The article is about the estate tax, not an annual wealth tax, and loopholes to work around it ultimately taking advantage of lower tax rates on capital gains than on estates (not to mention wages) and deductions for "charitable" donation. You don't need new taxes on the wealthy to close these loopholes, you just need to eliminate them: charity is a nice thing you can do with your after-tax income, and all income should be taxed on the same progressive schedule.
Not ad nauseam. There's a floor, an equilibrium where countercyclical forces take over. (Besides: many people agreeing with this sentiment maintain that growth _per se_ is already an existential threat to human existence.)
Inflation is a tax on saving which encourages malinvestment "bubbles" that fail catastrophically.
Monetary policy addresses them by creating ever more money to encourage ever more synthetic growth. Once debt service threatens to consume the sovereign budget, monetary tightening ceases to be politically viable.
Not for nothing, we appear to be living in the Keynesian "long run."
One thing to remember about NYC's crazy tolls and congestion pricing plans is that there are not many reasons why visitors should need to drive in. There's NJTransit, PATH, light rail to Hudson valley and CT, LIRR, Amtrak, so many regional bus routes and frequent shuttles to EWR and other popular places, where most of these have park-and-ride options. And then of course once in the city there are subway and buses. Other cities that want to copy the car-discouraging policies should think about what the alternatives are.
It was cheaper and faster for me to drive 25 miles into Manhattan than take the train in from a walkable station. Then getting back out doesn't have to be at the mercy of the train schedule which is often every two hours for the line in question.
but what is a 'pop'? maybe ordinary swings in both directions due to various minor panics and manias and profit-takings that average out to a decade of nominal gains but depressed real returns?
'Pop' can also take the form of increasing inflation, making people take bigger risks for returns, leading to a bigger pop that is not coming soon. People saying this market can't sustain need to think about the inverse: what needs to happen for this market cycle to last 5-10+ years?
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
2003 and 2009 style drawbacks but much worse. The SP500 has had 12 years of straight bull market, it's like an earthquake fault line that hasn't slipped in a long long time.
yeah a lender trying to get back principal seems pretty ordinary, i thought the bad behavior is making it hard to pay down to drag out the interest payments.
as an UWSer who does not know anyone with a "country residence" or who can afford a second residence at all given the exorbitant price of living in this city, there are plenty of other reasons for people to take the car out in the middle of the day on a summer weekend like, say, going to a beach with your chairs and cooler etc which isn't something you can do with public transit, or going hiking someplace not right off a train line, or any number of things that ordinary non-super-rich people do.
Sure, but every time NYC "car culture" questions come up, people start wringing their hands about people who need to drive to work. If we're talking NYC that's a low percentage of people who do drive to work (whether they need to is another question) and for the Upper West Side (say, zipcodes 10023, 10024, 10025) very low, 6%-7%.
I would certainly support resident parking permits. I don't think many people need to commute into the UWS for work by car, since of course the entire neighborhood is hooked up to transit endpoints that have their own parking, which is not necessarily true for the places that UWSers commute to.
aren't you conflating market share with the existence of competition? anyone has the choice to switch to bing today, but many people have no choice of telecom provider (cellular internet doesn't work for all the people in areas with bad cellular reception to begin with).
> anyone has the choice to switch to bing today, but many people have no choice of telecom provider
Do they though? I mean, bing exists, sure, but it's inferior and more expensive (by lacking quality). Hey, you can switch to satellite telephony/internet or connect two tin cans with a string if you really want to get off of your mobile provider.
> cellular internet doesn't work for all the people in areas with bad cellular reception to begin with
But the majority of US citizens have a choice, right, the population centers do have multiple carriers?
For example if I wanted to purchase internet, I have a choice of two providers. If I don't choose either of those two, I cannot have internet.
For search providers, I have a choice among a much larger variety. Google may have larger market share, but you're not locked into using Google like you are with your ISP.
There's a difference between having multiple potentially inferior choices and only having two choices full stop. In my experience living across multiple states now you don't have a choice of ISP.
> For search providers, I have a choice among a much larger variety.
I'm from EU, Google has 95%++ market share here and there are not other serious options (besides Google's resellers, which are a bit slower, and not quite as good, but close). Bing exists, but the quality is abysmal, so it really isn't an option, just as satellite internet probably isn't for most US states (I assume - it is an option in Europe, albeit not a great one).
