I wish there was a way to hold legislators accountable/liable for badly written laws. Our statute books are overflowing with junk. It is like we have a mammoth code base with no source control and no one even trying to clean it up. Just a stream of special interest patches being thrown on top.
I'd prefer it just redirect to the top of news.ycombinator.com/. The ranking of stories change over time, so at some point "more" has no meaning when the underlying list has changed. Since everyone who sees the expired link page, goes back to the top, the site should redirect there for me automatically.
Does anyone else see the irony of public campaign financing as a solution to problems explained in the this article?
In the same way that companies distort regulations of their industry to thwart competition, politicians will ensure that public campaign financing rules will prevent newcomers (e.g. tea party, green party, etc) from ever getting elected.
The problem with passwords is that ideally they are long random strings and different for every site. But humans are not good at remembering such passwords, so they tend pick shorter passwords and to re-use them on lots of sites.
But computers are good at remembering lots of long random strings, so why have we not developed a standard for site log-ons which the browser chooses the passwords and stores it securely for the user?
A non-zero second deriviate invites gaming. The tax rate (e.g. 20% or 35%) is per "unit". If the marginal rate is too high, you can always break up into smaller units (e.g not get married or split up a company) or defer realizing income until next year, then your overall tax burden is lower. A flat rate means that scale and timing do not effect the amount of taxes paid.
And that's why capital taxes are flat. It's much harder to split up personal income.
So you can say that flat taxes are harder to game. That's a good thing. But I do not know whether it relates to a sensible definition of `fair'.
(Approval voting is also harder to game than first-past-the-post. And arguably more `fair', because a third (and fourth) party candidate does stand a chance _and_ does not have to split the votes with another candidate who happens to have similar appeal.)
First, it costs a lot (accounts and attorneys) to game the tax system. So only "the rich" can afford it. The net result is progressive taxes wind up hurting the "doing well but not rich yet". Second, if I go to a store and buy a chair the sales tax rate is flat. Everyone pays the same rate. That seems fair. But if I make a chair and sell it, the income tax I pay on the gain depends on how much income I've made that year. Thus two people making the same chair and selling it for the same gain would pay different amounts of income tax. That unequal taxing of the same gain is what is unfair about a progressive tax rate.
It's much harder to split up personal income.
The flat tax is not an income tax. It is a tax on the creation of wealth. Most people think a flat tax means just changes our current tax system to have just one tax rate. The Flat Tax is a complete re-architecture of what and how to tax.
