StudioGlyphic

Category: Politics

  • Creating new American jobs

    Five policies and programs to spur business creation and hiring:

    Corporate Income Tax

    Eliminate it. It’s double taxation. If you want to tax rich people, tax rich people. More importantly, it leads to shenanigans like tax inversions, keeping cash overseas, and looking for crazy legal loopholes to reduce taxes. This system favors large companies over small companies, international companies over domestic companies. Kickstart the creation of new companies by eliminating the corporate income tax.

    Universal Health Care

    Implement it. Give every aspiring entrepreneur the freedom to start their own thing without worrying about not getting the health care they need or going bankrupt getting it. Take the burden of providing insurance away from companies, where insurance costs can be a significant percentage of the cost of labor. Give every employer a discount on new hires by removing this cost.

    Payroll Taxes

    Eliminate them. They’re highly regressive, punitive for the self-employed, and ultimately a legal Ponzi scheme where current workers pay for old people’s basic income and medical insurance. Fund Social Security and Medicare out of the broader tax base, and stop arguing over when the Ponzi scheme is going to collapse. Once again, make it easier for employers to hire new workers without having to worry about these additional costs.

    Universal Basic Income

    Implement it. No means-testing, no applications, no judgment. Just a guaranteed Basic Income for being an adult US Citizen. When basic needs are met, people have more freedom to start new companies or new careers. At the same time, we can dramatically reduce poverty and focus on productivity.

    Minimum Wage

    Eliminate it. It’s a burden on businesses and ultimately leads to an increase in part-time work, just in time shift scheduling, and contracting out services to contractors. The goal behind the minimum wage is to ensure that low income workers have a basic level of income and quality of life, but this isn’t the right tool.

    Five ways to pay for them:

    Income Taxes

    Add more brackets. Under the current system, $250k is taxed at the same rate as $500k, $1m, and so on. Adding additional brackets and higher rates at those brackets will make the tax code more progressive, ensuring that those who benefit most from our society also contribute the most.

    Capital Gains Taxes

    Increase them. Introduce brackets to ensure savers in the 99% aren’t taxed at the same rate as C-level executives in the 1%, but let’s drop this charade that they money made through stock, options, and other means of compensation isn’t the same as income.

    BAT or VAT

    Implement one or both. Either the Border Adjustment Tax or Value Added Tax will generate revenue based on economic activity in a more equitable manner, and should favor companies that make and sell stuff here in the United States.

    Social Welfare Programs

    Eliminate the transfer programs. Welfare (TANF), Food Stamps (SNAP), and Disability (SSDI) are all intended to provide cash assistance to people in need, but come with strict rules, differing qualifications, and a sense of shame. They’re also subject to shenanigans by the states (TANF dollars going to relationship classes and abstinence education). Universal Basic Income eliminates overhead, fraud, and abuse, and lets people make decisions about how best to spend their own money, whether that’s paying the utilities, getting a degree in nursing, or investing in some business equipment.

    Deductions

    Drastically scale back and phase out deductions. Deductions favor homewowners over renters, parents over the childless, religious people over the non-religious, the wealthy over the poor. It’s hidden spending and it’s a wasteful tool for social policy. If you want to encourage buying a house, installing solar panels, having children, set aside funds for each goal and ask people to apply for those funds, then deposit the funds in their Universal Basic Income account. Measure and examine the effectiveness of each policy each year and decide whether to do it again the next year. Don’t make this kind of spending universal, perpetual, and expected.

    The Reality

    Both parties and most taxpayers will likely reject different parts of this plan. It will never get anywhere.

    Image CC BY John St John

  • How to keep your political career

    Some free, but useful advice on how to stay in politics.

    12 things to avoid:

    1. Don’t take pictures of yourself naked.
    2. Don’t take pictures of your reproductive organs while wearing something tight/revealing.
    3. Don’t engage in sexually explicit conversations over the Internet or by text message.
    4. Don’t do anything remotely sexual with an underage person.
    5. Don’t have an affair in a foreign country and lie about it.
    6. Don’t have a relationship with a call girl.
    7. Don’t pay for a prostitute with a check.
    8. Don’t have an affair with someone who works for you.
    9. Don’t have an affair with someone who is married to someone who works for you.
    10. Don’t solicit strangers for sex in airport bathrooms.
    11. Don’t have illegitimate children and deny responsibility.
    12. Don’t make advances on the children of your donors.

    If you do decide to ignore my advice and go ahead with any of these activities, then please pay attention to the following tips.

    6 things that will make it worse:

    1. Campaign based on your squeaky clean image.
    2. Championing family values.
    3. Public and loud criticism of other people’s indiscretions.
    4. Anti-homosexual rhetoric, especially if you’re closeted.
    5. Covering up with hush money.
    6. Firing or threatening people who are involved.

