I asked AI and it looks like it is true. I asked what was the tax rate percentage for the top 10 percent of income earners in the US for each of the decades from 1940 to now:
1940s: Peaked at 94% in 1944–1945.
1950s: Remained high, peaking around 91%.
1960s: Started at 91% and dropped to 70% by 1965.
1970s: Remained around 70%.
1980s: Dropped from 70% to 50%, ending at 28%.
1990s: 31% to 39.6%.
2000s: Decreased from 39.6% to 35%.
2010s: Ranged from 35% to 39.6%.
Current (2020s): 37%.
Also, in 1930 it was low as well.
So it looks like the years in which we did the things Gary wants us to do again in his essay were all done during periods of time in which we taxed the super rich heavily.
I think that’s a fair point, and it highlights part of the tension here. Total receipts as a share of GDP may be relatively stable, but the structure of taxation and where the burden falls has changed over time.
My point wasn’t that government lacked revenue in aggregate, but that many of the periods people point to as examples of large national projects coincided with higher marginal tax rates on top earners.
The interesting question isn’t just how much is collected, but how the burden is distributed and what tradeoffs people are willing to accept going forward.
Nobody ever paid 90% taxes. There were tax rates that high but lots of ways to avoid it same as now.
If you want a fair tax that treats everybody equally you want a flat consumption tax. No tax to make money. Just taxed when you spend money. Rich people spend more money so they pay more taxes. It can't be avoided by taking a dollar salary or using assets as equity for loans that dont get taxed.
As an aside, billionaires pay the same taxes you do on income. Demanding a wealth tax on billionaires is foolish. Every tax ever devised was sold as a tax on the rich. Look where we are now, forced to give a third or more of our labor to an entity that half the country likes on a good year.
Agreed that effective tax rates were much lower than the headline marginal rates because of deductions and avoidance strategies. My point was more about the policy environment and incentives of those periods, not that people literally paid 90% of their income in tax.
The broader conversation I’m interested in is how we realistically fund large public efforts today and what mix of taxation or spending people think is fair and sustainable.
I don't think an individual's tax burden should ever be more than 15%. I would prefer that people get to keep the fruits of their labor. The people created the government to serve and protect them not steal their wealth.
If you had a thermometer that had no heat generation then yes.
If you have a resistor or other heat generating circuit then you need to have the needed surface area to radiate the heat away. If you don't, it will heat up. It's a rate problem.
Yeah but what about CNC milling machines? Way more guns are made on those every day than 3d printers. There is even one you can buy that is specifically for making "ghost guns"
A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
AFAIK they claim to still be selling general purpose CNC machines that aren't marketed as being for firearms... but only take the money and ghost customers without actually delivering anything.
I'm way more worried about drones, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots than "ghost guns".
Once these things can move around us, far away from their owner, there is enormous potential for societal harm.
Someone could buy a $10k Figure robot, strap a bomb or nerve agent to it, then have it walk into a public place.
If we just accept these robots as normal everyday things (it seems like we will), we wouldn't even blink or think twice that a robot was walking up to us.
I hate monitoring and tracking and surveillance. I'm a freedom and personal liberty absolutist for most things without negative externalities. But as I put this new AI tech through thought experiments, I don't know how we'll survive in a normal world anymore when agency is cheap and not tied to mortality.
Society, even one with guns, relied on the fact that people are afraid of the consequences of their actions. If there's no ability to trace a drone or robot, god only knows what could happen.
Kidnappings, murders, terrorism. It seems like this might become "easy".
How hard is it going to be to kill off political opponents in the future? Putin, for instance, enjoys relative freedom of movement because it's hard to get close to him.
Once you can throw a drone into a field or rooftop and have it "sleep" for months until some "awake" command, then it operates entirely autonomously - that's cheap, easy to plan, and potentially impossible to track.
Some disgruntled guy buys some fertilizer, a used van, and comma.ai?
We potentially have a very, very different world coming soon.
Good point, as a further example see all the "luck" countries like Ukraine have been having with even slightly modified "consumer" drone stuff applied to this kind of application
Too complicated - just strap it to a flying drone that can then slam it to the target at high speed.
Works well enough and is in wide use, many people just don't seem to have realized the implications - kinda like with machineguns and barbed wire at the start of WW1.
The first person to build ChatGPT with limbs wins.
The British army only has maybe 20,000 actual soldiers. You could manufacture enough robots to kill them all in a week. Then you’d just have a whole country.
It’ll completely change the game. There’s no point selling it to a state for their army, when you could just instantly make yourself the owner of the state.
this is so handwavy about so many disciplines of human effort?
robotics? (if you can assume AGI with a perfect world model and perfect motor skills you're insanely further than we are now, like hundreds of years in the future)
military planning? (the british isles haven't been invaded since roman times, hint its not for lack of soldiers)
law? (where are you launching your invasion from? how are you testing the killbots without being noticed? who is letting you?)
it seems like the only way you believe this is if you've given completely up on trying to understand anything and just truly to your core think that AI = magic
i am not saying its a good idea, just wondering because you say space has no temperature, but that makes no sense for the reason CMB radiation would prevent you from having 0 k right? and in fact how would you even measure it? wouldn't the measuring device its self have way more then 0K?
plus you would have to insulate the servers from the sun...then have radiators like the ISS... i think its just way easier to run a server on the ground
They actually do. Many of the things you think are designed in the west are actually designed in China but with a western logo slapped on top of it. The western companies are mostly just choosing what Chinese designed parts they want and maybe change the plastic enclosure for a unique look.
The US has openly spied on nato allies via msft for decades, and this was widely reported long before Snowden. All us tech is a tool of government surveillance and has always been. msft has also been repeatedly sued and sanctioned for corruption and bribery and coercive practices across europe over the past two decades. The fact that europe views trump as the threat but not the system he represents is cynical but the move towards autonomy is long past due. aws and msft etc all get away with overcharging for often terrible services is largely due to a lack of viable competition. europe has had great open-source offering for many years, but has "strategically" starved all of them of funding and credibility. This is as much a result of eu scleroticism as it is msft's bullying and anti-competitive practices. If trump makes it easier for them to get their act together it is to his credit.
1940s: Peaked at 94% in 1944–1945. 1950s: Remained high, peaking around 91%. 1960s: Started at 91% and dropped to 70% by 1965. 1970s: Remained around 70%. 1980s: Dropped from 70% to 50%, ending at 28%. 1990s: 31% to 39.6%. 2000s: Decreased from 39.6% to 35%. 2010s: Ranged from 35% to 39.6%. Current (2020s): 37%.
Also, in 1930 it was low as well.
So it looks like the years in which we did the things Gary wants us to do again in his essay were all done during periods of time in which we taxed the super rich heavily.
This seems at odds with this from him: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/garrytan_larry-and-sergey-can...
I agree that we should do big things for the greater good. That's an easy sell for everyone.
The real conversation needs to be about who pays for it, and how.
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