Ethan Scruples

10.1K posts

Ethan Scruples

Ethan Scruples

@agent_scruples

Thinking out loud. Sorry...

Katılım Temmuz 2014
247 Takip Edilen373 Takipçiler
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
"But while he was thinking that he'd get unearned benefits from the men above, he forgot about the men below who'd get unearned benefits, too. He forgot about all his inferiors who'd rush to drain him just as he hoped to drain his superiors." -- Atlas Shrugged
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@Romy_Holland Life is cruel to everyone, but it is not the job of the zebra to take pity on the starving lion.
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@Romy_Holland They should be executed so they cannot create children who would be likely to inherit their misfortune, and so that liberals cannot succeed in returning them to society.
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Romy
Romy@Romy_Holland·
i get why everyone is really mean to criminals, it’s good to disincentivize behavior that hurts ppl. but it must suck super bad to be a person with intense criminal urges and no impulse control. it’s just a random roll of the dice on what sort of brain you ended up with. i think there’s a case for scandinavian type prisons. from behind a veil of ignorance, it seems correct that dangerous people should be removed from society and that imprisonment is clearly a serious punishment in itself, the conditions to not additionally have to be torturous.
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EM@edwin_mccallum·
@agent_scruples @EneaszWrites whatever gets taxed gets disincentivized. income is worse to tax since it disincentivizes work, but it was easier to measure. The US has a relatively low tax:GDP ratio vs OECD avg. wealth taxes are easier to implement on a smaller base due to admin costs
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Eneasz Brodski
Eneasz Brodski@EneaszWrites·
Paul Graham "Each 1% of wealth tax=20% of income tax. It's clear that politicians don't get this from the way they talk about a "mere 1%" wealth tax. None of them would speak of adding a "mere 20%" to the income tax rate In the median case, US state politicians talking about adding a "mere 1%" wealth tax are talking about causing the residents of their state to have the highest taxes in the world. I'm optimistic that we can teach them. The answer's not hard to understand, once you realize the question exists." paulgraham.com/winc.html
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@edwin_mccallum @EneaszWrites The burden is not on me to justify my slippery slope argument. The burden is on you to explain why I should believe that what happened with income tax will not happen with wealth tax.
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EM@edwin_mccallum·
@agent_scruples @EneaszWrites thats a slippery slope argument. similar to saying that any movement in one direction will lead to an extreme case when obviously most people aren't for that extreme and it's more used to fear-monger. Surveillance is what billionaires like Ellison, Palantir are building
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@edwin_mccallum @EneaszWrites They will establish the principle that it is OK to for the government to seize a percentage of your wealth, and fund and build the apparatus of intrusive totalitarian audits to assess your wealth, and then they will expand the scope to everyone. Happens every time.
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EM@edwin_mccallum·
@agent_scruples @EneaszWrites proposed wealth taxes start at either $50M or $1B so don't affect over 99.9% of people. doesn't impact small businesses. way better tax structure since you have to tax where the money actually is and billionaires avoid taxes by not having their wealth gains recognized as income
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@micsolana Hear hear! And if he has more than one bedroom in his primary residence he must give the rest to immigrants.
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Mike Solana
Mike Solana@micsolana·
bernie shouldn't have multiple homes while his constituents are homeless. it's time for a "fair tax" on senators, who must relinquish all but their primary residence. join me in encouraging this wealthy landlord to do the right thing and return his stolen property to the people.
Sen. Bernie Sanders@SenSanders

Question for Musk: You tell us not to worry about the jobs that’ll be wiped out by AI & robotics because the government will provide everyone with “universal high income.” Really? How will that be paid for when you can’t even support a 5% tax on your $817 billion in wealth?

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EM@edwin_mccallum·
@EneaszWrites theres a large difference. income tax reduces incentive to work. wealth tax works whether you invest (as in PG's example), work, don't work, etc.. so doesn't disincentivize work. moving income taxes 20% higher would change incentives to work way more than a 1% wealth tax
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@IMAO_ As far as I know, Elon doesn't even possess a billion dollars. What he possesses are several businesses that he created, and which people value very highly.
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Frank J. Fleming
Wealth tax is dumb because you'd be taxing speculation instead of something actually real. Bernie Sanders doesn't understand that, though, because he has the economic understanding of a small child and thinks if someone is a billionaire, that must mean he has billions in coins in a vault somewhere like Scrooge McDuck.
Bernie Sanders@BernieSanders

Mr. Bezos: Let's have that debate. Under my 5% billionaires wealth tax, we'd: -Give $12K to a working family of 4 -Expand Medicare for dental, vision, hearing -Guarantee universal childcare -Raise starting teacher pay to $60K And you'd still be worth $269 billion after taxes.

