pilom

And how much more expensive is rent in your town because it has 100 fewer units? That is the opportunity cost. Unfortunately, these opportunity costs are not borne by landowners, just by renters. And then when the government charges landowners higher taxes on their now more valuable property, the owners balk.

Above a certain level I could certainly get behind saying no she's not entitled to it. 100% marginal tax rates above $10 million in annual earnings seem perfectly reasonable to me.

Sure they would. The companies would just have to have different ownership models that incentivized more distributed ownership between more people. If we somehow said that no one could own more than $100 million of a company, then for every person who has $1 billion of a company now, there would be 10 people with $100 million instead. This would be a net benefit to society.

The key to avoiding lifestyle creep is "pay yourself first". Set up automatic deductions to automatically pull money from your paycheck before it ever gets to your bank account. In the US, you can put $20k per year into a 401k account and another $6k into an IRA account tax free.

I'm going to take your comment at face value and assume a good faith question. There are a couple arguments for higher federal debt levels. Federal Debt doesn't really matter the way a household's debt matters. The debt to GDP ratio isn't the same as a family's debt ratio because the government can always just print more money to pay down the debt. Will this increase inflation? Very probably but not necessarily. Is higher inflation an absolute bad thing? Also likely but not proven. Modern Monetary Policy would state that you can just increase taxes (in particular on the wealthy) to avoid inflation if you need to.

Passive investing with savings from my tech job. My wife and I earned around 150k per year for 10-12 years but lived happily off of 40-60k per year for that time. The difference went into savings and retirement accounts and now we live off that nest egg and do what we want. I started a business teaching whitewater kayaking, packrafting, and swiftwater rescue which really took off during COVID but honestly the nest egg is what allowed me to do it pretty risk free.

Counterpoint, I'm a whitewater rescue instructor. My students and I are much more likely to see drowning victims than heart attack patients. Compression only CPR doesn't help drowning victims at all so we've had to add a "don't listen to your CPR instructor, do rescue breaths first" statement to our classes.

"Buy and dry" is the default outcome. Cities buy the farms nearby, use the farms' water rights and let the fields go dry. Agriculture uses 60-90% of the water in the west depending on river basin. Cities can afford MUCH higher rates per gallon for water than farmers can so the cities will eventually just buy out the farmers if nothing changes. I have no worries about Denver or Las Vegas or LA running out of water. There just might not be water intensive crops grown out west anymore.

We already do this. In Colorado there are over 50 "Transbasin Diversions" that move water from one river basin to another. Most of them transfer water out of the Colorado River Basin to the east side of the continental divide, usually the Arkansas River or South Platte River Basins. California also does this on a vast scale to move water from the wetter north to the drier south parts of that state.

There are many issues with transporting large quantities of water vast distances. From legal (it is illegal to transport water from the Great Lakes to outside of their basin), to physics (water is expensive to pump up and over mountain ranges and building tunnels is incredibly expensive.

Basically, just like there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build dams or pumped hydro electricity storage, there are only so many places that it is cost effective to build pipelines.

HN was down?

Anything is possible for enough money but I don't think you understand how much money what you're proposing would cost. In electricity alone desalination costs around 3kwh/m^3. 3.7mwh/acre foot of water. Last year we got 9.2 million acre feet of water in the Colorado River of the allocated 15 million acre feet. So if we say we want to supplement flows with just 2 million acre feet of desalination water, that's 7 Pwh of electricity. Per year. That's approximately 1000x the annual generated power of the largest nuclear plant in the world.

And we haven't even pumped that water 3700 feet up from sea level to the elevation of lake Powell.