Today, if sanitation workers go on strike, they rapidly end up with a negotiated settlement. If we had self driving garbage trucks that didn't need them, what political leverage would they have? The same too goes for other industries.

If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.

What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?

I wished, unfortunately the companies are going to complain that doing so will stop them to have enough money to innovate compared to other countries, or that they are too small to compete. (At least it's the current speech of the lobbies in EU for example).

But instead, ever since the brief federal surplus at the end of the 90s, we've done multiple multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the highest earners. Bush tax cuts + 2x Trump tax cuts (most recently in the BBB). In each case after fudging the projections beforehand to claim it will reduce the deficit somehow, then the deficit grows by a massive amount.

We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.

Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.

I've played the board gam "Monopoly". I know how that ends.

Automation also reduces cost of goods sold, which, assuming multiple sellers are competing, results in reduced price of goods and services.

“Short term” and “after the technology has established itself” can span decades, if not lifetimes, when the technology is something as complex and capital intensive as microchip production, pharmaceutical manufacturing, rocket launching, mobile communications, and other advanced processes.

gotcha, my misunderstanding

Changes nothing of the original point of in whose hands the excess money ended up.

Yes there is no money here. These are not the billionaires you're looking for *handwave

It's not just the government printing money though. A major part is the stock market "printing" money by wild overvaluation of company stocks.

Exactly the true wealth of America is no longer income or property its all shares. It could be argued the American 40T debt is pretty much because of tax avoidance due to hiding wealth in stocks and related possibilities.

Seems like a good reason to figure out some additional soak-the-rich taxes! (Back in the 30s that was a slogan that Americans could rally behind..! Not so much right in the last several decades.)

But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.

Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...

We had a 90% bracket in the US if I'm not mistaken. Also a fun fact, income tax was sold as a temporary measure at a 1% rate.

It seems like the economy is kind of doing this on its own? The Fed has been keeping rates higher, despite political pressure, without yet having achieved the inflation target.

Well, because one of the strategies of earning more money is paying workers lesser.

The solution is clearly to increase Pentagon spending 50%. Besides, the President said we are in the Golden Age, don't worry.

huh? how does the US get to a surplus with deficit spending?

the big spend since 2001 was going to war

This isn't a "one party is the problem" situation. Both parties have spent over 20 years fighting pointless wars. Both parties spend without balancing a budget. Both now gerrymander and both at least threaten to stack the court. Both pander to voters with short term solutions that actively do harm long term. Both were responsible for the shit show of the pandemic response.

The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.

It's easy to place the blame on political parties or the wealthy but at the end of the day the problems that America faces are the result of a series of choices made by the electorate over decades despite the feedback from each of these decisions as they were made.

At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.

People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.

Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.

An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.

Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.

consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.

All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.

Wahh republicans isn't a reasonable answer. It was Clinton and his ilk that got the US into this.

> 3 pointless multi-trillion dollar tax cuts

This is a misunderstanding of how "tax cuts" work under the US income tax. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Notice the lack of "tax cuts". GDP goes up, taxes go up by exactly the same amount. The number from the most recent year is basically the same as the number from 50 years prior in 1975. Ratio hasn't changed meaningfully since the end of WWII. But Congress somehow keeps passing "tax cuts", so how does that work?

It's because the tax cuts are fake. They set the tax brackets in dollars rather than percentiles, but the tax rates are in percentages, so that's not a stable ratio. In 1995 the median household income was $34,080, now it's $87,460. If they left the tax brackets the same, it would shove the middle class into the tax brackets meant for the rich. De facto middle class tax hike whenever they do nothing.

Naturally Congress loves this, because every few years they get to pass a bill re-adjusting the numbers to keep the true tax rate the same while calling it a "tax cut", and thereby get to claim credit for something people want while not really changing anything. Which is their absolute favorite thing, and why they never fix it by setting the tax brackets in percentiles.

All the Social Security taxes you pay get paid out to recipients this same year.

When Social Security was created in the 40's, the ratio of workers paying taxes to beneficiaries was like 40:1. So, each worker originally paid a very share amount.

Today, owing to demographic factors, that number is 3:1. Soon it will be 2:1. So by 203X, that number will drop below 1:1, meaning the program will be paying out more money than it takes in. It's at that point that the program will be considered "broke", because it can't meet its obligations.

