I specifically qualified "need" as "enough that they can afford to let others use it" so that nobody but the person in question is making any call about where the line between "want" and "need" is. If you have something, and you're not making any use of it, you clearly don't think you need it, and why would you even want it? As it is now people may need/want things they're not personally using because they can get the "use" of charging-other-people-to-use-them out of them, which is what we're aiming to eliminate here. Eliminate that "use" and nobody would have any reason to acquire more stuff than they're going to personally use themselves. And any such excess stuff they've already got, they will trade away for something more useful to them, like money, which can be used to buy services and spare you from having to work as much. Which is how extra wealth (more than you personally can make use of) would afford you leisure in a sane world: by trading the wealth (capital) for the leisure (labor), and ending up, eventually, in the same boat as everyone else (because they've gained the capital you spent on their labor). Instead of that extra wealth being an infinite-(albeit-rate-limited)-free-money machine, which is what rent (incl. interest) enables now.

And I'm unclear what you mean by "that allocation of capital (resources) is something that has value". Are you just talking about the fact that if I have more X than I want but not enough Y, and you have more Y than you want but not enough X, trading some X for Y will profit us both? If that is what you mean then I don't see how anything I've said goes against that. If that's not what you mean then I'm not sure what you mean. Care to elaborate?

There's nobody advocating complete "communism" (by which I assume you mean Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, not the end-state that was supposed to follow that that's never existed in a modern country) anymore, but there is still substantial debate about to what degree something like it should be patched over an otherwise capitalist society to ameliorate the problems of material inequality. It's broadly accepted in most of the western world that it's a good thing for the state to take rich people's money and give it (or goods and services it pays for) to the poor. What's still debated is how much and how exactly that should be done. (With some people, in America at least, ostensibly of the opinion that it shouldn't be done at all).

And I thought I already explained clearly enough, but the reason interest (and more broadly, rent of any sort; interest is just rent on money) causes problems, and thus eliminating it would make things better, is because it means that those who have excess wealth, enough that they can afford to let others use it, can make a continual unearned income from that excess without ever losing the excess; and conversely those who need more than they have and have to borrow it from those who have such excess have continual expenses for the use of it, without ever actually acquiring any real wealth for those expenses. Without rent and interest, the only way to profit from excess wealth would be to sell it, and thus those who wanted to profit from their wealth would gradually lose that wealth, and conversely those who would otherwise have only borrowed that wealth for a price would instead gradually acquire that wealth for that price. So there would be a natural and voluntary redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, as the rich paid the poor for their labor with their capital, and there would be no further process (like rent and interest) subsequently returning the capital back to the rich again to spend over and over again.

I have, and Marx has some good insights into the root of the problem, but his proposed solution is problematic, and nowadays nobody seems capable of discussing the problem without assuming that Marx's solution is the only solution, such that those who reject that solution "must" deny the problem, and those who acknowledge the problem "must" support Marx's solution. The debate has become one about whether or not (or to what degree) Marx's proposed solution is necessary or acceptable, and closer examination of the problem and other possible solutions has subsequently been ignored.

I don't know why I'm bothering to reply when you're pretty obviously trolling/baiting me here, but whatever...

Yeah right, so every high school graduate and welder in the country is easily set for retirement? And consequently the majority of Americans (struggling to make ends meet day to day much less save for retirement) are only in that boat because they're unskilled high school dropouts? Even the ones with four-year degrees doing technical jobs and making twice the median income and nevertheless struggling because the median income is a pittance compared to the cost of basic necessities like housing -- they're all unskilled high school dropouts too, somehow? Most Americans are high school dropouts, and all their struggles are all their own lazy faults for not just... welding? Really? Obvious troll is obvious.

Yeah, you can work hard and possibly beat the odds. You can increase you chances of success. But the odds are against you. That's why I said "just try ... and probably lose anyway". Try, of course, to not try is to guarantee failure. But it's not like it's a matter of just choosing not to be poor, and most attempts to change that fate fail, or else almost nobody would be poor.

