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I think the long-term historical drop in the ratio of [top marginal rate on individual income] to [tax as a % of GDP] is mainly the result of these factors:

1) increased tax compliance

2) more tax deductions

Overall, you’d need to use a more comprehensive “area under the curve” analysis of every tax to predict the impact of tax policy on total tax revenue, and it would be surprising if it could be predicted based only on the top marginal rate.

A major source of short-term noise is the business cycle, where capital gains and corporate profits fluctuate much faster than GDP, and some automatic stabilizers decrease revenue.

You also need to include inflation. Tax receipts actually fell on an inflation-adjusted basis in 2018. Absent any changes in government policy, you’d expect expenses to roughly follow inflation plus population growth, and revenues to roughly follow GDP.

> The point of the chart going back to WW2 is to show that it's a little more complicated and we can't draw conclusions either way.

I don’t think this is correct. Yes, the economy is complicated. No, that doesn’t mean when cutting taxes we can ignore the resulting increase in the budget deficit. A claim that cutting taxes won’t increase the deficit constrains you to make other claims according to the GDP = C + G + I + X equation, and we should demand that lawmakers be specific about those claims.

As I pointed out, the chart is not really flat. The line actually goes up and down.

GDP was growing before and after the Trump tax cut, so growth in tax revenue year over year was expected. The Trump tax cuts went into effect in 2018, and according to your link tax revenues increased from 3.32 to 3.33 trillion that year, which is a 0.3% increase. This was during a year when GDP grew by 5.2%. In other words, revenues fell behind GDP by 4.9%.

Note that I used nominal GDP growth because the linked article used nominal tax revenue. To adjust for inflation we subtract the inflation rate from both sides and we’d get the same 4.9% fallback in tax growth relative to GDP growth.

To be more correct, it’s a 7% decrease in income over $5,000,000 (if the total tax rate on that income was 50% before and went to 53.5%, the amount remaining dropped by 7%).

I think this point is under-appreciated. As the top federal tax rate has dropped over the decades, each additional percentage point drop has given less proportional value to top-rate-payers, while costing proportionally more of remaining federal revenue. In that sense, the lower the tax rate already is, the more expensive a tax cut is to the government. The higher the tax rate already is, the more expensive a tax increase is to taxpayers.

This is why tax cuts under Bush and Trump blew up the federal budget - tax rates were already pretty low, so quite deep cuts to revenue were required to deliver any notable benefit to high-rate taxpayers. It’s hard to make rich people much richer by cutting taxes when they are already keeping most of their income. In the case of the Trump tax cut, rates were already so low it required raising taxes on some to cut for others.

On the other hand, you can go back and find times when after-tax income of top rate payers doubled because the top rate dropped from eg. 91% to 77%, which delivered a lot of relative value to those taxpayers while fitting more easily into the federal budget (although as always, it’s probably more complicated as tax bills make changes to deductions when they change rates).

I’m not sure. If Facebook had been more surgical to send less traffic to clickbait listicles, but more to Prestigious Investigative Journalists, would the outcome have been the same? Did the unemployed listicle authors find their passion and become serious journalists working the tech beat?

Wow, iPad revenue up 31% YoY after being down ~10% in the last few quarters. Similar numbers to a Q1 (holiday season). I guess it makes sense that the tablet form factor is popular when so many people are indoors.

Also, services revenue grew YoY but it’s the first time it didn’t grow QoQ in a long time, so it seems to have stagnated. Services include a lot of recurring revenue so they should be consistently growing QoQ.

Wearables growth also slowed, this may be the other side of the coin when people are indoors and don’t want to buy a watch for fitness tracking.

I don’t think harming journalists was the motive, but it was the outcome, and in hindsight it seems predictable. At least it should serve as a lesson to anyone who faces a similar decision in the future.

Modifying the news feed algorithm to send less traffic to traditional news sites contributed to a lot of layoffs and general turmoil in the industry. This resulted in major animosity toward Facebook among journalists, which has encouraged them to highlight the negative effects of Facebook. These narratives encourage regulatory action against Facebook, which is now one of the main risks facing the company. I’d go so far as to say this little revenue-optimizing move may be a major cause of the media’s turn from fawning over big tech to trying to take it down. Similar story with the fights over payment for Google News previews in Europe. Squeezing journalists financially is a great example of a penny-wise, pound-foolish move.

I’m just responding to the common claim that means-testing UBI would be expensive relative to the expenditures of the program (well-illustrated by the quote “appropriating dollars to save pennies“ in the comment I responded to). This is a quantitative question, not a moral one. I don’t think it serves the movement to be making arguments that are obviously wrong if you do a bit of easy research or math, or just think critically about it. It makes the advocacy less credible. Since most people only read comments online and don’t post, you might not normally get any feedback from those who feel this way.

> Furthermore, you can solve the same problem just by increasing taxes on the rich. If you send every rich person $12k, but also tax them $12k more per year, the money spent/saved is exactly the same as not sending it to them in the first place.

This argument assumes you are identifying wealthy people, so again, it doesn’t support the claim that the overhead of identifying wealthy people will make UBI more expensive.

There’s still a ton of interesting content on YouTube. They have taken down stuff that didn’t deserve to be taken down, but it’s a very small portion of overall content. Other than people who are only interested in watching borderline material, I don’t think it affected the average user much. I can still watch a guy marvel in an endearing Canadian accent as he inspects the manufacturing of a $500 toaster.

And YouTube continued to grow quickly last year, so in the empirical sense it is doing well. The nature of the platform is that it is full of content producers with massive followings. If a small portion of those producers get dinged, they can make a lot of noise, but it doesn’t necessarily amount to much compared to YouTube as a whole.

I hear this argument a lot but it makes no sense to me. Suppose UBI is $12k/year. Then as long as it costs less than $12k to identify a rich person, it’s cheaper to not pay the rich people than to pay everyone.

In fact, we already have any agency that does this for most Americans called the IRS. The budget of the IRS is $12 billion, which comes out to about $100 per taxpayer. The cost of the IRS administering the tax system is less than 1% of the value of the money it raises. The IRS does things like check if people are eligible for credits and deductions they claim, and if they are due a refund. Clearly it’s much cheaper to employ an agency like the IRS to check the numbers than it is to just pay everyone. Increases to the budget of the IRS raise tax revenues, yielding a positive return. And since we already have the IRS, we don’t even need to fund a new agency to do this work for UBI. Compared to the overall cost of the UBI program (trillions of dollars) it would be trivial to fund the IRS to do means-testing. This would make UBI a much cheaper program, so it would be easier to fit into the budget.

I don’t doubt that local welfare agencies are a shitty bureaucracy, and I wouldn’t advocate putting them in charge of UBI.