it's just air.
With a wealth tax, the incentive to acquire increasing wealth dampens somewhat. You're only taxed once you cross a certain threshold usually, but once you cross it, the resulting tax hit can be quite sudden and severe. You hold equity but you have to hand over a significant amount of cash immediately, so you'd have to liquidate your holding, which is why a lot of HNWIs hate it.
In fact, it's why there are active strategies (usually involving philanthropy and blind trusts) in Switzerland (which has a global wealth tax) that allow to optimize your wealth just so you stay below the threshold. But at least, that wealth isn't being hoarded and is being actively deployed in other ways.
I think what you've outline here is entirely theoretical, unless you have some empirical evidence you have thus far not linked, and (IMHO) likely not correct.
I also don't think there would be any particularly progressive or otherwise good effects from reducing stock buybacks, but assuming we did think that, we can skip all of the wealth tax second/third order effect theorizing and just use a direct corporate buyback tax, which we did do in the IRA. Stock buybacks have already fallen, but if its effects are not big enough for you, then raise it or reduce exemptions. Not that I think that anything particularly good would come of that.
Some here are qualified to do angel investing by income (FAANG salary) or wealth so could take Wannabe term out, if they pulled the trigger. It's a way to get into the next innovation economy. Moderate-to-high risk, diversification is critical.
Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income. The lower tax rate is simpler than actually accounting for these differences.
Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income. Taxing them similarly without very negative consequences requires recognizing these differences in some fashion.
Taxing wealth has myriad additional problems. In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
>Treating wage and capital income equivalently would require recognizing losses due to inflation and risk that simply don’t exist in a meaningful way for wage income.
Learning that their wage income makes them immune to inflation and is risk-free seems like it may be surprising news to many Americans.
Inflation kills your wage much more reliably than wealth. If anything, the exact opposite of what you're saying happens: wealth has much lower risk from inflation, because the nominal price of the actual assets that your wealth is composed of often increases with inflation (e.g. land value). In contrast, wages are 100% affected by inflation - unless you put in the extra work to get a raise, the buying power of your salary is guaranteed to decrease year over year.
> losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.
Neither is true.
The only asset class directly hit by inflation is cash. No high net worth person in their right mind holds substantial cash for a longer period of time. If they do, it's a conscious choice and it's not clear why the tax system should help in that situation.
The risk of a wage earner is to lose their employment because the business folds. Just like the shareholder in that business. It's again unclear why the tax system should compensate both differently for this.
Capital gains taxes are assessed on nominal gains not real gains.
If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K, I gained no real wealth from that transaction. What I could purchase today for $200K could have been bought for $100K in 1999 because of inflation.
Yet, I’d owe capital gains on the $100K of nominal gain I experienced. This is part of the reason that long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
> If I bought $100K of stock in 1999 and sold it in 2026 for $200K
This is because you invested incredibly poorly. The S&P is up ~500% over that period, plus decades of dividends.
Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate because rich people have more influence over the tax code than people who earn most of their income from working.
> In the US, about 2/3 of wealth is completely non-liquid so any theoretical valuation is fiction and highly leveraged.
That may be the case but it doesn't prevent anybody from borrowing against it, which turns that fiction and illiquidity into very real liquid dollars. That same mechanism could be used for paying your taxes as it reveals that this is merely an excuse.
> Income from capital has a low tax rate in the US (and many other countries) because you can deduct neither losses due to inflation nor losses due to risk, both of which are substantial for capital income but non-existent for wage income.
You are incorrect on both of those, the risks are obvious.
If you wage/salary does not keep up with inflation, you lost buying power due to inflation.
If your employer goes out of business or your industry suffers a downturn, you may be laid off and lose your income. This risk is highly concentrated due to most people only having the one job.
Wage earners are exposed to all kinds of risk.
Also, equities go up when there’s inflation and if you hold bonds to maturity, all you miss out on is potential interest income in an inflation event. Rents go up with inflation. Cash and cash wages have the highest inflation risk.
