How much would taxes be in a progressive US

[XT]

@Shalmanese

One is parastic marketing. If a market is at near-saturation point, then the only way for a company to gain customers is to poach them from other companies. So Company A spends $100m trying to attract customers from Company B and Company B spends $100m trying to attract customers from Company A and they both end up with the same number of customers but $200m poorer.

Well, if both companies were this stupid then they would simply go out of business. Do you have any real world examples of this happening (not that I don’t doubt that it has happened in the past sometime).

@Shalmanese

Another is the duplication of R&D costs. Each company has to spend money developing the same thing, essentially in secret and duplicate each others efforts. Since government research has no profit motive, information can be shared freely which can sometimes lead to significantly faster development.

How often does it happen that two companies completely duplicate each other’s R&D costs…and why would it matter? The first company to actually get its product to market (and get patents) would have a huge advantage. Eventually other companies who researched along duplicate lines would be able to make back up market share, in theory, by either adding value (i.e. their own research allows them some other insite into the product, something added that the first company didn’t see or do), or perhaps cut down on manufacturing costs. Since multiple companies compete the cost to me for a CD player or a new TV is a lot cheaper than if one company (or worst still, the gubberment) had sole rights to R&D.

Again, do you have any real world examples of the Governmetn being able to research and develop a product significantly faster and cheaper than a private company…since the government isn’t motivated by profit and all?

@Shalmanese

Third is the tragedy of the commons or demerit goods. Private companies will tend to overproduce things like pollution since they do not have to pay for the effects (unless a regulation system like Kyoto is introduced)

Well, thats true enough. Market capitalism doesn’t really take such things into account unless society puts a price on things like a clean environment. Of course, if folks wouldn’t buy products from companies who were polluters then it WOULD effect them. However, the reality is folks care about the price of goods over how they were produced, so this is one of those areas I think the Government is necessary to regulate things to the publics standards.

@Shalmanese

Finally, there are issues with interoperability and standards. Each company has a vested interest in promoting it’s own standard in order to gain a competitive advantage but this leaves devices which are unable to interact with each other seamlessly.

Well, this isn’t always the case. Defacto standards emerge all the time in private companies and between manufacturers. I’m unsure why this is a problem in any case. Were it the government, there would be one standard and no competition, so we’d all probably still be using a varient on vinyl records to listen to music. Competition pushes technology…without all that ‘vested interest’ we’d pretty much be stagnant. One has only to look at the incredible product innovations in the old Soviet Union to get the point…

-XT

[Wesley_Clark]

@xtisme

Well, if both companies were this stupid then they would simply go out of business. Do you have any real world examples of this happening (not that I don’t doubt that it has happened in the past sometime).

Coke & Pepsi, Nike & Reebok, Colgate & Crest, Sony & Magnavox, etc. etc. etc. Government agencies do not really need to advertise the way private companies do as they don’t need customers.

@xtisme

How often does it happen that two companies completely duplicate each other’s R&D costs…and why would it matter? The first company to actually get its product to market (and get patents) would have a huge advantage. Eventually other companies who researched along duplicate lines would be able to make back up market share, in theory, by either adding value (i.e. their own research allows them some other insite into the product, something added that the first company didn’t see or do), or perhaps cut down on manufacturing costs. Since multiple companies compete the cost to me for a CD player or a new TV is a lot cheaper than if one company (or worst still, the gubberment) had sole rights to R&D.

http://www.hi.is/~joner/eaps/wrd_shor.htm

http://www.hi.is/~joner/eaps/wrd_fp.htm

"It has been estimated that … up to 30% of all R&D expenditures in the EC are wasted on unnecessary duplication.

The cost of this is estimated by patent professionals to be on the order of 20 billion English pounds annually."

However they don’t make a distinction between private & public duplication, it may be the same for both areas.

@xtisme

Again, do you have any real world examples of the Governmetn being able to research and develop a product significantly faster and cheaper than a private company…since the government isn’t motivated by profit and all?

