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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23799 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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My thoughts and concerns on the points:

  1. I'm definitely opposed to the ban on "price gouging". It's important that we have free markets, and prices fluctuate accordingly. If you don't you'll end up with surpluses or shortages.
  2. I hope this voluntary on the part of the companies, and by the hand of the market, not mandated by law. I'm not a fan of instituting price controls, as said above.
  3. Great.
  4. Alright. (Is this like a VAT?)
  5. Fair enough—I do wonder about ship-of-Theseus-ing, and whether that would ever end up being viable to make "used" goods. But I don't imagine that that's likely to be too much of a problem.
  6. Sure. I certainly don't expect the rich to skip it—they're often rich in part because they're conscientious about money, or they have someone to help manage their finances, but sure, a UBI.

Alright, some overall thoughts. The main thing here seems to be a shift of everything to a sales tax on the selling of new goods. This is distortionary, but I don't know that I mind lowering consumption? I would want to know how you'd handle imports of foreign goods. Also, to be clear, would this be packaged with a lowering of the welfare state more generally? How much would the markets move to accommodate the new tax structure, and how would that affect the revenue raised? I'd probably want to look up what economists think before having any definite opinion on this.

A national sales tax, fair tax, VAT whatever you want to call it seems economically more efficient.

I am not sure if it would lower consumption or not.

The big issue with it is it’s impossible to swap systems. I guess you could do it gradually but that probably just ends up being the government gets more revenue and spends it. Older people who paid income tax on savings get hurt with a new tax on consumption.

A lot of it feels like our roads system. Since we built everything for cars it’s difficult to swap back to trains and walkable. We can debate which is better but we have everything designed for cars now. If America got nuked, we did post-apocalypse for a few decades and then we’re back in growth mode we might choose different design routes.

But since system switch is hard it leaves these tax ideas mostly to the academics.

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