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A comment on Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men from Labor Force. Parent comment

Re:Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men ... by sverige on Thursday September 07, 2017 @12:53PM (#15193631)
Why link it to land value, which could hurt retired people who own their homes but have fixed incomes? Wouldn't a better alternative be to tax corporate income and close loopholes that allow them to pretend they're Irish (or wherever) companies? Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.
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Re:Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men ... by EGreg on Thursday September 07, 2017 @01:29PM (#15193972)
This. Corporations are where the money saved from automating jobs winds up. They are sitting on larger and larger cash stores. Facebook and others have one engineer per million people. Only corporate shareholders win, and only indirectly.

Bernie would have been a great UBI candidate.

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Re:Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men ... by zardo on Thursday September 07, 2017 @01:43PM (#15194091)
>Google and Apple could certainly afford to pay much more than homeowners.

Total private land value in the US is in the trillions.

Google and Apple could hardly make a dent in paying for a UBI.

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Re:Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men ... by EGreg on Thursday September 07, 2017 @01:55PM (#15194188)
That's not the point. Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do. As automation grows, we capture that savings and redistribute it to the working class and unemployed class equally.

Social Democracy!

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Re:Opioid Use Could Explain 20% of the Drop in American Men ... by sverige on Thursday September 07, 2017 @02:20PM (#15194427)
>Total private land value in the US is in the trillions.

>Landowners don't make profits from automation as much as corporations do.

Much of that land value is due to demand for space rather than productivity. Corporations generate wealth by adding value (at least theoretically) and benefit greatly from automation, so there is cash flow to tax.

Google and Apple are hardly the only corporations. They were just convenient examples of those who are successful at large-scale tax evasion and yet enjoy a generally good public image, along with Amazon, Facebook, et al.

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