Baumol's Law suggests the money spent on less automatable industries increases as the economy becomes more automated, so I question if the 7 percent figure is either realistic or achievable, given childcare is highly resistant to productivity gains through automation.
It's long term second-order thinking that people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to lack in my experience.
I pay taxes so other people can afford to have kids, they can stay home and give the kids a stable childhood. Then the kids will go to subsidised childcare (0-250€/month depending on income) and later to school where they have free school lunches and well-paid teachers.
Why? Because I'm getting old and when I retire we need people working and paying taxes so there's money to pay for MY healthcare and pension.
I was not trying to start an ideological battle — just pointing out that childcare is not cheaper, it's just paid out of taxes instead of consumer spending.
But if you want to discuss second order effects, what basic economic theory and empirical evidence both show is that the second order effect is less incentive for people to work, and higher rates of children born out of wedlock. The implications of that is higher incarceration rates and other socioeconomic problems as a consequence of the negative effects of being raised in a single parent household.
This is the kind of multi-generational impact that I've found social democracy advocates rarely weigh in their analysis.
In terms of the economic impact, the higher taxes dampens growth, which is exactly why median income is so much lower in the EU than the U.S:
EU Europe average ≈ $30,500
United States ≈ $68,000
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines:
This shows up in company creation. The United States has vastly more large young companies than the European Union. Looking only at companies started from scratch, and now worth at least $10 billion on the stock market, the EU has about 14 companies worth a combined ~$430 billion, while the US has dozens whose total value is close to $30 trillion — roughly 70 times larger. In fact, the entire EU total is less than half the value of Tesla alone.
You might point to the Nordic countries as examples of welfare success stories, but the Nordics are only proof that a rich, high-trust society can stay rich while paying high taxes. Not proof that high taxes made them rich, or that the model doesn’t slow growth or scale badly elsewhere.
Keep in mind that it was during the Nordics' 100 year free-market era that they got rich. That's when they experienced the massive gains per capita income and average qualify life. On the eve of their experiment with social democratic authoritarianism in the mid 1960s, they were at the very top of global rankings in per capita income and quality life metrics. It wad the preceding 100 years of free market economics that got them there, not social democracy.
Not only has their rate of economic growth slowed since they raised their taxes, there is evidence that they’re losing the high-trust culture that made this model possible in the first place. They’re also losing the work ethic that was built over hundreds of years of hard labor in a cold climate.
More and more people are comfortable lying about being on sick leave, for example. That’s a measurable decline in work ethic. And you simply cannot sustain a high-tax welfare state without an unusually strong work ethic and high trust.
No reason why it would be cheaper in total, given the government workforce would inevitably unionize, leaving the taxpayer with very little bargaining power.
I think he means the latter. This makes learning the spelling harder because you have to learn each word individually, as you would have with hieroglyphs, as opposed spelling it out based on phonemes (that you would have learned from learning how words sound when spoken) and a limited alphabet.
That's not how I learned to read or spell in the 1970s. "Sounding it out" was the main strategy. You learned a few rules for how different combinations of letters sounded, and the exceptions to those, as you went along. But most words are spelled as they sound.
That's why kids start with "Run Spot Run" and other simple 3 and 4 letter words. They then learn the more complicated rules and exceptions as they go. It's really not a problem.
Spelling can still be phonetic even if groups of letters have differing sounds from those letters' sounds serially in isolation. The key criterion is that the rules must be universal, applying to every instance of those groupings, rather than having exceptions for their appearances in certain words.
...ok, it occurs to me now that a smart-alec might declare each individual word to be a "grouping of letters with its own phonetic pronounciation", whereupon phoneticism as-defined is achieved trivially because pronounciation is universal over the singleton universe of words spelt exactly like that word. You know what I _mean_ - "sufficiently small groups of letters", hand-wave.
The issue is that the language can never render that collection of letters. Sh in English can render the sh in sheep. It can't render any word with the sounds s and h together.
An alphabet assigns a letter to a sound. No more no less. English no longer has an alphabet because the Latin alphabet, designed for Latin languages, replaced the native Runic alphabet.
Serbian has an alphabet, as does Italian. All other European languages I'm aware of don't.
Waste isn't automatically a social loss. It only becomes a problem when the cost is pushed onto other people. If burning excess goods pollutes the air or fills landfills, charge for the pollution or disposal. Once the real cost is priced in, companies will naturally waste less without needing thousands of permutations of actions being restricted in an attempt to micromanage them. You still hold them accountable for harm — you just do it through prices instead of micromanaging behavior. And again, don't just assume waste is net-harmful
Since the 1970s, some industries were deregulated, but overall legal and compliance complexity has still grown over time, according to all studies that I'm aware of on the subject of the regulatory burden.
The studies indicate that a few large early regulations aimed at clear externalities — like major air pollution — delivered substantial benefits on the balance, but many of the smaller restrictions added afterward, especially as they accumulated, mostly generated paperwork (huge compliance industries) and fixed costs (that made smaller firms less competitive) with diminishing returns.
The sensible goal should be to massively reduce the regulatory thicket, while keeping the small set of restrictions that have clear, major benefits and are straightforward to enforce, and replacing the rest with simpler standards or pricing mechanisms that prevent negative externalizations without dragging down productivity through top-down micromanagement of the economy that regiments the actions of private citizens.
Another factor was tech and crypto. The Biden administration was widely seen as hostile to crypto and DeFi, which turned off a lot of younger and online voters and created unexpected opposition to Harris.
There was also a perception of politicization in agencies that are supposed to be neutral. People pointed to things like EV summits excluding Tesla, or regulatory pressure and delays affecting SpaceX launches and Tesla investigations. Whether justified or not, the optics made it look selective and punitive.
Individually these aren't huge voting blocs, but at the margins they likely added to the broader dissatisfaction.
And what also didn't help was the perception that the Harris campaign operated in something of an ideological bubble. For example, reports that staff discouraged her from doing a Joe Rogan interview because they disliked him reinforced the idea of an echo chamber, which ties into your point about trans issues.
We shouldn't be balancing things we want to do for people in need against what kinds of things we will do to peaceful people that we shouldn't do. Nonmaleficence precedes beneficence.
In any case, abundance generally comes from not crossing those lines — from nonmaleficence. The US crosses those lines a plenty, but still less so than the EU, and consider how much higher its average wages are:
The source of the addiction is that an amount of effort is highly likely to result in a fulfilling outcome. That makes you want to make more effort. In the past, a lot of work was very futile, very tedious and often felt hopeless and that made people essentially give up. So this is a very good problem to have. I guess people should monitor their own output and try to pace themselves. But also be grateful that we have these capabilities that allow us to solve so many problems and achieve so many of the things that we want in life.
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