This is kind of an open ended question. Do you mean if private vs. public companies work on the same thing which one will succeed fastest? You’d have to also discount tax incentives and government funding for research that was used by private companies then, and you enter a Quagmire when you do that.
FTR, the vast majority of AIDS vaccine research is publicly funded because as I’ve said earlier in this thread, private companies will not make money off of an AIDS vaccine. Private companies don’t want to fund an AIDS vaccine because they make good money on AIDS treatments already and a vaccine would eliminate this market. AIDS meds can cost $20,000-$30,000 a year and must be taken for life. A vaccine would only cost $20-40 and would only be needed once. This would not only be a low profit drug, but it would eliminate the market for antivirals that cost more than a luxury auto.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/0223aids.shtml

The research and development of an AIDS vaccine remains a top priority for the NIH. Fauci said that last year $600-700 million was invested on AIDS vaccine research worldwide—of which the vast majority of the resources were paid by the United States ($520 million from the NIH and $62 million from the U.S. Department of Defense).

So keep in mind that if you ever take an AIDS vaccine it will be because of government funding. Not due to private funding.

Private (ie corporate) funding for malaria vaccines, which kill millions, is also very low. Although GSK does do some funding, which is good to see.

@xtisme

Well, this isn’t always the case. Defacto standards emerge all the time in private companies and between manufacturers. I’m unsure why this is a problem in any case. Were it the government, there would be one standard and no competition, so we’d all probably still be using a varient on vinyl records to listen to music. Competition pushes technology…without all that ‘vested interest’ we’d pretty much be stagnant. One has only to look at the incredible product innovations in the old Soviet Union to get the point…

-XT

Microsoft would disagree with this idea of universal standards. But there are some universal standards, I can plug RCA cables into a Sony TV, magnavox TV and JVC TV.

[XT]

@Wesley Clark

Coke & Pepsi, Nike & Reebok, Colgate & Crest, Sony & Magnavox, etc. etc. etc. Government agencies do not really need to advertise the way private companies do as they don’t need customers.

None of those examples actually match what was said. None of them are at saturation point in the market, having to resort to stealing customers from the other and spending (and losing) hundreds of millions on marketting while their competetor does the same. Shalmanese was trotting out the old zero sum game arguement just using different words.

Going into a meeting atm and won’t be back for a while so I’ll have to look over the rest of your post when I get a moment.

-XT

[Monocracy]

@xtisme

Again, do you have any real world examples of the Governmetn being able to research and develop a product significantly faster and cheaper than a private company…since the government isn’t motivated by profit and all?

space travel
the internet

[John_Corrado]

@Monocracy

space travel
the internet

Though the follow-up question would be “How much of the technology used in these were developed by the government, and how much was developed by contractors in competitive bids?” I don’t actually know the answer, but I know that they used to joke about the astronauts going up on a machine where everything was made by the lowest bidder.

[Wesley_Clark]

@xtisme

None of those examples actually match what was said. None of them are at saturation point in the market, having to resort to stealing customers from the other and spending (and losing) hundreds of millions on marketting while their competetor does the same. Shalmanese was trotting out the old zero sum game arguement just using different words.

Going into a meeting atm and won’t be back for a while so I’ll have to look over the rest of your post when I get a moment.

-XT

I’m hurt that you think a meeting is more important than one of my posts. There are children in Africa would would give their right leg for a laptop so they could read my posts.

Sony vs. magnavox is an example of the saturation point. With over 98% of western households owning a TV companies have to find ways to steal each others market. Besides I don’t know if there is a ‘saturation’ point per se in a free market system. A person can always buy 4 TVs for their home instead of 3 and own three cars instead of two.

Food may be an example of market saturation as a person can only (comfortably) ingest so many calories a day and companies have to make sure that it is their food they are eating and not somebody elses.

[Debaser]

@Kimstu

That’s silly. Nobody here is saying that the government can do everything just as well as the private sector.

@Kimstu

I don’t think it’s ever been suggested that the provision of health care services should be a government monopoly, or shouldn’t use competitive markets.

It certainly seems like people are suggesting these things to me.

I was obviously only teasing about communists and socialists on the board. But, now here they are! It’s hard to describe some of what we’re seeing in this thread as anything else.

@Kimstu

So an important social need, namely universal access to health insurance coverage, is not being successfully met by the market.

So what?

