I have a technical question: Is there any feasible way to implement a vehicle miles tax without building a massive surveillance state that basically tracks every single place everyone goes? This hardly seems beyond the wit of man, but I'm not aware of any existing off-the-shelf way to accomplish this, other than just having the government promise to delete all records after X days.
It doesn't need to report your location, just total miles traveled. That's how it worked in Oregon.
Distance traveled is still private information, so the Oregon rules called for it to be deleted after 30 days. I doubt it would suffice for privacy activists, but the ACLU was on board with it:
I like it. We might want to take some extra efforts to make sure the odometer is accurate, but there's pretty strong incentives to fool with odometers already.
Apparently the average person pays 150-400 in gas taxes per year now. I guess the depreciation from mileage on car is of a similar order of magnitude. And we seem to do OK now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odometer_fraud
Do you have any pointers for better studies regarding test-retake reliability with the MBTI and/or Big Five? The Wikipedia page does not appear to be helpful in this regard. As far as I can tell, every citation is regarding 16 discrete bins.
This is a slightly updated version of the post (new links, slightly less unhinged language, and a link to this MBTI quiz that I made to promote non-binary axes: https://dynomight.net/mbti )
It was changed the other way. I originally posted with your suggested link, but then moments later it was a "404 Not Found" error page. Your web site might be unreliable. Also, until I found the other link, I was unaware that there were any images. I had seen only plain text. Currently there are images, but will they stay? Do you know what went wrong with the web site? Might it go back to being "404 Not Found" again?
If you are certain that your web site isn't going to go "404 Not Found" again, contact dang.
Sorry, I accidentally pushed it to live before I was finished revising it, then hurriedly (but not hurriedly enough, clearly) pulled it down again. Blame me, not the site.
I didn't change the article between submitting and the time you made your comment. I did just add two paragraphs to the end of the "Before We Begin" section to try to clarify this point. (Your interpretation was what I intended.)
I didn’t really have a problem with the article. I wonder if the issue is that the article looks too much like the (false) claim that sales tax always works like your example, which is refuted by pointing out the exemptions, rather than the claim that the exemptions don’t always work.
I can imagine that pointing out some (hypothetical) tax where rates aren’t marginal could get a similar reaction here (ie lots of “OP doesn’t understand marginal tax rates, but that’s ok because lots of people are stupid,” rather than “oh dear, that’s not a very good tax system, I wonder how that flaw slipped through.”)
Author here. I very much appreciate your polite tone! I'm aware that taxes on items for resale aren't treated like in the toy model. (This is mentioned in the article already.)
Can you please take a look at this article and let me know if it changes your view:
I did not find the cost.org article helpful at all. It just seems to advocate that if a business has customers, then everything it buys is a business input, any sales tax the business would pay would be "pyramiding", and the business should be exempt from paying tax on all of it, even things like the pens, paper, and envelopes it uses for old-fashioned business correspondence.
Thanks for the interesting link. I've read it and here are my thoughts:
- The paper talks about business inputs, which is anything a business purchases. Businesses need to pay sales tax on items, unless they are intended for resale. So they're going to be charged sales tax for the coffee machine for the break room for example.
- I disagree that sales tax is a "household consumer"-only tax. It's just a consumption tax. No state exempts all business purchases, so this extra "household" bit is a position they're pushing. Part of their argument is similar to other anti-business tax policy papers that think tanks in the US put out regularly. The argument goes: businesses must pass all costs to consumers, therefore business taxes increase costs to consumers, therefore businesses should not be taxed since it's really consumers that pay those taxes.
- This is the pyramiding they refer to: Business needs to pay sales tax on coffee machine. If they pass this cost on to consumers, they'll increase the price of their products by a fraction of a cent, and that increase will increase the sales tax the consumer must pay (sales tax on that fraction of a cent).
- I'm not surprised by the high percentage of business purchases paying sales taxes. As the paper mentions, 79% of consumer purchases are sales tax exempt (items like food). Of the remaining 21%, many of those items are utilized by businesses.. items like desks, computers, etc. The high percentage of sales taxes being paid by business is likely due to the shear quantity of household purchases that are exempt.
- On the comparison to a gross receipts tax: If I sell pencils (an item generally subject to sales tax), I'm collecting sales tax on many purchases. The difference is that GRT would tax all revenue, versus sales tax would have exceptions for resale, sales to schools and other exempt organizations, sales shipped to areas without sales tax (or where a business doesnt have a nexus), international sales, etc. So to make the comparison work, we need to be very careful about defining the business: I sell pencils locally to end consumers, and I interrogate each customer to make sure they're not affiliated with a school, won't try to resell my pencil, etc. Once we do that, the comparison gets pretty ridiculous. In practice, these are two different tax regimes, and only by glossing over the differences can we make them sound similar.
- On vertical integration to avoid sales tax: This is a very specific scenario that I don't imagine happens too often. A business that sells X, but uses a lot of Y for some purpose not related to producing X. Additionally Y must have a very high markup (if not, the acquirer will be paying sales tax on the inputs for Y, and will save nothing on sales tax). Maybe my imagination is lacking... but I'm having a hard time coming up with a scenario where this would occur and it would be the sales tax (5-8%) that would be the deciding factor on whether to vertically integrate.
My take on this paper is what I mentioned in my 2nd point... it's an anti-business tax paper written to encourage governments to cut business taxes. You can decide your position on that. I generally think businesses should pay taxes.
I think it was accurate when it was created. But when I double-checked, I found that something like half the countries had created a VAT in the meantime!
It’s a bit debatable if this is really a “data” problem that could be solved in principle by gathering enough data or more of a “philosophical” problem where we aren’t exactly sure what bias means.
I feel like a lot of people don’t recognize how incredibly hard it is to check bias from data. The problem is that you have to define “subgroups” in a way that’s inherently arbitrary. This turns out to intersect with Simpson’s paradox in a weird way.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...