A counterpoint to that is that Bing's quality or accessability is not effected in any way by Google. Microsoft made a shitty search engine no one wants to use. Everyone CAN use it, so it is a viable option. Just like Le Bernardin is a viable option to McDonalds. (ignore the price difference, as it is immaterial to this discussion)
> ignore the price difference, as it is immaterial to this discussion
If you ignore the price, you have plenty of options for wired internet: hire a company to lay fiber straight to your home, connect it to a data center on the other end. Price and quality are the big factors in whether something is an alternative. Dial up or GPRS isn't an alternative to broadband, not because it's much more expensive, but because of the quality of service. Satellite internet can provide you with all the bandwidth you need, where ever you need it, but the price is prohibitive.
That is definitely not an option for the vast, vast majority of people in the US. Doesn't matter how much money you offer, good luck digging up Pacific Street to lay a fiber cable directly from a data center to your mansion on billionaire row.
Your neighbor on billionaire row where most Americans apparently live will gladly allow you to tunnel under his land, I'm sure. Since money isn't an issue, offer him a billion or two.
I do agree with you though: saying money isn't an issue when looking for alternatives is absurd. You can pretty much solve anything by throwing money at it. "You have an option if you consider it an option to pay 10x or 100x the price" misses the point entirely imho.
It's not just your neighbors, it's the city, and the activists who know their way around the labyrinth of regulations (not all of whom can be bought off without someone else just taking their place).
Would breaking google into 4 companies give us 4 googles or 4 bings? Considering that the more data you have, the better your results, it seems like winner take all is the norm in any sort of data-driven tech.
> benefits esp. health insurance? otherwise not sure these are comparable.
I'm confused by this argument. Has the value provided by health insurance gotten better to make up for the additional cost? If you're paying those 10% into health insurance and the benefit hasn't increased with that increase in cost, I'd say you're moving backwards.
Minimum wage drives down demand just as artificially forcing a lower price for something increases demand. Minimum wage is NOT just money. If an employer is required to provide benefits, those are also a form of minimum wage increase, but one that does not show up the same way as cash income.
ALWAYS remember: All benefits are paid for by reducing wages one way or another.
The effect of benefits on minimum wage is actually BIGGER than the current hourly minimum wage. Consider health insurance. Employers are required to pay for insurance for their employees working more than 30 hours. They cannot force the employee to pay more than around 10% of the cost AND the insurance must cover at least 60% of the costs. Average health insurance costs are (according to a quick google) $440 per month which leaves the employer paying $400 each month for health insurance per full-time employee (that's a $2.50/hr minimum wage increase for all full-time employees).
This leaves four options. The first is to raise prices across the board (hardly feasible). The second is to hire a ton of 29 hour "part-time" employees, but there are still hidden per-employee costs like extra unemployment, worker's comp, training, scheduling issues, etc. The third is to work employees 45-50 hours per week because the overtime cost in that range is still less than the cost of 1.5 time is still cheaper than all the fixed costs for bringing in another employee.
The final option (probably what we see here) is to use the other options until inflation allows you to recover from the pay issue, but with cash benefits not recovering in order to pay for all the other benefits the employee is buying.
These same things apply to all the other benefits ranging from vacation to 401k.
This also ties into 1099 negotiation. DO NOT negotiate with the cost of employment salary in mind. Instead, negotiate with the total cost of benefits in mind. Ask what the total cost of ownership for an employee would be. You need to be compensated for that $400 per month health insurance. You need to be compensated for that 3-4 weeks of vacation you can't take. You need to be compensated for losing 1 year of unemployment benefits if your job disappears. You need to be compensated for that 401k match. Especially don't forget that extra 7.5% you need for the other half of social security.
I worked for a company a few years ago for a while before finding out their cost to hire me as a contractor was around 100k per year while an employee with the same position would be paid 90k in cash and another 80k in benefits. That made a huge difference the next time I sat down at the negotiation table.
Yes, dramatically so. Cancer now has a 70% survival rate. HIV is not a death sentence. You can get a heart valve installed without cutting apart your rib cage.
That stuff doesn't come free. It would be kind of neat to offer the option of a 1950s level of care, only modernizing things if cost would be reduced by newer technology. Lots of people survived the 1950s just fine. Even just going back to 1995 would be a huge difference, avoiding all currently active patents.
Absolutely the technology has advanced. But a 21" RCA TV in 1956 cost 5,221 - technology is supposed to make things better and cheaper. And it has - according to one study I read(1) significantly so. Patients are spending less time in hospitals, getting better quicker. Why is the cost of healthcare benefits rising?
> The average worker received 32 percent of total compensation in benefits including bonuses, paid leave and company contributions to insurance and retirement plans in the second quarter of 2018. That was up from 27 percent in 2000, federal data show.