The market isn’t meeting other needs that one could claim as equally “socially imprortant”, however you want to define it. Housing? Food? Clothing? They are all just as socially important as health insurance. Why don’t they get provided universally by the government also?

[Debaser]

@Wesley Clark

The private sector only cares about profit. It doesn’t care about the who, what, when, where, how or why of profit. If Pfizer and Blue Cross can make more money manufacturing chemical weapons for Syria than fighting disease they will go into that business. That is why the private sector is not superior to the public sector for things like medicine.

I don’t know how to describe this as anything but communist/socialist ideology at work. Profit = evil. Public sector better than private.

The only thing I wonder about is why you single out medicine in this paragraph. You could apply this twisted logic to just about anything else, including consumer goods. Nike would make more money manufacturing jackboots for the chemical weapon wielding Syrians than sneakers, so the public sector should make shoes too right?

However a vaccine for malaria, a vaccine for AIDS or an antibiotic that can defeat drug resistant strains will only make a few million for the company.

What?

A vaccine for AIDS would make a helluva lot more than a few million. It would be huge.

So companies end up working on unnecessary drugs instead of lifesaving drugs because they don’t care about the who/what/when/where/how/why of how they get profits or who they have to help or not help.

This isn’t true. Right now a lot more money is spent on AIDS because of the social considerations of the disease. The who/what/where etc is taken into consideration by our current system, albeit with some government helping.

Governments, since they are accountable to voters, do care about the who/what/when/where/how/why of what is getting accomplished and who is getting helped. Voters would not stand for the government spending life saving medical research funds on unnecessary drugs.

This sums it up nicely right here. You trust the government more than capitalist corportations, obviously. You think that your vote can control the government more than your dollars can control the corporations. I can’t say anything to convince you otherwise except to point at the ruins at just about every attempt at communism. It just doesn’t work. People are always going to be evil and corrupt and out to screw us over. Governments and corporations both are sometimes guilty of this. However, capitalism accounts for this, government does not.

[Debaser]

@Shalmanese

Except there are many, widely acknowledged, structural efficiency issues to do with free market systems.

Of course there are inefficiencies with capitalism.

But, pointing at marketing, R&D and standards as if they are meaningful weaknesses is silly. It’s like complaining that a car needs oil, tires and a battery when the alternative is a broken pogo stick.

The advantages of the private sector vastly outweigh any losses due to the things you list.

If private sector industry suffers so under these things you consider weaknesses, how is it that it’s so successful? How is it that capitalist countries like the US with all our efficiencies are the best economies in the world, producing the best products?

Communist systems didn’t have any of the weaknesses you list. How is it that the Soviet Union had shoddy products that nobody wanted, even though they didn’t need to waste money on marketing?

How come it couldn’t even feed it’s own people and had to steal technology from others, even though there was no duplication of R&D?

Why was it that the USSR was an environmental disaster that’s incomprehensible by the US’s standards, even though there were no “tragedy of commons” as you called it?

[XT]

@Wesley Clark

I’m hurt that you think a meeting is more important than one of my posts. There are children in Africa would would give their right leg for a laptop so they could read my posts.

Well, if I want a new laptop to read your posts on I have to win contracts. Ironically the meetings I’m in today are to discuss doing some IT support for the Government.

@Wesley Clark

Sony vs. magnavox is an example of the saturation point. With over 98% of western households owning a TV companies have to find ways to steal each others market. Besides I don’t know if there is a ‘saturation’ point per se in a free market system. A person can always buy 4 TVs for their home instead of 3 and own three cars instead of two.

I don’t think that this example works either and one of the reasons you give at the bottom. There really is no saturation point for most products. TV’s for instance. Yes, both Sony and Magnavox have parallel research and they both compete for a composite customer base. But customers that are directly loyal to ONLY Sony or Magnavox (or whoever) are in the minority…most people just want a good TV at a good price with whatever bells and whistles on it they want/can afford. I’ve had both Sony and Mag TV’s in the past (as well as a few other brands) and basically I buy a TV because of price and features. Also, it brings up another point about saturation…this would be true IF TV technology stayed the same and no new advancements happened (like, say, if the government ran things and had a monopoly on TV’s). However, thats not the case. I just bought a TV this year to replace my older big screen because my older TV was getting dated and there were new sets that were significantly better. I’m planning on replacing the TV in the bedroom at Christmas in fact for the same reason.