> You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down
If any price for any reason goes down, that money ends up in housing. The only way to bring down housing pricing is to build more housing. This is extremely well documented.
And it's economics 101. The price is the symptom. The root cause is a shortage. Fix the shortage and the symptom follows. Try to fix the symptom and the root cause will make things worse.
You mean the prices are going up, so people can afford to keep the housing empty for more time to get a better price. That's not the same if you think about it.
I feel like the inflation of everything except wages will eventually show up in housing prices. People pay so much for existence, there’s not the same budget for housing. There’s only so much people can afford and also there’s now been a long track record of young generations having stunted starts.
Also not sure how the supply will be affected by boomers exiting the market. I know there will be no surge in supply, but I’m not certain there’s enough buyers at the prices they would expect. If that’s the case, supply will build and prices will drop.
I have had this sneaking suspicion for years now that most of the money needs to be locked up because if we actually gave it to the masses to spend we'd see massive inflation and/or environmental catastrophe (worse than the current one). I don't mean to defend the wealth gap, and I'm not trying to make a statement on how things should be. I just think there may be an unfortunate reality that we need most of the world to have less because we can't currently support a middle class globe.
this is already happening via asset price inflation.
where i live (Seattle) small businesses are trapped in a death spiral as their rents are going up, the wages they have to pay are up to even attract workers who also need to pay rent, but purchasing power has not caught up.
Or you tax it. Or, more correctly, you remove the current protections that allow land to appreciate tax-free for decades. That would move capital out of land and free it for other uses. The current system was designed to put money/people into houses post WWII but has gone too far in promoting radical multi-generational wealth structures.
We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
Is capital gains / wealth tax a fix here though? Definitely not saying it doesn't work, I have no idea. But I'd be curious to hear both sides of the argument.
You tax the non reproducible assets like money [0] and land.
The reason is quite obvious. You can't make more land so you have to force owners to use it efficiently. Money is transactional real estate, it grants the ability to perform transactions. What people call "saving" is actually just holding onto money and blocking the capacity, it's no different than blocking a lane on the high way and building a toll booth on that lane. Money is strictly a pass-through asset. Certificate of Deposits are fine because they are contractual agreements with finite duration, liquid money has infinite duration so its corresponding debt is also of infinite duration so that needs to be taxed.
[0] No, infinitely expanding the money supply is not a solution, because it also means infinitely expanding debt.
Australia’s current federal Labor government proposed such a a scheme, but had to back pedal hard when everyone told them it ain’t gonna work.
The same federal Labor government introduced changes to capital gains tax, after promising “50 times” they wouldn’t. All the while a not insignificant fraction of MPs and Senators of said party sold significant realestate holdings before they made public their plans.
In Germany there is a "Vorabpauschale" where you pay a certain part of the capital gains tax on ETFs, certain funds even with unrealised gains. These are later accounted for when you sell. Though AFAIK if you sell at a loss you can't get the Vorabpauschale back directly, but it would increase the losses you can potentially apply against other gains. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorabpauschale
“… These are later accounted for when you sell. Though AFAIK if you sell at a loss you can't get the Vorabpauschale back directly, but it would increase the losses you can potentially apply …”
The labor party doesn't know what it stands for anymore. The HAFF was supposed to make housing more affordable, but the housing minister said explicitly that she doesn't want house prices to decrease, rather increase at a rate slower than wage growth. But they have no plan for how to grow wages. So they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth, and the electorate will hear what they want to hear. Labor will make housing affordable for my kids in the future. Labor will protect my investment. The whole thing is a farce.
The US does this in most jurisdictions. Homeowners pay tax on the current assessed value of the property, even if that property was purchased when the property was much less valuable.
It would not be a stretch to do similar for other assets. In particular, assets held in stocks or bonds are more amenable to fractional sales than are the primary residences that we already tax this way.
No, people don't like it. They don't like paying any taxes.
