Fairness is hard to define. The income effect is such that each marginal dollar has less value: $1 more than $1,000,000 is worth less to a person than $1 more than $1,000.

Although that's backed up by empirical data, the simple thought experiment for this (hey, I'm an economist) is just a look at your purchasing scale. If you have no money, any money you get goes to food, rent, and other basic needs--you need this shit to live! Further money goes to luxuries like television. When you're a millionaire, it goes to more luxuries; but consider: someone making $50,000 can afford a $200 restaurant meal regularly, but they don't do that because they'd lose the ability to buy iPods and fancy phones. The expensive food has less value to them than the things they buy with more income.

So now we have three types of fair/unfair taxes.

First, the flat tax. Everyone pays e.g. $1,000. Well some people can't pay it, and it takes more of the working-hours of the poor than it does of the rich, as well as offending the income effect above.

Second, the proportional tax. Everyone pays e.g. 10%. Everyone is paying the same labor-hours now, but some people are getting more for those labor-hours. They're still keeping tens of thousands of average labor-hours worth of wage, while many are working the same hours and getting a fraction of the average labor-hours worth of wage to begin with. It also offends the income effect.

Third is the progressive tax, which increases with income. The progressive tax affords to those earning less per labor-hour a lower tax rate in compensation, and has those who earn more per labor-hour pay a greater rate in compensation. Progressive taxes top out at a rate that leaves a large amount of income at the upper end in the hands of the individual, even if it's marginally less than is kept by the lower end. The progressive tax accounts for the income effect; yet it also charges people at the top a higher rate of tax than people at the bottom.

You can see how each of these taxes is "fair"--everyone pays the same, the same portion, or a portion proportional to what their money is generally worth to them. You can also see how each of these taxes is "unfair"--the poor are overly burdened, or the rich pay out more of their income.

The progressive income tax works out best given the facts of the matter; that it's technically-correct does not eliminate the base arguments, i.e. we can explain how it's not unfair that people with higher incomes pay a greater tax rate, but people will still question it, and it still looks unfair on the face.

Good analysis. They also went back to school and job training, and many were ill. "Precarious employment" is like seasonal employment, in that your job is probably not going to be your job, or your hours are going to get cut severely at random times.

Impossible, really. We can say with a high degree of certainty that it categorically will result in a larger economy, of course; I prefer a negative income tax, however, and am writing a research paper on exactly that.

Employed before the pilot: 112. Such unemployed during the pilot: 32. Almost all of those (29) were precariously employed, i.e. their job security was low and they were likely to become unemployed anyway. Only 3 moved from full-time to unemployed.

Unemployed before the pilot: 77. Such employed during the pilot: 10.

Net based on 112 employed becoming 99 employed: 22 or 19.6%.

Of those 22, 13 dropped out of the workforce to go back to college full-time and become more-efficient workers. Excluding those from the unemployed leaves net 9 of 112 or 8%. A total of 53--including those unemployed before the pilot--either stopped working to go to college full-time or reduced their working hours to take up education and job skill training in hopes of improving their employment situation.

Over 3/4 of those unemployed during the pilot reported health issues that made it difficult to work.

Besides going to college, exiting the workforce due to health issues, and having unstable jobs in the first place, it's notable that people tend to stay unemployed longer when they have access to better support between jobs because they are able to balance the information asymmetry. That is to say: people don't rush to the next job as fast, and so collect more information about the job market, locate a better job where their skills are more-applicable and they are more productive, and have a better understanding of current salaries so as to negotiate good pay. This generally increases GDP.

It sounds strange, but longer periods of unemployment for individuals who become unemployed (micro, not macro) are much better for the economy than short periods.

"Equity" is just stock issue, not a cost to the business. It doesn't count for this computation (i.e. issuing $100M of stock as compensation costs the business $0). It does count for the regular income tax computation (i.e. if you get $100M of stock and $400,000 of cash, you're going to owe the IRS $40M of taxes).

Take the cash comp and other (i.e. benefits, which do cost money) for Stephenson, $8,530,538, and divide by the 251,840 employees, and you get $33.87 per employee per year, or $0.016/hr wage per employee. They'd save more by cutting everyone's wage by 2 cents than they would by cutting the CEO's pay (likewise, imagine what wage raises cost--this is why we need minimum wage laws, not some horse shit about wages magically growing as our economy grows).

