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[Sheb]

@Sheb, yeah, I don't know how to make that one "continuous" - the idea is, how do you avoid a disincentive for a small but growing company to grow past that threshold?  I mean if your company can pull in revenue of $200k an employee, but adding that next employee is going to cost you $1M, why would you ever do it?  It means you have to be able to have the business to add probably something like 15 additional employees to cover the incremental cost of that regulation to make it worthwhile. So you have this weird deadband in the growth curve where you have a bunch of businesses with 50 employees, almost none with between 51 and 64, then a bunch at 65 and larger.

You might not be able to do it on the paperwork side, but you could surely put a continuity function in the level of benefits you offer. So instead of saying "at 50 or fewer employees, you can have plans that cost X, but at 51 or more you need plans that cost X+Y" so the price of adding that next employee is 50*Y + (X+Y), not just X+Y.

Actually, I might have an idea. Another way to implement a kind of continuity and progressivity in stuff like taxation for exemple is, instead of having varying rate have a constant rate and a grant refund. For exemple, there was a proposal in Belgium to do that for electricity price by giving x kWh of electricity per household a year for free, and paying for that by raising the price above that, the idea being to incenticize energy saving without increasing the overall energy bill (since the marginal cost of the kWh is higher, every kWh you save bring you more).

In this context, you could have the same obligation for every employee of every business of all size, but the bill for the first X employee is picked up by the state. That way, you never have a case where getting an extra employee forces you to pay stuff to the other employee.

[RedKing]

Isn't Keynesian economics what led to the same sort of rural/urban divide and inequality with wages that we've seen with globalization? Not sure what -sian -ics -omics sort of economic model exactly, other than just saying globalization, led to the sort of problems in both Europe and US that were being done by liberals.

No, that's been partly policymakers' decisions and partly the fact that when you're sinking money into infrastructure and services, you get more ROI when you spend that in high-population density areas.

For example, if you're going to sink money into high-speed infrastructure, you do that in your largest urban centers to maximize the benefits. Honestly, this may be why libertarians like Maximum Spin hate "liberals" so much, because they want to live in the middle of nowhere, but then feel like they're getting screwed when government always invests in places where they don't live.

[smjjames]

Wouldn't you get ROI even if you spend for improved infrastructure (not neccesarily to the point of high speed rail) in rural areas? It might take longer or be more subtle, but the ROI is going to be there.

ROI is usually aimed to happen near immediately or within a few years, not decades.

Also, not sure what political ideology Maximum Spin is, don't think he's libertarian. Though if he declares himself to be libertarian, okay.

[Sheb]

Wouldn't you get ROI even if you spend for improved infrastructure (not neccesarily to the point of high speed rail) in rural areas? It might take longer or be more subtle, but the ROI is going to be there.

Well, yeah, but there is an opportunity cost to doing so. For exemple, many African countries runs expensive rural electrification scheme. They benefits the farmers who get electricity, but they also cost a lot of capital to utilities. Meanwhile, cities have to suffer from frequent blackout, costing a fortune to industries. You could make a decent argument that utilities should ditch the countryside, invest in the cities, and then use the money that follows industrialisation to then electrify the countryside.

Hell, in some case you're even going to get negative return on investment if the maintenance costs are higher than the economic benefits.

[sluissa]

Wouldn't you get ROI even if you spend for improved infrastructure (not neccesarily to the point of high speed rail) in rural areas? It might take longer or be more subtle, but the ROI is going to be there.

Well, yeah, but there is an opportunity cost to doing so. For exemple, many African countries runs expensive rural electrification scheme. They benefits the farmers who get electricity, but they also cost a lot of capital to utilities. Meanwhile, cities have to suffer from frequent blackout, costing a fortune to industries. You could make a decent argument that utilities should ditch the countryside, invest in the cities, and then use the money that follows industrialisation to then electrify the countryside.

Hell, in some case you're even going to get negative return on investment if the maintenance costs are higher than the economic benefits.

This is basically it. There are maintenance costs involved that occur even if nobody ever uses something. Imagine the most basic of things, a road. Asphalt, concrete, gravel, dirt, any of them will require periodic cut back to keep the vegetation from overgrowing, weather will deteriorate it, either in the case of rain washing out or undermining roads or ice breaking up the harder surfaces in colder areas. Even sunlight and heat. You can build a road, never have anyone travel over it, and still have it be untraversible after a few years if it's not maintained. (Look at examples of Siberian roads for how bad it can get.)

