U.S. workers took home their smallest share of capital since at least 1947

But it's also disingenuous to claim that none of today's approaches would show up as high income. A lot of old money would be protected still, a lot of new-money would be hit.

Isn't it telling that there was so much massive development of American industry in the post-WWII era and yet there weren't any Musks or Bezos or Gates? A country that had minted tycoons like Getty and Rockefeller and Carnegie stopped for a while. A guy like Howard Hughes was involved in several areas of development but didn't touch the guys who came before him or after him overall...

The list goes on and on. They argue over where new debt should be spent, who to bomb, or what new powers the government should claim. What we don't see is a debate over government overreach, balanced budgets, or even whether we should even be in a war with Iran.

This is a misunderstanding of how "tax cuts" work under the US income tax. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Notice the lack of "tax cuts". GDP goes up, taxes go up by exactly the same amount. The number from the most recent year is basically the same as the number from 50 years prior in 1975. Ratio hasn't changed meaningfully since the end of WWII. But Congress somehow keeps passing "tax cuts", so how does that work?

It's because the tax cuts are fake. They set the tax brackets in dollars rather than percentiles, but the tax rates are in percentages, so that's not a stable ratio. In 1995 the median household income was $34,080, now it's $87,460. If they left the tax brackets the same, it would shove the middle class into the tax brackets meant for the rich. De facto middle class tax hike whenever they do nothing.

Naturally Congress loves this, because every few years they get to pass a bill re-adjusting the numbers to keep the true tax rate the same while calling it a "tax cut", and thereby get to claim credit for something people want while not really changing anything. Which is their absolute favorite thing, and why they never fix it by setting the tax brackets in percentiles.

At then end of the day the way things are in America is a reflection of what the American people want their country to be.

People like to make the argument that Americans would stand up and sort this problem out, but the country is just so big, and the average American just doesn't have enough money to do something, and people are spread far and wide and that there's just no way for the to come together to decisively end these problems but it's just excuses. People by and large are content with the status quo. This is just what they want.

Precarious state of health care access and incomprehensibly opaque costs? That's a choice.

An ever escalating police state that has reached new peaks of immigration police and pulling random people off the street and a national guard perpetually patrolling cities? That's a choice.

Forever wars with no discernible objective or end point in the Middle East? That's a choice.

consolidation of media and economic control into a smaller and smaller group of people? That's a choice.

All of this is a choice that Americans collectively continue to make. And my prediction is that they'll continue to keep making these (imho) poor choices.

When Social Security was created in the 40's, the ratio of workers paying taxes to beneficiaries was like 40:1. So, each worker originally paid a very share amount.

Today, owing to demographic factors, that number is 3:1. Soon it will be 2:1. So by 203X, that number will drop below 1:1, meaning the program will be paying out more money than it takes in. It's at that point that the program will be considered "broke", because it can't meet its obligations.

So there's any number of solutions, which mostly boil down to some combination of the following: Raise SS taxes, cut benefits, or delay benefits (ie later retirement age)

You can't save it by cutting education or defense spending. By 2036 the combined social security and medicare shortfall is projected to reach $2.7 trillion. If defense spending stays at around 3.1% of GDP--it has been decreasing as a share of GDP since the 1990s--then the shortfall in medicare and social security will be about $1 trillion more than the entire defense budget.

It isn't fully funded though and people have been raising the alarm for decades now that it will run out of money.

The problem isn't simply that governments are stealing from the social security pot, the program isn't designed in a sustainable way and there are no direct links between money taken in and benefits paid out. The assumption at the time was that growth would always keep up, that fails eventually.

the big spend since 2001 was going to war

If police have advanced surveillance technology and drones, even violent protest becomes very hard.

What pressure is there to cater to people who are powerless dead weight on the economy?

We've been reshaping the system to redistribute trillions to capital owners via government IOUs that will eventually come due. Inevitably, this will be "solved" by cutting benefits to workers while insisting no other solution could possibly exist.

Like, you know, undoing these relatively recent handouts to the ultra rich and restructuring policy to the benefit of workers.

The notion that people will simply roll over and literally die for profit margins is absurd. The system will break and be rebuilt in that situation.

I'm much more worried about what housing looks like in the future.

It's more like, people have squishy "fairness" wetware.

Suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 in value and doesn't cost you anything whatsoever. You'd have to be a real bastard not to press the button, right?

Now suppose there is a button where if you press it, it causes your neighbor to get $50,000 and causes you to get $10,000. This one is even more obvious, but it's also the sort of thing where you wouldn't be surprised to discover people starting a campaign to say that the button is unfair and we need to ban anyone from doing that.

And it's basically because humans evolved under conditions of inherent scarcity. If you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you still get a house and a car and free time for your family/projects etc., and they get a mansion and a Ferrari and can pay someone to do things for them so they have even more free time, is that actually a problem? Whereas if you getting 20% of what someone else does means that you can't even feed your family while they're getting fat, you're going to go to war over that.

In a high scarcity environment, things look like the second one, and that's where the human fairness wetware got its intuitions. But modern stuff mostly looks like the first one, and to the extent it looks like the second one it's usually artificial scarcity. It's not that we lack the resources to produce enough housing, it's that building more of it in a particular place is prohibited by law. And then it's not that they get a bigger house than you, it's that you don't get one at all, and the objection goes back to being reasonable. But the better way to solve that is to build more housing -- eliminate artificial scarcity -- rather than trying to fight over a limited quantity of something that doesn't actually have to be so limited.

Alice has nothing, Elon has $1T and we give them each a UBI of, lets say, $50k.

Your "instant inflation" means now their effective buying power is diluted by some fixed factor X. You claim this somehow leaves both Alice and Elon in "the same place they started from"

100000005 X == 100000000 but 5 X = 0, if you've done high school math you can probably see that there is no value of X for which this works.

Well, no, even if it causes inflation, everyone won't be in the same place they started from, because (even if you assume no additional progressive tax or other revenue stream is established alongside it) a flat per-capita additional personal income stream doesn't result in the same distribution of income as existed without it. It would narrow the (relative) range of income distribution, making the poor better off and the rich worse off (assuming no overall change in purchasing power.)

And that's the only solution to UBI, when resources are abundant enough that UBI isn't needed or with UBI we increase resource enough that there isn't inflation risks.

All UBI experiments till now have proven it's not bad for the people, if we just manage the economy part it will all work out somehow.