Give me your energetic, your rich,
Your striding elite yearning to oppress,
The vaunted gild of your desolate shore.
Send these, the landowners, first-class-turbulence-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the door for those with gold!
America is broke. If you want to tax the rich you need to let them into the country. And people buying a house aren't that rich anyway. Besides, this is very similar to the immigration policy of Canada or Singapore, which also give points if you buy property and start a business in the country. Their economies are vastly outperforming ours and it might be worth emulating them.
We were taxing the rich progressively for decades and doing great as a country. The past decade has been great for the rich, but horrible for the country. The number one factor preventing investment today is not taxes, but lack of confidence brought about by a crippled economy brought about by haphazardly lowered taxes.
How Congress managed to convince us this is a moral issue instead of one of straightforward math I'll never understand.
I think your analysis is half right: it explains why the rich are doing better, but not why the poor are doing worse. The latter is occurring because the shift of manufacturing to lower-cost countries has increasingly eliminated the possibility of middle class jobs for those without a college degree. Manufacturing jobs have been replaced with low-value-add service jobs, which naturally result in lower pay.
Even if we were to ratchet taxes on the wealthy back up, this wouldn't do anything to bring high-value-add manufacturing jobs back.
Although Singapore is outperforming our economy (on a per-capita basis), Canada is not. Why do you believe emulating them will get us Singapore-like benefits rather than Canada-like harms?
1. The Canadian economy is largely based on exporting goods to the US or exporting natural resources world-wide.
2. When the Canadian dollar reaches par with the US dollar, the benefits of US companies doing things across the bordering Canada rapidly evaporates. This means that economies like Ontario start doing poorly, while economies like Alberta and British Columbia that have natural resources to export start doing better (well, at least when coupled with an increase in oil prices.. because the tar sands become viable).
3. A lot of money comes into the Canadian economy through the entertainment industry. There are huge tax breaks in Ontario (specifically Toronto) and BC (specifically Vancouver) for doing things there, in addition to the exchange rate (when the US dollar is riding higher).
yummy: good question, and let me preface by saying I'm generally sympathetic to your worldview.
I think the answer is that this policy is pretty much directly guaranteed to increase the human capital and GDP-per-capita of the receiving country. Canada does plenty of other stuff badly, but if you've seen the latest Heritage ranking they actually exceed the US in economic freedom for the first time ever. With the exception of an enlightened, merit-based immigration policy Canada isn't doing many things right...but it is doing far less that is grievously wrong than the US.
I'd take even odds that once the pending true economic collapse happens (including devaluation of the dollar, tuition bubble pop, Euro breakup, et alia), that Canada will have a higher GDP-per-capita than the US within 5 years and certainly within 10. But this takes us far afield.
Even with the current slowdown, U.S. per capita GDP is much higher than Canada's. Singapore, as an island city-state, isn't really comparable to the U.S. It is more like Manhattan, and the government in Singapore can implement fairly heavy-handed policies that are not feasible on a continental US-scale.
Well, not the ones planning to go home. But perhaps a more welcoming route to becoming a citizen would help keep some of the ones leaving upon completing their degree.
> Seriously though, limiting it to STEM majors would goose academia in the right direction.
What is this supposed to mean?!
If you don't know, humanities programs are being badly squeezed already. Some programs are being cut entirely. I have a friend who is earning her Ph.D. in comp lit, and she (with all of her colleagues) are seriously scared that her field will no longer exist in 20 years.
And all this, despite the fact that undergraduate courses in the humanities are, according to my friend, as popular as ever.
I don't dismiss the humanities, but I do think that doing a PhD in 'em is very unlikely to be a good career move, and that government funding of humanities PhDs is very unlikely to be a good use of money, nor of human talent.
I'll agree that a PhD in the humanities is unlikely to be a good career move - but that is unrelated to whether or not it is in the public interest to fund them.
A career in fundamental scientific research is also a poor career move - my brother is in it himself. It's grossly underpaid, funding is hard fought and won, and job security isn't great either.
But it would be hard to argue against funding it publicly.
By so easily dismissing the worthwhileness of its pursuit, and by claiming that it is unworthy of governmental funding, you are dismissing the humanities.
But again, unsurprising given the company we're in. To a large contingent of us tech nerds, the humanities would always be a "if we have some spare time and money" subject, never given any importance until all technical subjects (or in this case, funding need) have been exhausted.
The odd thing is, I know a lot of people in other technical fields - physics and chemistry, for example, and yet none of them exhibit the same tendencies. It seems that dismissiveness for the arts is somewhat unique to engineers and CS.
It's a symptom of mental narrowness, and working with computers a lot does, in my experience, narrow the mind. It has a kind of digitizing effect on one's brain, causing it to see everything in discrete terms, which is to say binary terms, which may explain why tech nerds tend to be so rigid in their judgments. Anything that "does not compute" gets rejected. The mind becomes increasingly oriented to things that work the way computers work. Arts and humanities are far removed from that. Moreover, our technocratic age no longer assigns them any elevated status by default, so you have to seek them out, and few care to do so.
Perhaps physicists and chemists are less vulnerable to this effect because their work is concerned with nature. There has long been an alliance between nature and art in the human sphere.
> I do think that doing a PhD in 'em is very unlikely to be a good career move
Outstanding hackers have the luxury that what they love overlaps with what makes good money.
If you love literature, and know that you are taking on a career where, if you are very lucky, you will make $55k in an isolated town, I see nothing foolish about starting a Ph.D. in the subject.
Those jobs that only require you to wear a suit don't care what the degree is in.
Now if your future job only depends on your grade - not the subject which would you choose? Studying maths/physics/etc for 4years or doing psychology/media studies/american studies.
I don't know anybody that took nothing other than math classes for four years of undergrad... and I majored in math, and subsequently went to grad school in it.