People like to do 1 CEO / 1 Employee, as if there's an executive manager for every worker. That argument is like spending $1,000 on a pallet of 200 coffee mugs and then telling everyone the coffee mug from which you're drinking cost $1,000.

No, because executives make like 0.01 billion instead of 10 billion.

Also fun exercise: divide executive cash compensation by employee headcount. It shows the relative wage power (i.e. how much more you could pay employees if the executive wasn't paid). For Walmart's CEO, that's 1/5 of 1 cent per hour. (Stock awards are just printed money, and paying employees in stock would rapidly decline the share price and leave the employees with nothing; plus you have to pay regular income tax on them, e.g. a $1M stock award to an executive paid over $400,000 in cash requires the executive to pay the IRS $400,000 in taxes.)

All of this rate-cutting monetary policy stuff has nothing to do with the short term and nothing to do with consumer spending.

"Wall Street" huh? That's just speculators.

"Wall Street" doesn't invest. They don't build machines or buildings or trains or whatnot. Businesses--which can and do go bankrupt--build those things; and businesses pull back from risk.

Keynes was right, but...we've been cutting rates too much. They're now down so low that lower rates don't matter. Think about it like this: taking a loan on your mortgage is going to cost you $500,000 for a 30-year or $200,000 for a 15-year. Maybe you aren't so hot on buying a house. Well, we cut rates, and now that loan is going to cost you $200,000 in interest for a 30-year, or $90,000 for a 15-year.

Well now we're at the point where the 30-year cost you $20,000 in interest. We've just cut rates, so it'll now cost you $10,000 in interest over 30 years. Who cares?! Interest is like 1% of your mortgage! It's not 80% of your first payment; it's nothing! Who cares if the interest rate is lower?!

Rather than stabilizing the economy while rebuilding the interest rate market--kind of like stabilizing your household finances while rebuilding your savings--we've just squandered our reserves. We no longer have a reserve of interest rate cuts. Open market operations supply more loanable funds, but that no longer increases the quantity demanded of loanable funds because the price is at a level where about 100% of notional demand is now effective demand (i.e. as much is being consumed as would be if it were free--remember you have to pay loans back, even if they're 0% interest).

But then wouldn't they be liable for content they fail to detect and take down?

It wasn't the original purpose, and people didn't believe they should be forced to allow private speech in private contexts. Businesses have always been able to cut off your freedom of expression, but they have to service you if you abide by their rules.

Consider this such Amendment to the Maryland State Constitution, which I have proposed:

The laws, of course, are prohibited from abridging such civil or political rights in general.

So if somebody posts child pornography to Youtube, they should leave it there so they won't be liable for it?

Well yes, these not-just-arrested-by-street-cops villains are the more intelligent of the bunch and throw entire elite policing forces into chaos and confusion routinely. The idiot police use iPhones.

In 2012, the United States Food Nutrition Service, which operates SNAP, WIC, and other means-tested programs, spent over $112 billion. Of this, $0.1365 billion or 0.12% was administration. The 2013 peak was 47.6 million recipients; for 45 million recipients, that's $3.03/year or $0.25/month.

"Expensive" is relative.

You know what else is expensive? Enforcement of sales tax and VAT. Management of an entire new revenue source. Hell, distributing the payments. We happen to be pretty good at all that, too. Still, you can't just pull out half the numbers from an equation and then make an assessment.

By the way: any kind of NIT or UBI can't replace welfare services. They become somewhat less-loaded, but they stay in place.

Your argument is also broken in exactly the same way as I described: regardless of your strange conception about the budget costs or savings in bureaucracy, that has absolutely no impact on the progressiveness or regressiveness of the funding source for any form of UBI or NIT. Your explanation is entirely irrelevant and is the part of the word problem that's correctly thrown out when making an assessment.

That's irrelevant. NIT doesn't reduce work (it actually increases the amount people work).

It does reduce crime: because people have greater means (both from benefits and from greater job availability), they have less strain on their lives, and thus become less-likely to commit crimes (especially violent crimes, as you've observed).