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Politics and Economics
The Houston Homeless Count found 3,223 persons experiencing homelessness on the day of its 2022 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, or approximately one out of 1,916 residents… San Francisco’s Homeless Count of 2022 found 7,754 individuals experiencing homelessness. With a population of 815,201 (2021), that would be a homelessness rate of approximately one out of 105 residents.
It appears that most of this wealth is wrapped up in bonds, stocks and businesses, where it helps fund the country’s public and private investment and operations. If the federal government were to implement a wealth tax, rich folks would likely have to take money out of their holdings and businesses to pay the tax. Ideally, the holdings and businesses would not lose value as a result.
Wealth is your overall financial picture, including all your assets. Assets can be considered anything of value that can be converted into cash, including things like cash itself, real estate holdings, investments, and personal property. According to the Federal Reserve, as of September 30, 2022, the combined assets of US households and nonprofit organizations were worth about $162.5 trillion - $54.8 trillion in non-financial assets (e.g., housing, land, machinery, vehicles) and $107.7 trillion in financial assets. Here’s the Fed’s breakdown of financial assets…
And I got to thinking…tax rates are a poor indicator of what US households actually pay in taxes. Economists know this…
President Clinton eventually signed the the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. That’s because the Senate had already made it crystal clear that the vote would not go well: just two years before the Senate has passed a resolution 95-0 telling Mr. Clinton not to sign any treaty that committed the US to cut emissions without also requiring undeveloped countries to do so.
To quote the New York Times: “Since then, similar comprehensive research has been blocked, in part by tenants’ advocates who believe the findings would be “politicized” and become a referendum on rent control…”
Perceived control also influences how people feel when exposed to others who are "higher" than them on some metric. Studies on social comparison have found that "upward comparison" (comparing oneself to "higher" others) was "debilitating only when accompanied by low perceived control".
“When inequality loses its association with hope and instead becomes interpreted as a signal of a rigged society, higher inequality relates to lower well-being.” - Buttrick, N. R., S. J. Heintzelman, et al. (2017). Inequality and well-being.
The California legislature recently passed Assembly Bill (AB) 2098, which would “designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or ‘COVID-19’ as unprofessional conduct”. AB2098 has been signed by the governor and is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2023. Here are some excerpts from the new law…
Then again, false equivalence is much more than a matter of flawed reasoning or cognitive bias. Comparisons reflect an understanding of how the world works, what leads to what and over what time frame. A problematic comparison may stem from empirical error, logical error, or both. But people rarely hold themselves to some scientific standard of accuracy. Sometimes a comparison is made to serve a larger point and it’s not really advancing the conversation by nitpicking minor errors.
“If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have 4 million open jobs” - Stephanie Ferguson/US Chamber of Commerce, October 31, 2022
The clearance rate for violent and property crimes has been stagnant in the US for the past 50 years, hovering around 46% and 17%, respectively, during 1971–2019. As follows: …
Ok, so fear of getting caught deters crime more than fear of the legal consequences after getting caught. That makes sense, given that the former is a more immediate concern than the latter. But then, if getting caught were never followed by serious consequences, it would cease being a threat. Consequences still matter.
As a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the following excerpt from The Economist piqued my curiosity: “…the actual Democratic Socialists of America, an influential pressure group whose rose logo can be spotted in hipster-ish corners of Brooklyn and Washington DC, aspire for a future of “popular control of resources and production, economic planning [and] equitable distribution”. It is not a message tailored to win in Miami.” …Whoa – that’s a lot more hardcore than the DSA I used to know! So, what else does the DSA want?
The surprise here (at least for me) is the number of respondents who considered "obeying their rulers” as essential to democracy. I didn’t think democracies had rulers, which per Dictionary.com are sovereigns who exercise “supreme” authority, such as monarchs and emperors. Then again, meaning is much bigger than a dictionary definition. The discordant survey responses may have simply reflected different ideas about what a ruler is and does. Perhaps some respondents saw rulers as “those who make laws” and concluded that a citizenry that obeys laws is indeed essential for a functioning democracy. Which is not unreasonable.
I would have thought there’d be a closer relationship between type of government (e.g., democratic versus autocratic) and perceived freedom of choice and control. True, a greater percentage of US and Canadian respondents reported high levels of freedom, but more than 40% of respondents in China, Iran, and Myanmar reported high levels of freedom as well. And not even a quarter of the Japanese respondents felt substantially free. Obviously, perceived freedom of choice and control has other feeder streams than form of government.
The World Value Survey (WVS) has recently completed its seventh wave of data collection, covering 58 countries over the period of 2017-2022. This series of posts will highlight some of the findings. I’ll use the same subset of countries in each post. In this post, I’ll focus on what the WVS calls “emancipative” values, as in emancipation from authority. Emancipative values emphasize freedom of choice and "involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people." (World Values Survey, 2022).
And then there’s the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 as “a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected”. Per the Declaration’s own preamble: “… the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…[and] it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”.
Considerations
Public and bipartisan buy-in
Funded primarily through transfers from budgets of redundant government programs
Minimal tax increase on employers and affluent households
Employers and households paying higher taxes would also benefit from the ASBI - making the tax increase much more palatable
The problem with broad statements about rent control is that rent control laws vary greatly and so their effects are likely to vary greatly. Details matter.