@Wesley Clark

"It has been estimated that … up to 30% of all R&D expenditures in the EC are wasted on unnecessary duplication.

Not time to read the cite (sorry), but I’d have to see how they define ‘unnecessary duplication’. What is that exactly? Companies aren’t monopolies so need to compete with each other…unless you only want one company per service. If you don’t, then they are going to have some cross over and duplication of R&D efforts…but is this needless? If it gets us cheaper and better products in the end? If it opens up new markets? At what point does something become needless duplication if it ensures competition?

Let me put it this way: When the state controls the companies and dictates things like the necessity of R&D, number and quantity of products needed, quality, etc, has this proven successful historically? Was it successful in Europe, say (I’ll avoid the obvious by not mentioning the Soviet Union and its satelites), or in China? If so, why did both go to a more privatized structure if government run is more efficient and less wasteful?

@Wesley Clark

Microsoft would disagree with this idea of universal standards. But there are some universal standards, I can plug RCA cables into a Sony TV, magnavox TV and JVC TV.

I disagree that Microsoft doesn’t want/like standards…they love the things. In the case of hardware standards and communications standards they wouldn’t be able to penetrate the market as they have if there WEREN’T any standards because they’d have to write one-off code for every platform out there. As for software standards, they simply want THEIR standards to be THE standards…just like other companies who write software encoding want THEIR standards to be THE standards.

There are a lot more things that are standardized out there than you think…and many of them are standards not imposed by the government but arrived at by private entities (sometimes with quasi-government oversite to be sure).

@Monocracy

space travel
the internet

I think they are both bad examples. Space travel isn’t any cheaper or more efficient because the government does it…its simply that ONLY a major government could afford it until recently. When a private concern takes a stab at it (like the X-Prize race) they show they can do it cheaper than the government. Thats an unfair comparison of course because the Government pioneered things in the first place so a private company is simply using what the Government learned so as not to have to start from scratch. However, such programs are done by the government not because they do a better job (anyone looking at NASA and saying we get the biggest bang for our buck or that the agency is efficient is going to have some quick stepping to do to make that case) but because essentially the Government has unlimited funds to draw on.

The Internet is a poor example for similar reasons. Its not efficiency and superior skills that allow the government to do such things, its deep pockets. The government didn’t develop the Internet to be what we have today…private companies took what the government had done and expanded on it so that we have what we do today. Originally the ‘Internet’ was simply a backup communications link in case of nuclear war, as well as a way for certain contractors and institutions to share data. Today the Government doesn’t manage or control the thing…quasi-government groups and private companies do. If the Government was running the show the thing would be slower and cost more…and I probably wouldn’t be able to get any good porn either!

-XT

[UncleBeer]

@Kimstu

The US Postal Service provides far better geographical coverage for letter delivery, at much lower costs, than private courier firms or FedEx. (I’m not clear why you think the Postal Service shouldn’t count in this comparison: it’s a bona fide federal government agency, even though it runs (usually) on its own profits rather than being taxpayer-supported.)

The United States Post Office is subsidized with your tax money - indirectly.

First, since it operates without paying taxes like competing corporations, it has a competitive advantage. You, as a taxpayer make up that revenue shortfall to the federal gov’t.

Second, the USPS has been permitted to borrow in excess of $11B (as of calendar year-end 2002) from the federal treasury for operating expenses. At lower than market rates. The taxpayer again makes up this revenue shortfall to the federal budget.

On the other hand tho’, the USPS doesn’t get the option of cherry-picking their services to select only the most profitable; it is mandated to deliver to all addresses. USPS competitors aren’t constrained by such considerations.

All-in-all, I would agree with you though, the USPS is a pretty decent example of a successful federal gov’t operation. But that may be because the USPS is encouraged to operate like a for-profit business wherever possible, rather than through legislative and executive mandates like other large chunks of federal bureaucracies.

[Wesley_Clark]

@Debaser

I don’t know how to describe this as anything but communist/socialist ideology at work. Profit = evil. Public sector better than private.

