Mod note: For critiques like this, please give more context or background. Disagreement and critiques are really useful, but they are very hard to engage with when they give this little context. In my experience, comments like this can cause quite a bit of stress for both readers and authors, and I would really like to avoid that on LessWrong, so try to outline at least a basic argument for why you believe something when you disagree, or alternatively add a meta-comment of the form “I don’t have time to write up my reasons for believing this, but I am overall pretty confident that this would reduce tax revenue. Sorry that I don’t have time to write up the arguments for this, but I think that’s a major obstacle to this being a good idea, and it seemed good to voice my take even if I can’t give more context”, or something like that.
(If I were to guess what the above poster is thinking...people buy lottery tickets. So, we should expect the government to lose money (if possible):
from people taking on stupid risks
from people taking on more stupid risks (this amounts to a prediction that the proposed change in the tax code around paying investors back, will leads to antigrowth).
people buy lottery tickets. So, we should expect the government to lose money (if possible):
from people taking on stupid risks
The government loses money if the average investor is losing money. But that’s not true, the average investor makes a lot of money. (And once you weight by tax %, it’s even more stark.) I guess you could think there are some investors who go bust (losing too large a fraction of their ordinary income to ever collect on the rebate) while others won’t change their behavior at all under this policy. But I do think we need to get into some kind of quantitative model of that (and it doesn’t look super likely to me).
That’s not my guess but it seems plausible. Do you have some explanation/argument/calculation/intuition?
ETA: I actually thought that part 2 would increase tax revenues all on its own, though that might be making unrealistic assumptions about investor rationality. Not sure if you are referring to part 2, or to the whole package.
I guarantee this would reduce tax revenues.
Mod note: For critiques like this, please give more context or background. Disagreement and critiques are really useful, but they are very hard to engage with when they give this little context. In my experience, comments like this can cause quite a bit of stress for both readers and authors, and I would really like to avoid that on LessWrong, so try to outline at least a basic argument for why you believe something when you disagree, or alternatively add a meta-comment of the form “I don’t have time to write up my reasons for believing this, but I am overall pretty confident that this would reduce tax revenue. Sorry that I don’t have time to write up the arguments for this, but I think that’s a major obstacle to this being a good idea, and it seemed good to voice my take even if I can’t give more context”, or something like that.
This sounds a lot like a bet.
(If I were to guess what the above poster is thinking...people buy lottery tickets. So, we should expect the government to lose money (if possible):
from people taking on stupid risks
from people taking on more stupid risks (this amounts to a prediction that the proposed change in the tax code around paying investors back, will leads to antigrowth).
)
The government loses money if the average investor is losing money. But that’s not true, the average investor makes a lot of money. (And once you weight by tax %, it’s even more stark.) I guess you could think there are some investors who go bust (losing too large a fraction of their ordinary income to ever collect on the rebate) while others won’t change their behavior at all under this policy. But I do think we need to get into some kind of quantitative model of that (and it doesn’t look super likely to me).
That’s not my guess but it seems plausible. Do you have some explanation/argument/calculation/intuition?
ETA: I actually thought that part 2 would increase tax revenues all on its own, though that might be making unrealistic assumptions about investor rationality. Not sure if you are referring to part 2, or to the whole package.