alt Hacker NewsIt's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.
I bought my car for $32k. To replace it would be $50k. I crash it, am I out $32k or $50k? Or some other number? Numerically, it could be anything.
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good list.
if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, i would pay you $1 per day.
but if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, plus a bunch of econ theory rationalizing it, i would pay you $0.
> A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year.
Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax.
There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue.
> $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.
The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.