    And finally, when you are caught (and you will be), come clean as quickly and openly as possible. Learn how to shed a tear in public, but try not bawl. Look and sound sincere. Keep a low profile. Work hard. And then maybe, if your constituents feel like they have a connection with you, they’ll let you keep your job.

  • There’s no shame in walking away

    Apparently there’s a growing number of people strategically defaulting on their mortgages. Or, at the very least, there’s a growing fear that this is happening. For some commentators, this is a sign of low moral fiber, that the strategic defaulters are somehow breaking their word, losing their honor, etc.

    Bullshit.

    Housing loans are not based on the belief that the borrower will pay the money back because his honor is at stake. They are based on a contract, which spells out exactly what the lender can do if the borrower stops paying back the loan. The lender can choose to take the house and sue the borrower for the difference between the house’s value and the loan amount (unless it is a non-recourse loan).

    There’s also this refrain of unease that not only is the decision to default immoral, but it’s just too easy and trivial to do. That the borrower somehow escapes punishment-free for buying too much house or getting a terrible loan.

    But losing your home and getting sued is not a trivial thing. Not to mention the massive hit your credit score will take. For the borrower who defaults, it means that credit will either be unavailable or offered at exorbitant rates. Moreover, employers and landlords often do credit checks prior to hiring or renting, which will further limit the borrower’s options.

    Nor is it necessarily easy! The lender has the option to take the home, but no obligation to do so. If there’s a glut of inventory in a particular submarket, a backlog of defaults to process, etc., the lender can choose to send nasty letters to try to get the borrower to pay, but may hold off on actually seizing the property. In the meantime, the borrower still owns the property and any liabilities that go along with it.

    Finally, there are those that mention other effects of the foreclosure, such as declining house values and higher borrowing costs within the submarket or economic cohort. But aren’t these effects the natural outcomes of a market? We are coming off a 7 year bubble; houses are going to go into foreclosure, prices will drop, costs will increase, and to expect anything else is insane.

    The bottom line is that the decision to take a loss, just as the decision to purchase, should be evaluated rationally by the individuals involved. There are a lot of things to consider beyond the value of your house, the amount of your loan, your monthly income, and the monthly expenses, but morality is not one of them.

  • Short-term memory

    One day, perhaps in the near future, gay people will have the rights and responsibilities that come along with marriage. They’ll be recognized by society as committed couples just as straight people are, heart-broken widows and widowers will have inheritance rights over their homophobic in-laws, and gay celebrities will fight their divorce and custody battles in the pages of the tabloids and the courts.

    It won’t take too long for society to forget that we voted in favor of ballot initiatives like Proposition 8; there won’t be any collective sense of shame because we are not only shameless, but brazen in our shamelessness. Jim Crow? That’s old news. Ditto Executive Order 9066, which put over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps, because they were trusted less than Americans of Italian or German descent. Women’s Suffrage and Alien Land Law? That’s really old shit. The Trail of Tears, Chinese Exclusion Act, and slavery? What century are you living in?

    It’s really unfortunate. We keep patting ourselves on the back about how we are the most-free, the most-tolerant, the hands-down pinnacle of human civilization–which in many ways we are–but we forget about the decades and centuries of struggle and death that got us where we are, we like to think that every generation gets a fresh-start without the baggage of the previous generation, and we don’t recognize the disconnect between what we say we are and what we actually do.

    It’s easy when you’re a straight, married man with some education and a decent job to file this away under “Abstract thing that I’ll voice an opinion about in polite conversation but doesn’t affect me” (along with single mothers, homelessness, and at-risk kids). But maybe when your life’s biggest problems are whether you could have saved more money buying from newegg.com or whether you want to buy a BMW or lease a Porsche you should take advantage of that human gift of looking outside yourself and fucking do it.

  • No bailout for the automotive industry

    I could care less if the Big Three were to disappear overnight. For decades they’ve existed as marketing and financial bureaucracies–not car companies, putting out shitty products propped up by nostalgia, misguided patriotism, cheap fuel, and cheap money. In the meantime, their foreign competitors have innovated, diversified, and invested wisely, building their brands over years, if not decades. The American automotive industry seems to be institutionally incapable of learning anything; it’s time to stand back and watch those institutions implode. This doesn’t mean we won’t have an automotive industry; it just means that new companies will have a chance to grow and innovate without being overshadowed by these soulless monstrosities.

    However, I’d be perfectly happy to have the Feds relieve them, and American businesses in general, of the twin clusterfucks we know as defined benefit retirement plans and employer-based health insurance.

    NaBloPoMo 13