The FairTax is a complete replacement for US Income taxes.

Would the FairTax replace all the other state, county, city/municipal taxes too, or would it be added on top of all the other taxes too?

The USA is being torn apart between those with employable skills and those who jobs have been automated or exported to third world countries. Soon there will be a lot more more unemployed Americans because robots are getting cheaper than workers. Democracy is under threat already. When most of the population is unemployed democracy will be impossible.

And yet....we continue to let masses of people flood across our border, almost all of which is unskilled labor at its best potential, so therefore, a burden to our social safety net dollars, since they won't be able to get jobs.

This is getting so bad, I almost think there HAS to be some sort of nefarious thinking and planning behind all that is going on with this US govt. administration.

Resident aliens getting it basically comes under 'very short summary'.

As for sales tax, you're talking that, in exchange for a percent or so of the federal tax, the state tax agencies would handle collecting and forwarding on the sales tax, right? Logical enough, i guess, but you would still have the 5 states, the prebate, and you'd still probably want an audit and fraud investigation unit. These days, I wouldn't trust a the states to be on the up and up.

And yes, you pay at the cash register. Just like how the lions share of income tax is collected via paycheck deduction by the employer. A lot of people don't send a check or whatever to the feds at all, instead the feds send them a payment.

The rebate would be huge, plenty of work for the IRS to manage.

It's because they were dumbasses who parked in the airport parking lot (without charging), left them in sentry mode which consumes more power for a month, then tried to mob the charging stations without knowing enough to precondition the battery by telling the car that you're going to a charging station.

That's why you weren't hearing similar stories coming from other cities further north, such as Canada, Norway, Sweden, and such.

There are many solutions:
1. Driver education
2. Improving standby power use
3. Installing at least trickle chargers in airport parking lots
4. More charging stations so you can handle the rush of low-charge rate customers (low charge rate because they didn't precondition).
5. Improved batteries that can charge faster anyways, or retain more range after sitting in a parking lot for a month
6. Software improvements so the battery gets preconditioned anyways
7. Hardware improvements so the battery can precondition faster
etc...

I think that it's also that populations are getting older. Many of the older people in my family have mobility issues. For example, I have to help mom out of my car if she rides in it - but she can get out of their compact SUV just fine.

Modern cars are typically built so low that people with arthritus and bad ankles and such can have a hard time with them. So when they go to the dealership, they're going to buy a vehicle that they can get into and out of without hurting, and that's often not a car.

Plus, well, I've seen ads placing compact SUVs as cheaper than cars smaller than that. What's up with that? And the amount I saw wasn't a small amount - it'd be like 5 years to make up the price difference with the extra gasoline use of the SUV, assuming average driving.

fairtax proposal.

Very short explanation:
Replace the income tax (and possibly other taxes) with a 23% sales tax. If you meet requirements like being a US citizen, you receive a "prebate" equal to the tax you'd pay on poverty line spending. Somewhere around $3,464 for an individual, $7,176 for a family of 4 (I couldn't find these numbers on the site, I had to calculate them based on the description of the prebate). This makes it a reasonably "progressive" tax.

The site itself talks about "no longer needing the IRS". Personally, my first thought on that is that you're still going to need an agency collecting the sales tax money as well as administering the prebate, which would logically be the IRS. IE the mission changes in some major ways, but still remains - to collect taxes and pay out refunds as required by law. To me, the IRS is not the "enemy" most people who hate income taxes view it as, as it just operates how congress tells it to.

VAT and US style sales taxes are different. With VAT, what happens is that business A, for example, produces wood logs. They sell them to business B, charging VAT. business B converts them into boards (for example), then sells them to business C, charging VAT. They then get to deduct the VAT they paid to A for buying the raw materials. Business C sells the boards to customers, again, charging VAT. They deduct the VAT they paid to B, and remit the excess to the government.

In the USA, that's generally handled by simply making business transactions tax exempt. So A selling to B simply doesn't charge sales tax. You only charge sales tax when selling to the final consumer.

Except for the problem that you'd probably sell notably fewer $73k SUVs as long as somebody is still able to offer a $70k one, perhaps one imported from overseas where they pay even less.

Well, except fairtax isn't really VAT, the idea is to get rid of the huge mess and waste of time that is our income tax system, and replace it with a theoretically simpler to manage sales tax system.

Note: I say "theoretically" because I'm far from convinced that that is actually the case. For example, fairtax cites taxes foreign visitors as a benefit - but what about the tax loss of US tourists going elsewhere? If I can, say, go to Canada for a vacation and not pay 23% sales tax, why wouldn't I? Heck, maybe I'll bring back some stuff while I'm at it.

It hasn't paid more than the occasional token statement towards being communist for decades now. It's still statist and authoritarian, of course, but it isn't communist.

Except that if no new small cars are being made, eventually the used car market for cars with a decade left in them will dry up.

They'll be stuck buying the huge used clunker that consumes even more fuel now that it's old and a bit worn out.

While the analogy isn't entirely correct, it's my impression that Tesla's cars are the equivalent of BMWs in country, at least for electric vehicles.

So BYD can be like, say, Toyota. Once you're high enough economically, getting a Tesla for appearance's sake starts becoming a thing. Or maybe you actually need the extra capabilities.

I have to point out that it's more "all US vehicles", it is very much not limited to electrics. Hell, I'd argue that there are far more ICE vehicles with this level of monitoring and interference level built in the USA than electrics.

Your "how much to disable" comment? You might as well apply that to any newish car these days.

Remember, it wasn't an electric vehicle where the manufacturer tried to make heated seats a subscription.