I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth. For half a century, in France, it's been told that real estate was the safest/best investment for households; everyone was passively peer pressured each year, whatever the macroeconomic situation at the moment, to buy. This is a Ponzi scheme, so even the middle class households that recently bought their own shitty flat in Paris will never vote for such a tax because their overpriced asset would lose value and it's often their only lifelong investment.
The same fear will happen if you just target investors owning multiple real estate with this tax, or simply forbid by law from owning several flats in high demand areas. The right wing would scream that the hard working French guy won't be able to invest his hard won money, but the very rich foreigners from Saudi Arabia or investments funds from USA will find a loophole thanks to their infinite money and buy all the french real estate.
Hell, most people in my country are against inheritance tax despite a huge part of them not rich enough to pay it, meanwhile inequalities are rising because of inherited wealth. So taxing the land won't happen, the bourgeoisie has been too effective in its propaganda.
> I agree, but taxing real estate as an investment would break the wealth structure of many voters (and politicians) above the 80th percentile of wealth
Most places do tax real estate. I was surprised to look it up and find that Paris has some of the lowest property tax rates in the world.
Land Value Tax would be a little different, though. It's a proposal to replace most or all taxes with a simple tax on the estimated value of the land. One of the key features of LVT is that if land becomes valuable over time, the tax on that land becomes so high that the owner is forced to sell it. The idea is that the LVT ensures optimal usage of the land by forcing people who own land in valuable areas to use it for a business. So if you buy a house and the area becomes popular 10 years later, your tax bill might get so high that you have to sell it to a developer who will build a high-rise on it, or a grocery store that can afford the high tax rate.
It would never be accepted in practice when everyone's 70 year old parents were being forced to sell their modest forever homes. There's also a major problem where the structures aren't considered at all, so one person with a $2 million home living next to someone with a $200,000 100-year old home would pay the same tax rate if they're on the same size lot, because it only cares about the value of the land.
I don't know why Land Value Tax has become the default solution to everything on the internet, because I think most people would actually hate what it did to society. Having progressive taxes that scale with people's income, spending, and size of their home is good for making the tax burden proportional to wealth and consumption. Replacing it all with a tax that just taxes how much your property is worth ignores everything except the value of your land, which is completely out of your control over several decades of life as the world changes around you.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
You seem to be confused about the point people are making. The point is that from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".
People owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores. A single income from any white collar job supported a stay-at-home spouse. Teenagers bought cars by working part time. College kids paid their tuition and living expenses for the full year by working summers.
That today's below-poverty-line job still leaves someone better off than being completely destitute is beside the point.
I think this is a rosy view of (at least) the 1980s-1990s. There were definitely jobs that paid way below what it cost to live, and there were plenty of people who needed to take a second or third job to survive. It just wasn't the norm like today.
Frankly, the biggest reason for these sentiments is straight up false nostalgia. The 90s wasn't some utopia. There were plenty of shit jobs. People struggled. Notice how none of the positive vibes are backed up by numbers. It's just "people owned houses and cars by working at grocery stores." No mention of how many people managed to pull that off or how it compares to today. It's just a vague feel-good statement that The Past Was Better.
I didn't back up my statements with numbers because I'm old enough to have lived through the times I'm talking about and it's as obvious how much things have changed in my lifetime, but here:
The 90s wasn't a utopia, but also, look at the media landscape of the time as a reflection on society - Fight Club, Office Space and American Beauty were reflections on the unfulfilling banality of life being too easy to find purpose. Married with Children (1987) and The Simpsons (1989) center on men who are supposed to be relatable-losers in low status, low paid dead end jobs (shoe salesman and power plant worker) and yet both have two story houses and are supporting multiple kids, because that was just normal and relatable to the blue collar average Americans watching the show at the time. Rocky (1976) has a protagonist who owns a house in Philadelphia despite being "poor", if it were filmed today they'd have to make him sleeping in his car for the character to represent the same level of desperation that audiences understood him to be in at the time.
Living through it doesn't save you from having a selective view due to only seeing a tiny, tiny portion of the country, or just rose-tinted glasses.