You apparently don't understand even naive set theory. There are a lot of other things much less severe than overthrowing the government that could be achieved if enough people demanded it. Like just changing a few laws here or there. Change doesn't have to mean a complete replacement.

Something like that (or a negative income tax, etc) would be a useful band-aid, but in the long run I agree that those are boring solutions. Forced redistribution of wealth is palliative at best, treating the symptoms of a problem, making it hurt less, but not addressing the cause of those symptoms at all, leaving the actual problem untreated.

The problem is that wealth concentrates; that having more wealth makes it easier to acquire more wealth, and having less wealth makes it difficult to even stem the further loss of wealth, to the point that a class of idle rich can live off the labors of a class of working poor, creating the class divide and class immobility which are the symptoms that forced redistribution is aimed at alleviating, but which aren't the root problem. As far as I can see almost nobody is even asking the question of what the root problem is. How does having wealth enable some people to simultaneously work less and gain more? How does lacking wealth force other people to work their asses off and yet gain nothing? Why doesn't wealth naturally flow from the idle rich to the working poor, as the rich pay the poor to work to support them, gradually drawing the rich and poor together into a single moderately-working moderately-wealthy middle class? What breaks that natural process?

The short version of my answer (because I gather you don't really care enough to read a full explanation) is that the problem is any transaction where someone with more wealth than they need for their personal use lends that wealth (be it money, land, whatever) out for temporary use by someone who needs more than they have, in exchange for a permanent transfer of wealth (i.e. money) in the other direction -- rather than a simple sale where both sides give up something permanently in exchange for some permanent gain. Such transactions (the ones we call rent and interest, or in older technical terms, "usury") are the root cause of the problems of capitalism, and if we got rid of them we wouldn't need palliative treatments like forced redistribution at all. A usury-free free market would be one without any of the troubles that free-market opponents deride. It would be one where any high school graduate or welder who showed up and did their job every day could expect to own their own home and eventually retire, unlike the world today.

I have much more I could say about how such a usury-free market could function without disrupting all the things which currently rely on rent and interest, but you probably don't care to hear it.

Oh, you meant solutions the suffering individuals could implement all by themselves? Nah, they're probably fucked. Just try to fight it as best as you can and probably lose anyway.

I was offering ideas for solutions we collectively might implement if enough of us had the political will to do it, but it doesn't sound like you're actually interested in hearing those so never mind.

'Nuff said

From your own link, "The overall median personal income for all individuals over the age of 18 was $24,062".

You're probably right about the taxes though, that was a back-of-the-envelope estimate based on my own take-home pay. Still even when I was making about $25k my take-home was still barely above 80% of my earnings, so it's not super far off my estimate. That would give you an extra $200 a month or so, which is nothing to sneeze at, especially at lower incomes, but still not enough to retire on. If you can manage to save all of that for 45 years of work, it might pay your rent and maybe some utilities on a small apartment in a cheap location for 15 years of retirement. But food, medicine, never mind something to make life worth living? Good luck with that.

When I talk about solutions most people just deny the problems. Do you really want to hear my proposed solutions?

And how much do you expect someone making $25k a year to be able to buy? Bearing in mind they're going to be having to rent while saving up for a down payment. And then they if they somehow manage that, the interest alone on a 30-year mortgage is likely to be greater than their rent.

I agree that owning your own home is the first step toward a truly secure retirement, but that is even further out of reach of the majority of people than just saving enough to rent a tiny apartment through their old age is. You say "buy as much as you can" like buying anything at all is even remotely feasible. And I say this as someone making twice the median income, living the kind of college-student life I've described, and still looking at pretty much me entire life before I can buy anything at all.

You realize the median income in America is only about $25k/yr right? That means half of the country makes that or less. Which even with the best money management skills isn't going to leave with with much for retirement, unless you live like a college student alone by yourself in a tiny rented bedroom for your entire life AND have no irregular expenses like car repairs or medical care.

