Several sources are talking about how much Bernie Sanders would raise your taxes. For just about everybody, he would, but you get a lot more for them: free health care, free college, better bank regulation, lots more. The only people who are getting hit hard are people who have been treated very gently for the last 30 years. Here are a few hypothetical households and how they would fare:
Single, $20K income, 3 kids. (e.g. a single parent earning $10/hr)
2016 tax: $155, 0.8% effective rate
Bernie tax: $189.1, 0.9% effective rate.
Such a household is probably already on medicaid. if they had college loans, this is would be a huge savings. These are the people (and especially their children) who will be helped most: they will have an opportunity to go to college, where unless they get a "free ride" scholarship, they presently do not.
Single, $50K income, no dependents, no investment income or deductions (i.e. a recent college grad)
2016 tax: $5719, effective rate 11.4%
Bernie tax: 1131.55+4880.50+1373.60=7385.65 14.8%
2016 tax+$2K for medical insurance for a 26 year old: $7719 a 15.4% effective rate.
+5K for college loans: $12719.
Married, 2 kids, $50K income, no investment income or deductions (a "typical" family)
2016 tax: $3468, effective rate 6.9%
Bernie tax: 2263.10+1849=$4112.10, effective rate 8.2%
2016 tax+$3600 for medical insurance for 36 year old parents and young kids $7468: 14.9% effective rate. Bernie saves $3300 a year.
+5K for college loans $12468
Married, 2 kids, $100K income, no investment income or deductions (a 96th percentile family)
2016 tax: $11368, effective rate 11.4%
Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+1088=$13112.10, effective rate 13.1%
2016 tax+$3600 for medical insurance for 36 year old parents and young
kids $14968: 15% effective rate. Bernie saves $1800 a year.
+5K for college loans $19968
Married, 2 kids, $1M ordinary income, $200K investment income, $100K deductions (a typical 0.1% family, e.g. a very successful doctor or lawyer or upper manager in a big company)
2016 tax: $333,869, effective rate 27.8%
Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+229,584.36=384,467.76 or 32% effective rate.
Health care and college loan costs are negligible on this income. Bernie costs them a few percent.
Single, no ordinary income, $10M investment income, no deductions (a wealthy, stingy widow)
2016 tax: $1,972,340. 19.2% effective rate.
Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+4,012,837.4=$4,852,250.4 or 48.5% effective rate.
Single, no ordinary income, $10M investment income, $4M deductions (a wealthy, generous widow)
2016 tax: $1,173,600. 11.7% effective rate.
Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+2,610,400=$3,449,813 or 34.5% effective rate.
Single, $20M ordinary income, no investments or deductions (I can't imagine anyone like this; it's constructed to create the extreme case)
2016 tax: $7,868,864, 39.3% effective rate.
Bernie tax: 2263.10+9761+20,835.2+24,024.1+6529.6+98K+678K+4016K+5,355,800.1 =$10,211,213.1 or 51.1% effective rate
I found several sources bogusly claiming Bernie would raise your taxes to over 90%. I can't work out any version where this would be correct. The nearest I can come is someone using the "imputed income" scam to add corporate income taxes to personal income and add percentages with different bases rather than dollars.
I found some more credible sources computing numbers in the 70s by adding payroll taxes (on which Bernie would lift the cap. It's presently $117K) and state income taxes. e.g., california's top marginal rate is 13.1%, and the payroll tax on my imaginary $20M ordinary income earner would be on the whole thing, where today it's only on 5% of it: 51.1+13.1+6.2 = 70.4%. But this is at best an apples to oranges comparison. None of the incomes above include payroll or state (or property) tax. Even if you imagine this to be correct, this person ends up with $6M of after tax income. They should use some of it to hire an accountant who is not as incompetent as they are...
sources:
http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_calculator.htm
http://taxfoundation.org/article/details-and-analysis-senator-bernie-sanders-s-tax-plan
https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/HBEWeb/Annon_DisplayHomePage.action
25 March 2016
18 March 2016
PRT Elevator
PRT Elevator is one name for an advanced elevator concept that might make extremely tall or large buildings much more practical, or might allow higher overall elevator capacity in more moderate buildings while reducing the amount of space consumed by those elevators.