I've seen The Simpsons argument brought out a lot and it's weird to me. Homer isn't just a power plant worker, he's a nuclear safety technician, which pays quite well. Despite (somehow) having a really good job and a pretty moderate lifestyle (no childcare costs, modest and rare vacations, eating out infrequently, no fancy toys or extracurricular activities) and having substantial financial assistance in buying their house, the family is portrayed as financially struggling.
I'm not convinced about the usefulness of those numbers either. The figure for houses is probably useful. Used cars seem much less so. Modern cars last way longer. The average age of cars on the road today is almost double what it was then. The average price is going to be skewed upward by people with more money buying used cars that still have a ton of life left in them. Cheap used cars are still available and you probably get a much better car today even at the cheap end of the scale. For tuition, I'd like to see how financial aid changes the picture, since it seems like colleges these days engage in massive price discrimination by listing high tuition that few students actually pay in full.
Certainly some major things have become more expensive, but "there really wasn't such a thing as 'a job that doesn't pay enough to live on'" is way over the top.
> from about 1945 until around 2000 in the USA there really wasn't such a thing as "a job that doesn't pay enough to live on".
Also, this is flatly wrong in that the wage laws were crafted specifically to enforce certain jobs not paying enough to live on. In particular, US labor & minimum-wage laws have exemptions for the types of labor which was commonly associated with disfavored groups. As a result, those jobs have been poorly paid ~forever. Example jobs: agriculture, food service, hospitality, personal care.
Minimum wage was first established in the US in 1938, so I'm not so sure they're wrong. Almost sounds more like you're confirming what they said, since it's barely been adjusted with inflation.
But "employment" is tracked as a binary, not as a "number of jobs someone is working".
So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not quite 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but generally at least 1 job less.)
So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make sense for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.
You're just cherry-picking though. Things were massively different in 1945 in tons of ways. For example Jim Crow was still active for one. Food prices were MASSIVELY higher for another.
Job and slavery are two very different things. I love free markets too but not to the level of autism (for lack of better word) and ignoring how things actually work in the physical world. Shallow economic theory doesn't create happy and functional families. Economic theory that is mostly rigged to serve the rich, entrenched, and powerful anyways.
Right, unless this is counting some broad definition of "underemployed" its obviously off by a large multiple.
What is interesting though is that, despite whatever they are trying to convey about how high their made up rate is.. we are at a lower rate of unemployment than the entirety of 1995-2019?
Their definition is clearly stated in the first paragraph:
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
Significantly less. Wanted a job? Walk through any neighborhood being built with a tape measure in your pocket. You'd have a job doing something before you made it past the 4th house. Had a car? Delivering food paid enough to afford a modest apartment.
"would like" is pretty wild in this context. The number of individuals who have had a job they truly enjoyed is a rounding error in recorded history. I'll save us both the indignity of repeating tired boomer tropes around modern attitudes towards work.
It really would, most boomers seem to also think living alone while not having a girlfriend is very odd and shocking (still). Most worldviews do not and will not add up to reality.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr.
But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
One really nice economic factor of the dole is that it disappears at a rate of 50c for each $1 of earnings above $150 and at 60c above $256, so there's no welfare cliff.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
I think we could move to a UBI surprisingly easily by giving everyone the dole and then taxing their income a bit more.
> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.
Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.
I'm saying that the "low paying jobs" have never been included in "unemployment." That is not how academics define "unemployment" nor how the term is colloquially used.
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
If you include all the stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day, you reach those 30% easily. Add to that the college students who only work part time. If you also include pensioners, kids and disabled you find out that only around 15-30% of the population actually work and support everyone else. And again, of those that do work, a significant portion is bureaucrats that have to be paid from taxes of people with a productive job.
> stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day
> include pensioners, kids
The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.
Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.
> Kalshi is just hoping to be treated like Uber was.
This is not a bad strategy for a company in our asymmetric regulatory environment. Fortunes were made in crypto on exactly this one-way bet.