$25000 times about 0.7 for after-tax take-home pay minus about $1100/mo for ALL expenses total -- housing, utilities, food, transportation including purchasing a means of transportation, education which you will need to get to even that median income level, necessary items to work in today's world like a computer and phone, and so on -- times about 45 years of working and saving the leftovers, divided by 15 years of life expectancy after that, leaves you about $1075/mo to live off of for those 15 years.

Given housing expenses of 50% of that monthly stipend, or about $550/mo (which this tells me is the bottom of the range nationally, for a one-bedroom apartment, with the average being about $750 instead), that leaves less than $20/day to cover every other expense you will ever have in your entire life.

That is the best case scenario that over half of Americans are facing. But they're all a bunch of unskilled losers so they deserve that fate amirite?

It's also a big thing in Santa Barbara, CA, which has streets full of "homeless" teens from wealthy families who voluntarily move out to the street to escape their "dictator" parents, and which is also apparently some kind of "homeless mecca" to which homeless people from other cities want to migrate because of great weather and sympathetic liberal-minded college kids stocked up on their rich parents' money.

Oh and on top of all of that: if you somehow make absolutely nothing whatsoever, you automatically get about $20 a day to work with, which should at least keep you from either starving or being homeless (pick one, cause it won't cover both).

Oh and for a concrete example, here is that form, the simplified version with the last two lines combined, using the following values for X, Y, and Z:

X = 2, so we're exactly halfway between a flat tax and total communism.
Y = $25,000, which is a mean income of around $50,000 divided by X = 2 above.
Z = $17,500, which is a mean income of around $50,000 times a 35% tax rate.

That mean income and tax rate chosen because they're nice round numbers close to the current actual figures.

So, that said:

Line 1: Enter your gross income.
Line 2: Divide the amount on Line 1 by 2.
Line 3: Subtract $7500 from the amount on Line 2.

If you made $15,000/yr, which is about full time minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40hr/wk * 52wk/yr = $15,080/yr), you would pay no taxes.

If you made minimum wage working half time (20hr/wk, 52wk/yr) for a total of $7540/yr, you would get a tax credit of $3730, which would mean a whopping $8 or so extra spending money a day. Don't spend it all on one meal.

If you made twice minimum wage full time for about $30,000/yr, you would owe $7500, which would be about $288 or 15% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.

If you made the mean income of $50,000/yr, you would owe $17500, which would be about $673 or 35% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.

If you made twice the mean income, or $100,000/yr, you would owe $42,500, which would be about $1635 or 42.5% withheld from each biweekly paycheck.

If you made a seven-figure income of $1,000,000/yr, you would owe $492,500, for a tax rate of 49.25%.

If you made an eight-figure income of $10,000,000/yr, you would owe $4,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.925%.

If you made a nine-figure income of $100,000,000/yr, you would owe $49,992,500, for a tax rate of 49.9925%.

But nobody would ever pay higher than a 50% tax rate, because we set our X = 2 which means the maximum possible tax rate is 1/2 = 0.5 = 50%.

Citation needed, unless by "influence behavior" you only mean things like stopping people from aggressing upon each other. (For which taxes are a horrible method; would you punish violent criminals just by raising their taxes?)

Why does any government need to influence its people's behavior beyond keeping people from using force to "influence" each other's behavior?

I think a big point of his tax form is that all of that complication is problematic. Any kind of income should count the same and be taxed the same, with no loopholes. If we're going to allow deductions for expenses, any kind of expense should be taxed the same. But what defines an expense, you might ask? I would answer: any trade where you lose capital, like paying for services, but not paying for goods. Likewise, I would define income as any trade where you gain capital, like selling services, but not selling goods.

This would have positive motivational effects as well, as it would encourage the rich to make money by selling off their capital and to spend money by buying labor, thus spurring business ("creating jobs") for the poor who have nothing but their labor services to sell, in turn enabling those poor to buy the capital goods that the rich are selling off, creating a natural, voluntary redistribution of capital from the rich to the poor. It would also allow the poor to deduct their expenses for "services" like rent paid to the rich, for which the poor gain no capital and thus no wealth.