Conventional elevators go up and down in a shaft, one elevator per shaft, stopping at intermediate floors. In the tallest buildings, there are multiple elevators per shaft, each traveling over a limited range. Passengers must transfer from an elevator that travels, for example, from the 1st to 40th floors, to an elevator that travels from the 40th floor to the 80th. This is done to increase capacity: as elevator trips become longer, the time to complete a trip increases. But because the building is very large, demand is also very high, and in order to meet it, the number of shafts required would consume a sizable part of the building.
A different approach might be to allow the elevator vehicles move between shafts in order to bypass each other as they're stopped. People familiar with PRT will recognize this as very similar to an offline station. Such an elevator would allow many vehicles per shaft (as many as .33 per floor: 26 in an 80 story building). This very much higher capacity per shaft would require far fewer shafts and allow far more non-stop trips, providing much better service.
There are many technical issues to be solved before such elevators become practical, including powering the elevators (existing elevators use cables or hydraulic pistons), switching or steering the elevators, providing a similar level of reliability to existing elevators (existing elevators have several extremely reliable safety mechanisms), and control. None of these seem intractable, but a lot of hard work will be required to solve them.
In its most extreme form, these flexibly routed elevators can also be routed horizontally and diagonally. Viewers of the Star Trek television series will recognize this as a TurboLift.
The author is aware of very little actual development that's taken place on either a PRT Elevator or a Turbolift, but doesn't see any fundamental barriers. Some conceptual work has been done on the Spanish ATS PRT system. The author thinks it is workable but it remains a concept only.
This article was originally at http://www.advancedtransit.net/atrawiki/index.php?title=TurboLift but AtraWiki seems to have malfunctioned.
Conventional elevators go up and down in a shaft, one elevator per shaft, stopping at intermediate floors. In the tallest buildings, there are multiple elevators per shaft, each traveling over a limited range. Passengers must transfer from an elevator that travels, for example, from the 1st to 40th floors, to an elevator that travels from the 40th floor to the 80th. This is done to increase capacity: as elevator trips become longer, the time to complete a trip increases. But because the building is very large, demand is also very high, and in order to meet it, the number of shafts required would consume a sizable part of the building.
A different approach might be to allow the elevator vehicles move between shafts in order to bypass each other as they're stopped. People familiar with PRT will recognize this as very similar to an offline station. Such an elevator would allow many vehicles per shaft (as many as .33 per floor: 26 in an 80 story building). This very much higher capacity per shaft would require far fewer shafts and allow far more non-stop trips, providing much better service.
There are many technical issues to be solved before such elevators become practical, including powering the elevators (existing elevators use cables or hydraulic pistons), switching or steering the elevators, providing a similar level of reliability to existing elevators (existing elevators have several extremely reliable safety mechanisms), and control. None of these seem intractable, but a lot of hard work will be required to solve them.
In its most extreme form, these flexibly routed elevators can also be routed horizontally and diagonally. Viewers of the Star Trek television series will recognize this as a TurboLift.
The author is aware of very little actual development that's taken place on either a PRT Elevator or a Turbolift, but doesn't see any fundamental barriers. Some conceptual work has been done on the Spanish ATS PRT system. The author thinks it is workable but it remains a concept only.
This article was originally at http://www.advancedtransit.net/atrawiki/index.php?title=TurboLift but AtraWiki seems to have malfunctioned.
17 March 2016
Shirt Colors
Brownshirts -- Sturmabteilung or SA. A paramilitary army of thugs, consisting largely of unemployed young men, who intimidated opponents of the Nazi rise to power. The real police collaborated or looked the other way until it was too late.
Browncoat -- A fan of the short-lived Firefly TV Science Fiction series. The browncoats in the series were soldiers in the independence army, a little like greycoats in the civil war.