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@Overlap_Tech Basically, they want everybody equal, but they can't bring everybody up so they're gonna have to bring everybody down.
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Overlap: Business & Tech
Overlap: Business & Tech@Overlap_Tech·
Marc Andreessen on a Wealth Tax: "Nice Farm You Have Here"⁣ ⁣ "Nice farm you have here. We're gonna take 6% a year until it's all gone. What what's the endgame? Fairness? What actually happens is everybody gets poor."
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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@allTheYud It has to be legislated. If you make cuts and free up a bunch of money, the very last thing Congress will do with it is pay down the debt. No incentive to do so, and it would create a crisis in our monetary system anyway.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer Yudkowsky@allTheYud·
Sorry, but real DOGE has never been tried. The level of that predictable fuckup is so great that I do not conclude there is no cuttable government waste, but that you cannot begin to target it with 20 kids blindly searching for leftist keywords.
Cameron 🇺🇸 🗽🦅@CameronCorduroy

it's genuinely crazy that Elon got free reign to do the exact thing that every "just cut spending" dipshit has wanted to do for decades, it failed catastrophically, and they're still running the exact same script like nothing happened

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@JustinWolfers Sales taxes are flat, not regressive. I do agree we should eliminate payroll taxes and abolish social security.
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Justin Wolfers
Justin Wolfers@JustinWolfers·
If you only count the progressive taxes the U.S. levies, then the U.S. system is quite progressive. But if you also count regressive taxes (payroll taxes, sales taxes, etc), it's not very progressive.
Jeff Bezos@JeffBezos

Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@Camp4 The logical conclusion is that we should have a flat national sales tax and no income taxes. This hits people exactly equally whether they are spending from income, inheritance, savings, capital gains, borrowed money etc. etc. Equal skin in the gam. Scales up the richer you live.
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Kevin Dahlstrom
Kevin Dahlstrom@Camp4·
The second order effects of this would be disastrous. Bezos knows this—he’s just trying to deflect criticism. It’s not about the 3% of tax revenue. Every voter needs skin in the game and needs to feel the sting of government spending. Otherwise, they’ll only vote for more.
Jeff Bezos@JeffBezos

Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@EndWokeness "Laws prohibiting murder disproportionately target communities of color..."
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End Wokeness
End Wokeness@EndWokeness·
Things that got canceled for "racism" 1. CCTV cameras (Seattle) 2. Mugshots (San Francisco) 3. Gunshot detectors (15+ cities) 4. Standardized tests (UC system) 5. Gifted & Talented program (NYC) 6. License plate readers (30+ cities) I wish this was a joke, but it's 100% real
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Ethan Scruples retweetledi
Warren Gunnels
Warren Gunnels@GunnelsWarren·
Bernie's 5% wealth tax would: -Raise starting teacher pay to $60,000 -Give $12,000 to a working family of 4 -Expand Medicare for dental, vision, hearing -Guarantee universal childcare -End homelessness Bezos would see his wealth drop from $279 billion to $265 billion. Poor guy.
More Perfect Union@MorePerfectUS

Jeff Bezos on CNBC: "If people want me to pay more billions, then let's have that debate, but don't pretend that that's gonna solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens.... Airbnb isn't causing high rents. What's really causing high rent is government intervention."

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@ewarren It would violate the constitution. Why are politicians like you and Trump always so willing to discard the law when it is in your way?
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Dan Scheinman
Dan Scheinman@dscheinm·
I may the lone dissent on this, but I think it is important for everyone to pay for the federal government. I believe in shared obligations. When that goes, 50% of the population sees government as “free stuff” and demands more of it.
Shay Boloor@StockSavvyShay

Jeff Bezos said the bottom half of Americans should pay zero federal income tax. He cited a nurse in Queens making ~$75K and paying ~$12K in taxes saying “we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington.”

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Ethan Scruples
Ethan Scruples@agent_scruples·
@chamath Yes, they should not pay taxes and they should not be allowed to vote.
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