This goes for almost any infrastructure. So unless you have enough taxes being paid by people who regularly use that infrastructure to cover those maintenance costs, and then some, then there will be no ROI. That is largely why Rural is so screwed, and continues to be screwed. "We don't like to pay taxes because we don't get anything for the ones we do pay." "We don't like to build things out there because the ROI isn't worth it." As long as the taxes(or profits for private utilities) are low, the ROI will be low. As long as the ROI is low, they won't be building any infrastructure out there with the taxes. As long as there's nothing to show for the taxes, the people won't want to pay anymore of them. It's a cycle.

[RedKing]

That's why I said *more* ROI. If you build high-speed rail along the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-DC corridor, the benefit extends to a LOT of people. Tens of millions, possibly 100 million+. If you build the same length of high-speed rail from say, Denver to Salt Lake City, you benefit less than a million people, and the costs of construction and maintenance are likely higher.

As sluissa said it's kind of vicious cycle. Nobody lives out there, so nobody invests money, so the area is underserved, so nobody wants to start major businesses, so there are no jobs, so nobody wants to live out there.

It's also why Trump's promises of jobs to small-town America are a sad joke. Even if those jobs come back, they're not coming to Podunkville, ID. Manufacturing isn't going to relocate back to decaying Rust Belt towns with aging infrastructure and an aging, meth/opium-addicted workforce. They're going to site in low-cost Southern and Western states, and when they do, they're going to be in major cities or suburbs of major cities.

It's also a question of diminishing returns. America went from 75% rural population to 50% rural population between 1870 and 1920, 50% to 33% between 1920 and 1960, and 33% to 20% between 1960 and 2000. There's still a lot of rural land, but not that many people left in it.

But this isn't anything to do with Keynesian spending. Rural areas get less funding regardless of whether you're spending in boom times or bust. There may be political elements to it, in that highly urbanized regions tend strongly Democratic and more rural regions trend strongly Republican. But in my experience, it's not as if rural areas are getting preferential or even equitable investment dollars when Republicans are in charge. Instead, they get "tax cuts", as if that's going to pave their roads for them and keep the water and sewer systems running.


EDIT: And this is also why the Republicans have to lean heavily on the culture wars to retain support in rural areas. The free market is NOT going to help develop rural areas, for the reasons we've already covered regarding ROI. Wealth transfer (through taxation) from urban areas to rural areas is the most viable means of development.

Incidentally, this is also why the farmers' movement in the late 1800s was damn near socialist. It fought for things like free rural mail delivery, the creation of the Dept. of Agriculture, the establishment of land-grant universities (especially agricultural/technical schools), etc.

[Starver]

Re transitioning between small and large businesses (or tiny, small, medium, large, massive - as desired) in a fluid manner, how about kicking in the greater responsibilities according to ranked pay.

<=50 employees (say, for the sake of argument, and this is inclusive of management) require certain responsibilities supportive of the small business and encouraging employment, and does not demand employer-contributions or anything more than the statutary minimum employee PAYE (or whatever you lot do, over there). For 51+ employees, there's additional business taxes and things, but (instead of kicking straight in) it's applied as a percentage-point of the intended additional income-related taxes upon the 51st (and 52nd, 53rd, etc) per >50 employee, until hitting 150, when the 50 most menial labourers (cannot be Board Members/owners, to avoid with tax-avoidance, but with the caveat to allow for Workforce Representative appointments where they exist) are still benefitting from minimal tax burden, the other 100 are paid well enough (and clearly earning the company enough) not to significantly notice the additional burden asked to bear, or at least finding a comfortable level where gaining an employee is preferable to shunning additional business that might only be serviced by that employee being there to cover the ground.

Then, for 150+, a further bracket kicks in (0.1% of bracket-requirements, per employee, until 1150?) and again (0.01% per employee until 11.15k employees).


Not perfect. Needs some way to deal with undue splitting of large firms into unwarranted 'franchise' components of what should be a whole, and other things, I know.


Also, I started this post with the idea in mind that the term "geometric mean", as applied to take-home-wages, would apply somehow (or something similar, so that "geometric upper-quartile" would apply if a theoeritcal 25% of the workforce should be asked to be the higher contributors, but I momentarily forget what the "nth-percentile, geometrically adjusted" might be called) to help flatten the high/low disparity. And it needs a better economic-mind than mine to help avert even the more obvious ways of tricksing the system.

Plus things like "below n employees, you need only produce self-certified accounts upon request; above that, you need certification by a trained accountant; above m employees, further oversight is required by State/Federal regulators" are tricky to phase in, especially when trying to avoid short-changing by borderline employees using zero-hours contracts or 'contractor' status to hide true-employees from the count.  But there'll be answers to, this, already. Probably the ones most argued against in legislature (by those lobbied upon by the people who would miss their favourite loopholes). Perhaps we should study failed amemdments to employment law more even than the passed ones?