And China will happily give your data to the TLAs.

Forgot to state a couple points clearly:
1. An insulated tank full of molten salts is relatively cheap for the energy storage ability. It scales up very well, as the skin of the tank is where unwanted radiation/heat loss happens, and that goes up by the square, while the volume goes up by the cube. IE double the volume of the tank, surface area and heat loss should only go up 40%.
2. Power turbines are expensive, but not that expensive. Our standby natural gas turbines already have them, and having extras, well, it's not bad for a plant otherwise. IE if you have extra turbines, you can take one offline for maintenance or replacement without affecting operations much.

Actually, the latest is to steal a bit of technology from reflective solar thermal systems - thermal storage.

There's a push to switch to MSR - Molten Salt Reactor. There's a number of potential advantages to this, including reducing the pressure of the reactor and enabling much higher temperatures for efficiency. But in the context of balancing supply, if you build one of these, you can also build a relatively giant insulated tank. You fill it with the superheated molten salts, heated up by the reactor. You then build an appropriate number and type of turbines, so you generate the exact amount of steam you need at the time using the heat from the tank.

IE you could have a 4GWt* reactor, putting 4GW into the tank. Then you produce anything from 0-10GWe using turbines as necessary. Your only limit is not letting the tank get too cold(the salt will freeze and the steam won't be hot enough to turn the turbines well) or too hot. If there's a risk of the tank getting too hot, you can turn off the reactor if necessary. Realistically, they can scale the power plant's output enough to avoid it being a problem. If there's a risk of the tank getting too cold, well, time to build another reactor and tank setup. Or if it's a momentary problem, make the tank bigger.

*GWt = GigaWatt thermal, GWe = GigaWatt electrical

The executives putting in more hours could indeed be a move more designed to placate investors and lenders.

That said, it's quite likely that true improvements can be made, though this requires analysis.

Basically, an old management book I read talked about the tendency for executives, management, and employees to tend to lose tract of what's really important, what the true goal is.

For example, a web developer might have the goal of developing a kick-ass site for the business.
The production manager might be focused on keeping costs down for their production line.
The executive might be focused on the next quarterly profit report.

But they all forget that the ultimate goal is not just for the business to make money - but to make money in proper proportion for the investment. By which I mean that if you have $100M in equipment and spend $1M in labor and materials to produce $2M in sales, you might as well pack up, sell the equipment and invest in the market.

All the above goals might be helpful in being profitable but even the most kickass website isn't helping if it isn't driving sales or solving some other need of the company like attracting talent. Keeping production costs down doesn't mean anything if your customers are leaving because your quality is crap. or your required lead times for delivery are so long that they go elsewhere. And producing a profit in Q1 doesn't help if it means an even bigger loss in Q2. Remember, most investors are actually in it for the long run. They don't appreciate you burning the company down to look good momentarily (though yes, there are a class of investors who are just fine with this).

Samsung is so diversified that they make companies like GE and Amazon look focused. To me, it looks like Samsung went through a period of expansion and diversification for the sake of expansion and diversification.

So if I was an executive, I'd be looking to see if the company should be getting out of some of those sectors and product lines. Whether or not some products are being produced using old methods and the production can be streamlined. Does a product need a refresh? Can we fix a product so there isn't as many warranty repairs, so we stop getting beat up in reviews for it and can thus sell more. Is that design team basically spinning its wheels? Etc...

Still a pretty pathetic percentage - you may still help those in need, but a lot of them aren't actually vets.

Well, obviously it depends on what you're actually doing, but generically speaking, productivity per hour going down with more hours worked is pretty much universal. The exact form of the slowdown, when it occurs, and how severe it is will vary, of course.

Fixing the bugs introduced because people were working tired isn't true productivity - I mean, it's productive use of the worker, but it's like the broken window fallacy - fewer bugs would be better yet, because fixing a bug can easily cost more time than producing the original code took.

To consider a few different examples:
1. Coding/Office work: Bugs and/or mistakes start creeping in, requiring rework. I've also heard that as you increase office hours, you also start seeing less and non-productive office activities taking place more often. Meetings have their place, but do you need an hour long one with everybody every day? I've heard that these sorts of meetings tend to be the first to go when you reduce working hours.
2. Taxi driver: The obvious one here would be that a tired driver is dramatically more likely to get into an accident. It doesn't take many wrecked taxi cars to make working those taxi drivers economically negative. That's before you include the deaths, injuries, and such. It's part of why there are so many rules about commercial drivers.
3. Factory worker: This is similar to the coder. One mistake and you ruin a part, meaning you have to replace the part and start over, including any machine work done before the mistake was made. Maybe you can fix it, like welding material back in, or grinding to remove material you shouldn't have added. But that takes time as well.
To use some family careers:
Woodworker - finger meets circular saw
Lumberer - misjudges a cut, drops tree on self
Accountant - makes some weird math errors and judgement calls

Hell, consider the epitome of a "manual labor" job - ditchdigger. It should be obvious that a ditch digger at maximum effort can move much more dirt than one that is hardly trying - but they can only sustain maximum effort for a few minutes, while "hardly trying" is doing so so they can last the entire shift. Productivity, as measured in amount of dirt moved per hour, increases as you have them work fewer hours. When one is concerned more about total dirt moved per day? Then longer hours makes more sense, but there's going to be a limit there where you don't get any more dirt moved per hour worked. It'll probably even start declining.

So yeah, it doesn't really matter - brain meat and physical meat gets tired from work. They need that time off to work right. Mental work can be spread out more easily, perhaps.