The only thing I wonder about is why you single out medicine in this paragraph. You could apply this twisted logic to just about anything else, including consumer goods. Nike would make more money manufacturing jackboots for the chemical weapon wielding Syrians than sneakers, so the public sector should make shoes too right?

What?

A vaccine for AIDS would make a helluva lot more than a few million. It would be huge.

This isn’t true. Right now a lot more money is spent on AIDS because of the social considerations of the disease. The who/what/where etc is taken into consideration by our current system, albeit with some government helping.

This sums it up nicely right here. You trust the government more than capitalist corportations, obviously. You think that your vote can control the government more than your dollars can control the corporations. I can’t say anything to convince you otherwise except to point at the ruins at just about every attempt at communism. It just doesn’t work. People are always going to be evil and corrupt and out to screw us over. Governments and corporations both are sometimes guilty of this. However, capitalism accounts for this, government does not.

You are blatantly pro-free market capitalism. I don’t see why you don’t see any dichotomy when you accuse me of being blindly socialist, which I am not. I do not blindly trust the government, but you seem to unconditionally trust the private sector. Its confusing that someone as radical as you would accuse me of being radical. I am not really radical at all, and I’m willing to believe the private sector is better if you can prove that the private sector is motivated by trying to save lives and that quality of life is better with the private sector in charge of medicine. But I’m sure you can’t. Because government orgs aren’t motivated by money that motivation is not a part of their resource distribution. Why do you think 80-90% of funding for diseases that affect poor people like Malaria and AIDS is provided by the government?

I realized after I made my post that an AIDS vaccine could make some decent money. However funding for an HIV vaccine is low and 95% of people with HIV live in the developing world, meaning they are not a high priority for for profit corporations.

For providing medicine do I trust the government more than the private sector? Yes

For providing consumer electronic goods (TV, DVD players, computers) do I trust the government more than the private sector? No

You didn’t address the fact that vaccines for killer diseases like AIDS and Malaria get very little private funding (maybe $200 million a year tops), which is far far less than is devoted to unnecessary (unnecessary meaning a duplication of a pre-existing drug) treatments for things like baldness, depression or cholesterol. If the free market is so great why is this happening? Shouldn’t non-profitable medications that enhance human life matter more than unnecessary, but profitable, medications? Some of us don’t care about idealogy or capitalist/communist. If someone can prove (which I have never seen) that the private sector is better than the public sector for medicine I’ll change my mind.

[Shalmanese]

@xtisme

I don’t think that this example works either and one of the reasons you give at the bottom. There really is no saturation point for most products. TV’s for instance. Yes, both Sony and Magnavox have parallel research and they both compete for a composite customer base. But customers that are directly loyal to ONLY Sony or Magnavox (or whoever) are in the minority…most people just want a good TV at a good price with whatever bells and whistles on it they want/can afford. I’ve had both Sony and Mag TV’s in the past (as well as a few other brands) and basically I buy a TV because of price and features. Also, it brings up another point about saturation…this would be true IF TV technology stayed the same and no new advancements happened (like, say, if the government ran things and had a monopoly on TV’s). However, thats not the case. I just bought a TV this year to replace my older big screen because my older TV was getting dated and there were new sets that were significantly better. I’m planning on replacing the TV in the bedroom at Christmas in fact for the same reason.

Which is why I specified near saturation point. A huge amount of marketing is devoted to convincing you to switch brands, you pretty much have to be blind not to notice it. “We tested dishwasher detergent XYZ against a leading market brand…”. The aim of the ad is not to convince you to buy more dishwasher detergent, it’s to convince you to switch to their brand. The Pepsi challenge, cell phone providers, ads for game consoles etc. Seriously, this is all marketing 101 stuff. It seems so obvious that it would be absurd to deny their existance.

[rfgdxm]

@Neurotik

And people with money and means are the only ones getting the best treatment in the country. There’s a reason we have one of the highest infant mortality rates and lowest life expectancies in the industrialized world. The average person gets the same treatments he’d get in another country.

EXACTLY. I literally may soon be dead due to lack of access to decent health care in the US.