Browncoat -- A fan of the short-lived Firefly TV Science Fiction series. The browncoats in the series were soldiers in the independence army, a little like greycoats in the civil war.
Blackshirt -- The Italian Fascist version of the Brownshirts
Red Shirt -- A character in fiction who is there to be canon fodder. It originated from Star Trek where security personnel wore red uniforms and were often killed in the first few minutes of the episode.
Red Shirt -- in college sports, a player who is attending classes but not competing, in order to extend their allowable eligibility.
Red Shirt -- in American football, a player who is exempted from full contact in full contact scrimmages and drills.
Red Shirt -- A follower of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian military leader and activist.
Red Shirt -- A character in fiction who is there to be canon fodder. It originated from Star Trek where security personnel wore red uniforms and were often killed in the first few minutes of the episode.
Red Shirt -- in college sports, a player who is attending classes but not competing, in order to extend their allowable eligibility.
Red Shirt -- in American football, a player who is exempted from full contact in full contact scrimmages and drills.
Red Shirt -- A follower of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian military leader and activist.
Red Shirts -- A white supremacist terrorist group in the south in from 1875 to the early 1900s.
Redcoat -- a soldier in the British Army or Marines. From the mid 17th century to the late 19th, British soldiers wore red uniform coats. The armies of Prussia wore blue coats during this time (and German dress uniforms are still this color), the French wore grey and blue.
Yellow Jersey -- In bicycle stage racing, the current leader in general classification (accumulated time). Some other races use a different color for this same purpose: the Giro d'Italia uses pink, and the Vuelta a Espania uses Red.
Bluecoat -- a soldier in the Union Army during the civil war. The Prussian army also wore blue coats.
Bluejacket -- an enlisted sailor in the US navy.
Greycoat -- a soldier in the confederate army during the civil war.
Redcoat -- a soldier in the British Army or Marines. From the mid 17th century to the late 19th, British soldiers wore red uniform coats. The armies of Prussia wore blue coats during this time (and German dress uniforms are still this color), the French wore grey and blue.
Yellow Jersey -- In bicycle stage racing, the current leader in general classification (accumulated time). Some other races use a different color for this same purpose: the Giro d'Italia uses pink, and the Vuelta a Espania uses Red.
Bluecoat -- a soldier in the Union Army during the civil war. The Prussian army also wore blue coats.
Bluejacket -- an enlisted sailor in the US navy.
Greycoat -- a soldier in the confederate army during the civil war.
14 March 2016
Aluminum Overcast
Someone--at least as far back as Bismark's general Helmuth von Moltke--said "No plan survives contact with the enemy." It's consistent with the ideas of Sun Tzu although nothing quite like it appears in "The Art of War".
The US prevailed in WWII not by the superiority of its technology, although there was some of that, but by superior numbers. The US industrial base was able to produce more planes, tanks and ships than our enemies. That included producing a lot of them for our allies. The German Panzer tank was significantly superior to the US Sherman, but a plan was quickly devised where three or more Shermans could defeat a single Panzer, essentially by trapping it and forcing it into a crossfire. There were a lot more Shermans than Panzers so this tactic proved effective. Liberty ships were produced in such great numbers for such low cost that they were considered to have paid for their construction cost if they successfully made a single shipment.
Before the war, there was some design work and a little advance production by the US, but the real work didn't start until after Pearl Harbor. There were lots of big surprises. For example, before the war it had been thought that bombers needed to be able to defend themselves, consequently B-17s and B-24s carried a lot of guns. 5 or 6 of the 10 member crew of a B-17 were primarily there to man the guns. But it turned out it didn't work all that well and there were appalling losses of bomber crews, and work was quickly begun on a fighter with sufficient range to travel with them to the target. Once the P-51 came on line, the bomber losses dropped dramatically.
