Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
That only works as long as the companies don't pay Congress to keep foreign competitors out of the market. To continue the automobile example, consider why the market for light trucks in the US is almost exclusively American brands.
Looking at the labor force participation rate it seems like there is a lot of labor to work in the factories
U-3, the official unemployment rate only includes people who were actively looking for a job in the last 4 weeks. Meaning if you've been out of work for half a year and you stopped sending resumes the last 4 weeks (because none of the local employers are responding to your resume) you are not included in the unemployment rate
It depends what you mean by rich people. Do you mean people like Doctors and Lawyers who work for their money, or do you mean investors and CEOs who created a company worth millions/billions, and the shares they own in that company mean they are also worth millions/billions. Because I can tell you the former certainly pay income tax, and I have heard from many doctors and lawyers that they weren't planning on working on that weekend because that marginal tax rate made the juice not worth the squeeze so they spent the weekend on the golf course instead
You're not really rich if you have to work for pay to maintain a (relatively) expensive life style. It's the distinction between the rich and the "professional class" or "upper-middle class". The really rich are capitalists, in the sense of making their money from owning stuff.
Looks like the top marginal rate's about 50% (including the top state rate of ~13%), but that's also way past the point where FICA's dropped off so it's not quite as bad (relative to middle tax brackets) as it looks. I can definitely see turning down ~50% of (say) $2,000 in exchange for a free Saturday if I'm already making north of a quarter-million a year (individual—brackets are higher for joint filing). Hell, when I was a freelancer, for every single vacation I took the main cost was foregone income, so I've even done basically that exact thing, though without being in that high a tax bracket. In fact, even today, I could probably take on paying work many weekends, and never do, so I make the same choice all the time despite being well under the top tax bracket.
Like, working the weekend normally isn't worth it for most people who can possibly afford not to do it, tax bracket be damned. Did these doctors and lawyers work a pretty normal number of hours that week? If so, I don't really understand what you're getting at. Seems like they just wanted to frame a normal thing most people do as a complaint about taxes.
Wasn't the income tax introduced as a temporary measure in WW1, and prior to that the majority of state income was generated via tariffs? Shifting the burden can certainly cause distortions, but we already caused those distortions getting into this situation in the first place.
Tariffs were done in the past because they were easier, but I think they distort less than an income tax. You're literally favoring domestic producers, right?
How are tariffs regressive?
Income taxes are obviously progressive. If you earn $100,000 you are going to be paying a higher percentage of your earnings compared to someone making $10,000 or $50,000. It's not intuitive that someone who makes $100,000 is going to be paying less in tariffs than someone making $50,000 though. How does that work?
They’re regressive in the sense that people with lower income spend more of it on consumption than people with higher income or wealth, who can save or invest at a higher rate.
This comment is built on mind reading. Like you can tell what Joe Biden or Barack Obama genuinely believed, and what Donald Trump or George Bush were pretending to believe. No evidence can convince you one way or another because you've already read their minds and can tell who is genuine and who's an interloper
Bush, Obama, and Biden expressed coherent, reasoned ideologies and plans of action, and as presidents, acted consistently with their own words and deeds. I may have disagreed with Bush's policies, but I know that he actually believed that what he was doing was what he thought was best for America based on his ideological beliefs, because he was able to articulate why. (And those ideological beliefs didn't change on a whim and weren't centered around what was best for him personally.)
Trump doesn't issue coherent thoughts. He doesn't use reason. He can't explain why he does why he does because he doesn't act based on reason; he just goes base of whatever feels good in the second it's flashing through his brain. At the start of the month, he changed his mind on tariffs literally dozens of times in a few hours; so quickly and so frequently that even his own White House didn't know what the tariff policy was for several days. The Secretary of Treasury even said that the best place to find out what our tariff policy was is the President's twitter account (never mind that Congress determines tariffs, not the president).
Everybody is great until they're the worst ever. If someone disagrees with him for whatever reason, they're losers and traitors and maybe should go to jail. Every member of his first administration refused to come back the second time around, so he calls them all losers and traitors. He appointed Powell to the Federal Reserve chair, and now he's calling him Biden's puppet for not doing the stupid thing Trump is demanding that he do to bail him out of the other stupid thing Trump is doing. He appointed two of the justices to the SCOTUS and hundreds of federal judges and now he's calling them "out of control" because they won't just roll over and okay the unlawful things he's doing.
You are using this logic to say it is pointless. They can use the exact same logic and say that's why their doomsday bunker needs to have a Lewis Gun or a Tank
Yes but what prejudices we accept and which we do not is arbitrary. You have no choice over your height. Taller people can have more promotions and more dating opportunities, but we don't have affirmative action for short people, and we don't treat women who say they don't date short guys like we treat women who say they won't date black guys. There's always going to be discrimination, what form of discrimination is acceptable or unacceptable is still arbitrary.
First, let's not talk about dating and work in the same argument - they are fundamentally different in many important ways, and it's not conductive to the conversation.
Second, at least call a spade a spade - according to you, when people say meritocracy they actually mean "meritocracy with handicaps for non-whites and non-males". Let's not call that "meritocracy", okay?
You can find a lot of this in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At its most extreme an Asian Student and Black student with the exact same MCAT test score would have a 21% acceptance rate for the former and 80% acceptance rate for the latter. The lawsuit revealed the admissions office would use intangibles to discriminate, like giving Asian students low "Personality scores"
What about Brown v. Board of Education?
Do you think that Southern schools had an obligation to accept black students or did they not have to accept anyone at all?
Do you think in 1900-1945 when Harvard Yale and Columbia were putting a quota on the number of Jewish students to limit their enrollment that was fine, as Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone, Jewish or otherwise?
reply