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  • I used to work for the U.S. Department of Defense and can confidently approve of massive defense budget cuts and merging of several military branches. This is only a single and relatively minor anecdote, but it is a small piece of a much larger problem and is one I can share from personal experience:

    I used to be the government lead for a highly successful defensive capability that only consisted of myself and 2-3 defense contractors. We outperformed several long-standing projects that had 10x the staff, 100x the budget, and had been around for approx 10 years without going operational ("operational" in this case meaning that intelligence analysts are authorized to provide actionable intelligence derived solely from the tool). My team released 3 operational releases within 1 calendar year from the start of contract.

    I don't say this to disparage the staff of the other project(s), but rather to highlight how the government can afford to cut long-standing under-performing projects and become more lean and efficient. The government funding allocation is often in the realm of $300k/yr for a single FTE. Multiply that by a team of 20-30 that works on a project that is shelfware after 8-10 years.

    My same project was approached by numerous branches of the US and FVEY military community. Branch A offered tons of money to put it on a ship; branch B offered even more money to put it in the back of reconnaissance aircraft or fighter jet; branch C offered money to make it man-packable for ground troops. US taxpayers already paid for this capability once (my team and myself) and we made it as unclassified (i.e. disseminable) and modular as possible (it was literally designed to run on a general host computer running Linux), yet each branch was willing to fork over tens of millions of dollars for something they could have installed on a $2k computer using some internal software repository. And that's what I suggested they do.

    Again, this is just one minor anecdote. How often does this happen where taxpayers are forced (being that they have absolutely no control over how the defense budget is organized) to pay for the same (perhaps MUCH more expensive) tools e.g. 5-10 times because military branch A, B, C, etc, want their own flavor of the same thing? Why does the military often have pissing matches of authority when there is so much overlap between some of them? Take away their stick by taking away some of their funding, and force them to share and cooperate.

  • Why a land tax? Many (most? all?) towns and cities have a real estate tax.

    You forgot long term capital gains tax. There is no reason that the investor class should be paying a flat 15% tax. Critics will quickly jump up to say that we need to incentivise people to make long term investments in businesses, which I agree with, so short term capital gains should be taxed like gambling winnings.

    Also, minimum wage can be addressed with a one time bump and after that, make tax brackets, 401k contribution limits, etc. multiples of the federal minimum wage.

  • The vast majority of these will not come to pass if the government is not in active fear of revolutionary change. That is the only time they will be convinced to budge from the status quo.

    A similar thing happened in the 30s in the US. Most people don't know that FDR was a trust fund kid and the inheritor of a fortune. The only reason he did the reforms was to prevent the country from going commie. Enough of the other capitalists fell in line. Those who didn't, tried to install a military dictator, it's called the Business Plot. Some of the smarter ones founded the John Birch Society, created various nonprofits, and selected religious leaders to empower with bags of cash. From there they slowly created the media, education, religious, and cultural right wing ecosystem that claimed the political system in the 70s.

    If we don't want a similar claw-back of power we need to ensure it doesn't happen again. We need to make sure no one is capable of corrupting media, education, religion, and culture at such a scale. I'd argue we need to eliminate the ability for people to own the means of production. After that is done almost every other problem we have as a society will be easier to manage.

136 comments