Go on breaking the law until you get a favorable judge/Congress. Nobody is going to jail (we don't really do that anymore), you might pay a fine. Every once in a while you'll have change the app a little to sort of comply with a judicial order. There's practically no downside to this strategy.
> Binance, FTX, BitMex, Silk Road founders all went to jail
BitMex didn't go to jail, they all got probation/ankle tag, for not running a clean money org (allegedly no KYC, registering US accounts from offshore, etc.). CZ got caught in the US anti-China panic that also saw the TikTok ban pass Congress with nearly 80(!) votes in the Senate. Silk Road: drug trafficking.
FTX is the closest analog, but by all accounts they did not run a clean operation. What I have read of their operation would have been grounds for charging even if they were trading legal securities.
Seems the through line is if your main business is illegal, you need to run it as if it were going to be legalized tomorrow.
Sam Bankman Fried wasn't jailed for running FTX. He was jailed for conducting fraud. Silk Road wasn't a registered company at all. It was downright criminal.
IIRC, the Binance founder simply paid Trump off and got a pardon, with Trump himself admitting afterwards that he 'didn't know who the guy was'. So, the assertion that there are no real consequences anymore for 0.1% continues to hold.
Kalshi hired Donald Trump Jr as a strategic advisor with a salary reported to be around $300,000 per year. Recently there was a meeting between him and various State Attorneys General, where the message was back off prediction markets. Not too long after that other areas of the Trump Admin sent a letter basically saying the same thing.
And so the circuit courts coming to very different conclusions from the 9th circuit represents the inherent political corruption involved in the court system.
Circuit splits get resolved at the Supreme Court and I would make a prediction that it isnt a coin flip, probably more of a safe bet.
Silk Road was running an online marketplace for heroin and hitmen. That is not the same as Uber pushing the boundaries on what a "taxi" is, and you obviously know that. FTX was a ponzi scheme and that is the one financial crime they will still put you in jail for. It's the exception that proves parent comment's rule
e.g. make as much money as possible while you have a favorable judge/Congress/President b/c you assume the ability to make money will go away once the next regime is in power.
Fortunes were made long before venture capitalists and governments got involved in (crypto)currencies. Even larger fortunes were prevented by legislation crafted by the banking cartel over many decades, pushed through with the help of their lobbyists in DC.
Existing legislation favors the haves, not the could-haves. And many people go to jail every year for breaking rules that big banks get a slap on the wrist for. Money laundering, terror financing, fraud,... Name a major bank and I'll list you some crimes no one ever spent a day in prison for. But that's fine because they have a license.
Not just breaking the log: use your VC funding to both build your product and buy your politicians. The asymmetry is basically that our politicians are way cheaper than market demand, like they're communists in north korea and just border guards who can get bought off with some contraband.
> Most of us are only citizens because someone up the chain was born under this rule.
This understates the situation. All of us who are not naturalized citizens are citizens only because of the birthright clause in the Constitution. The US does not have any other way for a person born here to become a citizen.
If the birthright clause of the Constitution stops being enforced, Congress (or more likely in our current iteration, the President) will have to create a brand-new set of rules determining which of us natural-born citizens get to retain our citizenship and which do not. There is no existing law to guide them, so they can make it up out of whole cloth.
More plainly: if we choose to eliminate birthright citizenship, whoever is running the country at that time gets to determine whether you are still a citizen.
A hypothetical operational space data center will cost a multiple over a similar terrestrial facility. It would be cheaper/more efficient to offer a municipality or its citizens a fraction of that multiple to secure approvals, now that the bullying approach is running out of steam.
Instead of installing MWs of illegal gas generation and also still causing local electricity rates to spike, why not arrange to buy down the electricity of local ratepayers and also comply with existing laws & regulations?
It's worth asking why operators aren't doing that yet. I suspect it's because neither OAI nor Anthropic have an extra $50B-$100B to put out at the moment. We'll see what happens post-IPO.
I have had financial websites impacted by adblockers, which is why I stopped using them. (I do not work on all of the teams building the financial websites I use.)
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