What should the top income tax rate be?

[basilsands]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You may be correct, but that doesn't make it any less a matter of judgment.
______
Dennis

I guess I'll modify my previous statement to agree your closing statement there. Everything we understand is relative to our foundation of understanding.

[basilsands]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Or we need to develop technology that does work formerly done by people, ...

The downside of "robotising" society is that humans don't lend themselves well to sitting around letting others do the work. I have watched too many people retire from their jobs expecting to enjoy 20 or more years of retirement doing anything but work, only to come running back to a job of some sort because too much play starts to drive them crazy. I've also seen relatively young people retire from jobs with enough money for decades of life only to die, quite literally, within months of leaving their jobs. Before technology can take over large parts of life, we have to find a way to keep those millions of robot replaced workers employed doing something else.

Human's crave productivity. It's why there is an almost universal disdain for the sluggard.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by basilsands

The downside of "robotising" society is that humans don't lend themselves well to sitting around letting others do the work.

Then find work they enjoy. There's no shortage of needs-human-attention work, especially creative works that can't be mechanized. But we don't need an endlessly-growing number of people to support our current standard of living--we can turn a lot of the grunt work over to machines. We *have* -- traveling thousands of miles no longer takes weeks and a couple of animals and food for them; communicating with relatives a hundred miles away no longer takes days and a courier.

We don't have to turn people into slugs in order to replace much of the unpleasant parts of work with technology. More people could focus on work they enjoy and find fulfilling... if we weren't tied to the notion that you have to earn the right to eat by expending a certain amount of effort, regardless of whether it's useful effort.

I'm not advocating for socialism; just pointing out that, at some point, the tech should mean shorter workweeks, more leisure time, better education opportunities. And we've got some of those; we should be working on more, not on having more people to maintain the current level of comfort.

[basilsands]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'm not advocating for socialism; just pointing out that, at some point, the tech should mean shorter workweeks, more leisure time, better education opportunities.

Perhaps it will work for us that way. I guess it all depends if the infrastructure is strong enough to continue growth in that direction. The hardest part of it all is the human part, as long as everyone, or at least a majority, can agree on what is best for the common good then we're probably going to work out fine. And technology with keep getting better, and life more enjoyable. I hope it does. I like being in middle class America.

...it's just that people part of the equation that always seems to mess things up.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

The post office could be cut down quite a bit more than it is, by encouraging more use of email... but for that to be a useful change, current postal workers need to be something other than "unemployed because their jobs have become obsolete." And the current postal system would have to change quite a bit to allow it to still deliver packages if it's not delivering letters every day.

Email is already dominant. When was the last time you sent or received an actual first class letter? What the postal service handles are bills, statements, junk mail, and parcels, with the odd greeting card and formal business letter still considered something to be sent on paper. The number of bills and statements is also declining, as businesses increasingly use electronic communication. Junk mail is not decreasing.

Part of the issue the postal service faces is a blurring over time of its original role of the government agency that delivered the mail to add "employer of last resort for people who can't get other jobs". And in doing so, it changed form: it's no longer the US Post Office Department. It's the US Postal Service, a unionized, quasi-private entity. (And arguably managed to combine all the worst aspects of civil service and unions in the process. A late friend was a long-time postal worker, and a union shop steward toward the end, till he grew tired of representing idiots on behalf of a union local whose officers were morons. He found he slept better and had less problems with asthma when no longer subjected to that stress.)

Regardless, you won't be able to simply downsize the postal service and realize savings in reducing headcount, salary, and fringe benefits. Even if you did, you would face the issue of what to do with the displaced workers.
______
Dennis

[Falcao]

It should be a flat tax, like the old Kings' Fifth.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Email is already dominant. When was the last time you sent or received an actual first class letter?

The single largest customer of Royal Mail (the British postal service) is now Amazon UK. They account for some quite preposterously high proportion of their income.

[HarryT]

I remember reading a report somewhere recently which said that the total burden of taxation (direct and indirect taxation, plus things like medical insurance in those countries where it's not government funded) in the top 20 industrialized nations is pretty much the same - between about 50 and 55% of income on average. Different countries choose to apply tax in different ways, but it all finishes us at pretty much the same sort of level once you add everything up.

[basilsands]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I remember reading a report somewhere recently which said that the total burden of taxation (direct and indirect taxation, plus things like medical insurance in those countries where it's not government funded) in the top 20 industrialized nations is pretty much the same - between about 50 and 55% of income on average. Different countries choose to apply tax in different ways, but it all finishes us at pretty much the same sort of level once you add everything up.

Alaska has no income tax. Most towns also have no sales tax, or a very small one if they do. The state services are paid for mostly via oil revenues from corporate taxes, property taxes, and tourism taxes (aka Bed Tax), fuel tax, and alcohol & tobacco tax. The only other tax we pay is the Federal Income tax. So it sounds pretty good for us from the outside. Our total tax rate is more like 10% - 20%

Of course our cost of living is about 10%-20% higher than most of the US, so I guess that almost makes up for it.