[sluissa]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/after-firestorm-cdc-director-says-terms-like-science-based-are-not-banned/

Oh, look. Once again the left overreacts to something. Boy Who Cried Wolf much?

[Starver]

Doesn't read so much like over-reacting. Making things palatable for Republicans is one thing, but...

was told to use “Obamacare” instead of “ACA.”

...that's just supplying compulsory dog-whistles for people to be forced to blow, who didn't even want to whistle up any of those dogs. And they should be using something close to the official and technical name in official and technical documents they author, not the derogatory term (especially when it comes to the people in power, reading their words).

[sluissa]

Doesn't read so much like over-reacting. Making things palatable for Republicans is one thing, but...

was told to use “Obamacare” instead of “ACA.”

...that's just supplying compulsory dog-whistles for people to be forced to blow, who didn't even want to whistle up any of those dogs. And they should be using something close to the official and technical name in official and technical documents they author, not the derogatory term (especially when it comes to the people in power, reading their words).

Obamacare became the de facto name for it, even getting Obama's approval at some point. It's also a clearer name than a 3 letter acronym which is probably used a hundred other places just in government health care circles.

[smjjames]

Doesn't read so much like over-reacting. Making things palatable for Republicans is one thing, but...

was told to use “Obamacare” instead of “ACA.”

...that's just supplying compulsory dog-whistles for people to be forced to blow, who didn't even want to whistle up any of those dogs. And they should be using something close to the official and technical name in official and technical documents they author, not the derogatory term (especially when it comes to the people in power, reading their words).

Obamacare became the de facto name for it, even getting Obama's approval at some point. It's also a clearer name than a 3 letter acronym which is probably used a hundred other places just in government health care circles.

+1 here, it's just become the commonly-known-by name, even Obama was cool with it.

[bloop_bleep]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/after-firestorm-cdc-director-says-terms-like-science-based-are-not-banned/

Oh, look. Once again the left overreacts to something. Boy Who Cried Wolf much?

So basically they're saying either don't use these words or we'll cut your budget, which is essentially the same thing as a ban. Not sure there's much overreaction going on here.

[sluissa]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/after-firestorm-cdc-director-says-terms-like-science-based-are-not-banned/

Oh, look. Once again the left overreacts to something. Boy Who Cried Wolf much?

So basically they're saying either don't use these words or we'll cut your budget, which is essentially the same thing as a ban. Not sure there's much overreaction going on here.

No, it's more like "Here's the proper etiquette to use around politicians." You're asking them for money, you'll probably get it either way as long as you're not a complete asshole, but things will go much smoother if you just say "please and thank you".

[Starver]

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-bailey-msw-acsw/obamacare-not-the-name-is_b_7984778.html
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2013/1129/Obamacare-vs.-Affordable-Care-Act-Does-the-name-matter
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/what-s-name-obamacare-may-not-have-been-such-hot-n708006
http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/02/07/poll-1-3-americans-doesnt-know-obamacare-affordable-care-act-are-same-thing

A mix of sources there, all showing that it's important what you call it, and I'd lay high odds of Obamacare being looked down upon more even by the relevant members of the House and Senate, in either pop-quiz or when actively discussing policy papers and reports, than when instead presented as the Affordable Healthcare Act or its various other non-personified permutations of it and its kindred bills' official titles.

It is a dog-whistle, plain and obvious, straight-out looking to tip the balance. And people are falling for it. Going along with it is just inviting yourself to be led blindfold time and time again.

But don't mind me. Doesn't affect me. Agree to get rid of the kludged and hobbled system and replace it with a downright damaged one (if anything), if you want. Good luck with that, and I'll be over here moaning about how my country's healthcare is being sabotaged so that it's only "mostly Ok" instead of "overwhelmingly Ok".


("Please and thank you"? I think you've got your rose-tinted tin-foil hat on, there.)

[nenjin]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/12/after-firestorm-cdc-director-says-terms-like-science-based-are-not-banned/

Oh, look. Once again the left overreacts to something. Boy Who Cried Wolf much?

So basically they're saying either don't use these words or we'll cut your budget, which is essentially the same thing as a ban. Not sure there's much overreaction going on here.

No, it's more like "Here's the proper etiquette to use around politicians." You're asking them for money, you'll probably get it either way as long as you're not a complete asshole, but things will go much smoother if you just say "please and thank you".

Because obviously there are zero ties between the language used for the budget approval and what is allowed to be done with that budget.