So there's any number of solutions, which mostly boil down to some combination of the following: Raise SS taxes, cut benefits, or delay benefits (ie later retirement age)

> how many cuts to education or defense spending save social security?

You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.

Social Security has been running a cash flow deficit since around 2010, currently at around $270B per year and expected to keep increasing. Congress will need to pass some combination of an increase in payroll taxes, raising the retirement age, or reducing benefits.

Social security is a legal ponzi scheme. I don't say that to be outlandish, its a good description of how SS is funded - take money from people paying in today and give it to this who laid in previously.

It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.

The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.

Never knew this about him. Interesting as this is how the average person thinks SS works rather than a pyramid scheme.

People will take food without paying for it before dying. You don’t have to forage when you can loot grocery stores. At a point when a large percentage are going to die and the food is there, it will be bedlam and the police won’t be stopping it because their families will be part of the riot.

The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.

Food banks. Church pantries. Welfare programs. Meals with family and friends. Eat way less meat. Get hardcore into meal prep. https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook. People will find ways to eat as long as there isn't an active warzone.

I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.

> Past a fairly low threshold people seem to mostly care about relative.

It's more like, people have squishy "fairness" wetware.

Suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 in value and doesn't cost you anything whatsoever. You'd have to be a real bastard not to press the button, right?

Now suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 and causes you to get $10,000. This one is even more obvious, but it's also the sort of thing where you wouldn't be surprised to discover people starting a campaign to say that the button is unfair and we need to ban anyone from doing that.

And it's basically because humans evolved under conditions of inherent scarcity. If you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you still get a house and a car and free time for your family/projects etc., and they get a mansion and a Ferrari and can pay someone to do things for them so they have even more free time, is that actually a problem? Whereas if you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you can't even feed your family while they're getting fat, you're going to go to war over that.

In a high scarcity environment, things look like the second one, and that's where the human fairness wetware got its intuitions. But modern stuff mostly looks like the first one, and to the extent it looks like the second one it's usually artificial scarcity. It's not that we lack the resources to produce enough housing, it's that building more of it in a particular place is prohibited by law. And then it's not that they get a bigger house than you, it's that you don't get one at all, and the objection goes back to being reasonable. But the better way to solve that is to build more housing -- eliminate artificial scarcity -- rather than trying to fight over a limited quantity of something that doesn't actually have to be so limited.

Try a worked example.

Alice has nothing, Elon has $1T and we give them each a UBI of, lets say, $50k.

Your "instant inflation" means now their effective buying power is diluted by some fixed factor X. You claim this somehow leaves both Alice and Elon in "the same place they started from"

100000005 X == 100000000 but 5 X = 0, if you've done high school math you can probably see that there is no value of X for which this works.

> UBI will cause instant inflation and everyone will be in the same place they started from.

Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)

No because you tax it back. Or only give it out if it wouldn't be taxed back (aka negative income tax)

Not if we control the prices, the idea of UBI isn't to give money but to give resources, if everyone gets a house, clothes, food and education for free that's UBI as well. Even if it didn't involve a direct benefit transfer.

And that's the only solution to UBI, when resources are abundant enough that UBI isn't needed or with UBI we increase resource enough that there isn't inflation risks.

All UBI experiments till now have proven it's not bad for the people, if we just manage the economy part it will all work out somehow.

Not sure who pretends to work. I work unhealthy amounts since I was 15, and that was a long long long time ago

Mark Benioff is also struggling with fake AI-generated videos- https://x.com/Benioff/status/2116658212640604297?a=SNDwXOvrG...

There's always exceptions to any rule.

It's not really out of whack, it's the normal trend, Karl Marx wrote it out in his labor theory of value over a century ago. The reason nobody learns that in school is because it's very convenient to the minority who accumulate money and power on the opposite end of the equation.

It's ambiguous, because it lets the reader think for themselves about the implications of a straightforward fact?

If you do insist on being spoon fed - getting information about labor relations from Fortune magazine is like taking heath advice from a Luck Strike promotion. The article's cheery conclusion is: Yes, AI productivity is driving wages down - but we only need to be patient and wait for more jobs to replace them, not tax or regulate AI. Yes, unemployment is driving wages down - but more immigration will fix this, not make it worse. Yes, the deficit is high while corporate profits are up - but the solution is more jobs (how?) rather than more tax. Yes, smoking causes 'throat irritation' - but Lucky Strike is toasted.