During the Cold War, lots of ideas about the enemy promoted lots of ideas about how we should defend ourselves, and this led to an ever escalating rise in complexity and cost. The various skirmishes that did occur: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, showed how completely inappropriate the Cold War ideas about weapons were for the conflicts we actually did have. B-1s, B-2s, F-117s, Nuclear Aircraft Carriers, etc., were all used in the Iraq conflicts, against enemies who were almost completely defenseless against those, and would have been almost equally defenseless against B52s and F4s, designed in the early 1950s. (not completely: surface to air missiles took down a number of planes, including an F-117 during Bosnia.). The most effective planes of the present generation, by far, are the drones, such as the Predator, which has performance not much more impressive than a WWI Sopwith Camel, but carries modern weapons and observation gear and can be flown remotely.
Recently, one of the more effective 1980s generation airplanes, the A-10 "WartHog", was retired in favor of the as yet undebugged F-35. Each F-35 costs more than ten times as much and cannot do any of the missions the Warthog proved so effective at very well. The F-35 program costs roughly the same amount each year as the SNAP "food stamp" program that feeds 5 million people every day.
We need national defense, no doubt, but we need to do it wisely. The over-reliance on extremely complex military systems does not keep us safe; it does the opposite. We are committing large portions of our treasure and talent to producing weapons that are not particularly useful. At the same time, we're offshoring our once formidable industrial base. Should we need to project force the way we did in World War II, we no longer have the industrial base that won WWII. It doesn't appear that we have any enemies who could take us on, but should we be surprised, with our absurd military, we will almost certainly lose.
The US prevailed in WWII not by the superiority of its technology, although there was some of that, but by superior numbers. The US industrial base was able to produce more planes, tanks and ships than our enemies. That included producing a lot of them for our allies. The German Panzer tank was significantly superior to the US Sherman, but a plan was quickly devised where three or more Shermans could defeat a single Panzer, essentially by trapping it and forcing it into a crossfire. There were a lot more Shermans than Panzers so this tactic proved effective. Liberty ships were produced in such great numbers for such low cost that they were considered to have paid for their construction cost if they successfully made a single shipment.
Before the war, there was some design work and a little advance production by the US, but the real work didn't start until after Pearl Harbor. There were lots of big surprises. For example, before the war it had been thought that bombers needed to be able to defend themselves, consequently B-17s and B-24s carried a lot of guns. 5 or 6 of the 10 member crew of a B-17 were primarily there to man the guns. But it turned out it didn't work all that well and there were appalling losses of bomber crews, and work was quickly begun on a fighter with sufficient range to travel with them to the target. Once the P-51 came on line, the bomber losses dropped dramatically.
During the Cold War, lots of ideas about the enemy promoted lots of ideas about how we should defend ourselves, and this led to an ever escalating rise in complexity and cost. The various skirmishes that did occur: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, showed how completely inappropriate the Cold War ideas about weapons were for the conflicts we actually did have. B-1s, B-2s, F-117s, Nuclear Aircraft Carriers, etc., were all used in the Iraq conflicts, against enemies who were almost completely defenseless against those, and would have been almost equally defenseless against B52s and F4s, designed in the early 1950s. (not completely: surface to air missiles took down a number of planes, including an F-117 during Bosnia.). The most effective planes of the present generation, by far, are the drones, such as the Predator, which has performance not much more impressive than a WWI Sopwith Camel, but carries modern weapons and observation gear and can be flown remotely.
Recently, one of the more effective 1980s generation airplanes, the A-10 "WartHog", was retired in favor of the as yet undebugged F-35. Each F-35 costs more than ten times as much and cannot do any of the missions the Warthog proved so effective at very well. The F-35 program costs roughly the same amount each year as the SNAP "food stamp" program that feeds 5 million people every day.
We need national defense, no doubt, but we need to do it wisely. The over-reliance on extremely complex military systems does not keep us safe; it does the opposite. We are committing large portions of our treasure and talent to producing weapons that are not particularly useful. At the same time, we're offshoring our once formidable industrial base. Should we need to project force the way we did in World War II, we no longer have the industrial base that won WWII. It doesn't appear that we have any enemies who could take us on, but should we be surprised, with our absurd military, we will almost certainly lose.
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