A sales tax as a general term on goods that have negative externalities. That produce pollution, have negative health impacts, use public infrastructure etc… whole foods, homes at minimum should be exempt. I agree that the poor shouldn’t bear the brunt of tax policy changes.

Yes tarrifs getting passed to the consumer is completely the point, to normalize for asymmetrical human rights across the globe. Fair trade, not free trade. Not isolationist either. An elegant way to implement would be based on a democracy index.

The aluminum example is a good one. The consumer in this case is the company importing aluminum. They can buy from an authoritarian country at a 2x tarrif (or whatever), or a democratic country with no tarrif.

But… more of a thought experiment, I think that would be the way from a humanist perspective. But the geopolitics are very challenging.

On progressive taxes: my apologies, i wasn’t very clear. Yes I’m familiar with how it works, I just meant raise the bottom tax bracket. EG: first 30k is not taxed.

On economic systems: there are negative trade offs with scale, central planning, vertical integration. Less diverse ideas, can be slower. There are still middlemen just structured differently.

I’m not against publicly owned companies though, they should tend towards infrastructure and natural monopolies (rail, telecom, probably some tech…)

I disagree that it would be easier/more efficient to break up companies than to tax them as they approach that state of need. But I’m not against the idea.

Generally tarrifs over income taxes makes sense in some ways, I don’t expect him to understand what he saying or implement changes the right way, and there are geopolitical challenges.

If you think of taxes as friction or a decinsentive…

We should move away from income taxes. Consider a progressive income tax system, where the first 15k is not taxed, and the next 15k is taxed at a rate of 10%. Start here. Why are we taxing income at these levels?

Sales tax on goods makes sense. As it covers externalities.

Sales tax on services doesn’t make sense. Why are we taxing exchanges of labour? This impacts productivity.

Trade is good when it’s taking advantage of geographic advantages in a healthy way: I will trade you maple syrup for lemons. But not when a developed country is just exporting their exploitation: I have health, labour, environmental rules and you don’t let’s trade… A tarrif to equalize here makes sense.

Lastly developed economies should tax corporations on revenue (not income), this makes sense once they get to a certain size or share of the market. At the point where they are no longer adding value and instead just using size to hold market position through uncompetitive practices.

I did a quick search and couldn’t find an answer.

I wonder if part of the disconnect is that they are using just a general “dwelling” in CPI. As opposed to price per square foot. That is, is dwelling size shrinking, while costs are growing, this could cause housing costs to be understated in CPI

The library is appealing to me because:

Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.

Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.

Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.

For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn’t want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn’t want them worrying about liability.

Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn’t exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it’s bizarre.

Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:

Caretakers of digital archives.

Caretakers of relevant open source projects.

Could I get a free domain with my library card?

Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?

Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)

Yes, confiscation of illegal and dangerous substances and drunk tank for public intoxication. Why is this outlandish?

If I go through an airport I’m frisked and water can be confiscated. Open liquor at a beach can be confiscated.

If I get drunk to the point I’m out of control I can be placed a drunk tank.

Crystal Meth, fentenyl etc… are very dangerous drugs. And people on these drugs are very antisocial.

You may just be saying that those policies won’t help an addict. Addicts have different profiles and so would behave differently. Having consequences on actions would be helpful for some.

Conversely, a complete laissez faire attitude is propelling addiction for some. We are implicitly condoning their behavior.

It’s OK for there to be consequences to an addicts behavior, while also providing more support.

Their behavior disproportionately impacts the poor. Consider addicts tend to poorer neighborhoods, but only a very small portion of the neighbourhood are addicts. And it’s the poorer families who can’t use their parks, or have their kids run to the corner store or maybe even play outside. Their public amenities are trashed, and local funding doesn’t go as far. The normalization and access to drugs is certainly not helpful either.

What about a third choice of confiscating their very dangerous drugs?

Or a fourth choice of putting them in a drunk/drug tank for 24 hour hold with optional invite to a treatment center? I get it’s certainly not ideal to use force on people.

Why is thinking of the children not valid? Certainly they have some right to be able to walk around their neighborhood without fear.

Maybe tough to get a concensus on where the economy is going to be, a bit of reading tea leaves.

Regardless, agreed on extended 0% being problematic. Out of all the factors dragging us down:

interest rate history, pandemic, demographic shifts, climate change, global instability…

It could be interest rates that are having the largest impact today. Considering it caused such a large wealth transfer, equity inflation, and a drag on productivity.

The economy is important. Rates will go lower to protect that.

Central banks I think need to consider a higher neutral rate. Interest rates were too low for too long to try and move GDP growth. In retrospect not a great policy, as it led to a decade or so of inflation in stocks markets and housing.

Why do anything of value if I can just leverage at low rates and dump borrowed money into stocks and real estate?

Central banks tend to be arms reach from government, but maybe they should be doing less and the government more.

GDP growth low? Invest in infrastructure and research. High inflation? Increase taxes.

CPI inflation is reported higher than ‘all items’ though…

Grocery is seeing lower inflation. Seems to have come back down to earth.

We need wage growth to continue to outpace inflation like it has been for the past year or so.

I like this - as a fan of democracy.

Democracy costs, I think it’s OK that it takes a bit of time, more representatives, more votes is OK.

More civic engagement is a positive. Hearing the viewpoints of your neighbour is positive.

A really interesting dynamic, is that you would be creating a strong pipeline of leaders/representatives developing bottom up.

A lot of things of value are very hard to measure.

X degree influences can be very hard to measure.

You may hit your target metric, but secondary effects may be making the whole system worse.

Ideally you could A/B a parallel universe to isolate your specifc change, but that is challenging.

For sure, happy to open up the conversation again later

Very little of the demand is demand to drive a car. It’s mostly demand to travel as effectively as possible.

When you build out road networks you make traveling by car more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you build out transit networks you make traveling by transit more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you have well designed cities, you reduce the demand for travel, period.

Higher population centers have favorable economics for transit vs. Personal vehicles. And are more impacted by pollutants.

Low population centers have favorable economics for personal vehicles vs. Transit. And are less impacted by pollutants.

That’s a description of the dynamics anyway.

I imagine vast majority of people would agree that folks that live in the densist cities need transit, and those living in a forest need a personal vehicle. The debate occurs somewhere in between of the extremes.

Personally I’m of the opinion that we skew too far towards cars, because the true costs/externalities are harder to see, so what seems like favorable economics is actually just socializing the costs.

Agreed we are not in a good spot and unlimited population is not sustainable. However, sex education, access to birth control, and strong women’s rights is the answer in my opinion not ‘enforcing’ limits - which reads as an authoritarian dystopia to me. Economic growth is good as long as it’s decoupled from natural resource use/impact.

Restricting reproductive rights is not ethical.

Alternatively, if there was no Google or Google like company, we would likely be much further along in tech, and have better functioning democracies. They have limited innovation in maps and search products. They rely on being big to be competitive. Their products are pretty poor given their engineering team size. Digital advertising: they bought their way into a quasi monopoly, siphoning dollars from people that actually create things.