<story><title>Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis</title><url>http://reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSKCN10U1ST</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsacco</author><text>I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I&amp;#x27;d like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself.&lt;p&gt;I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, &amp;quot;But doing this will increase income inequality&amp;quot; stated as a counterpoint.&lt;p&gt;If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven&amp;#x27;t seen definitive evidence that income inequality is itself a bad thing if it is a byproduct of capitalist processes that are improving life for basically every measurable metric.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying we should dismiss it, but I&amp;#x27;d like to engage in more consideration rather than make it a boogeyman.</text></item><item><author>acidburnNSA</author><text>I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book (&amp;quot;Listen, Liberal&amp;quot; by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.&lt;p&gt;Frank argues that after the liberal shift, &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot; now agrees to these pro-business, pro-Wall Street policies, but we don&amp;#x27;t have to allow rapid disruption freely. We could do what Massachusetts is doing. We could have tariffs and bring manufacturing back. Policy can prevent the inevitable.&lt;p&gt;I learned about the book while vigorously researching Trump&amp;#x27;s rise to popularity during the primaries. I personally can&amp;#x27;t wait for self-driving cars, etc., but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs.&lt;p&gt;I know lots of working people. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t want to go back to school or get technical training. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t want to start the next big company. They just want to work their job and go hang out with their family. What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m new to this line of thinking myself and I know there are lots of counterarguments. I just find it worth a ponder.</text></item><item><author>rev_bird</author><text>This is a pretty surreal move:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The law says the money will help taxi businesses to adopt &amp;quot;new technologies and advanced service, safety and operational capabilities&amp;quot; and to support workforce development... [Larry Meister, manager of the Boston area&amp;#x27;s Independent Taxi Operator&amp;#x27;s Association] said the money could go toward improving a smartphone app his association has started using, or to other big needs.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not an anti-regulation guy most of the time, but this doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem like regulation -- they&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;literally giving money&lt;/i&gt; to a fading industry because they are incapable of keeping up. I don&amp;#x27;t want to see cab drivers turn into homeless drifters, but this just seems wrong.&lt;p&gt;Making a more efficient competitor pay to help taxi companies make their service better? The whole reason these companies exist is because taxi companies have been utter garbage for years and got the government to elbow out competitors. Am I missing something? Surely the burden for &amp;quot;do things better and buy nicer equipment&amp;quot; falls on the taxi companies, not the other organizations that are embarrassing them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>HillRat</author><text>&amp;gt;I&amp;#x27;d like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself.&lt;p&gt;One main issue is that income inequality decreases socioeconomic mobility by inflating the cost of scarce goods that improve earnings capabilities. So 4K TVs are cheaper but college tuition becomes unaffordable, because good universities and grad programs are valuable, scarce goods that the wealthy can outbid everyone else on.&lt;p&gt;Policies that aggressively expand capacity and defray costs, such as post-WW2 expansions of universities and the GI bill, can ameliorate this by shifting monies down the socioeconomic ladder via taxation, but high levels of inequality also lead to a powerful political interest group that generally seeks to reduce tax rates that affect them.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also the more general economic argument that high levels of inequality are economically inefficient since they result in a lower average marginal propensity to consume, but that&amp;#x27;s not so much &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;could be better and provide greater macro stability.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Massachusetts to tax ride-hailing apps, give the money to taxis</title><url>http://reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSKCN10U1ST</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsacco</author><text>I like your comment as a contribution to discussion, but I&amp;#x27;d like to see a dialectic about why income inequality increasing is bad, in of itself.&lt;p&gt;I see this implied quite a bit on Hacker News. Usually something along the lines of, &amp;quot;But doing this will increase income inequality&amp;quot; stated as a counterpoint.&lt;p&gt;If overall quality of life increases, I am personally unconcerned with income inequality. I haven&amp;#x27;t seen definitive evidence that income inequality is itself a bad thing if it is a byproduct of capitalist processes that are improving life for basically every measurable metric.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying we should dismiss it, but I&amp;#x27;d like to engage in more consideration rather than make it a boogeyman.</text></item><item><author>acidburnNSA</author><text>I mostly agree with you, and I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you 2 weeks ago, but I just read a book (&amp;quot;Listen, Liberal&amp;quot; by Thomas Frank) that makes some interesting points about how liberals have shifted from representing working people to representing professionals, and to worshiping innovation. While free trade and disruptive technology is good for the professional class, it inherently increases inequality.&lt;p&gt;Frank argues that after the liberal shift, &amp;quot;everyone&amp;quot; now agrees to these pro-business, pro-Wall Street policies, but we don&amp;#x27;t have to allow rapid disruption freely. We could do what Massachusetts is doing. We could have tariffs and bring manufacturing back. Policy can prevent the inevitable.&lt;p&gt;I learned about the book while vigorously researching Trump&amp;#x27;s rise to popularity during the primaries. I personally can&amp;#x27;t wait for self-driving cars, etc., but I think someone needs to be thinking of the swaths of working people who are afraid of losing their jobs.&lt;p&gt;I know lots of working people. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t want to go back to school or get technical training. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t want to start the next big company. They just want to work their job and go hang out with their family. What do we tell the taxi and truck drivers when Uber shows up with self-drivers, etc.?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m new to this line of thinking myself and I know there are lots of counterarguments. I just find it worth a ponder.</text></item><item><author>rev_bird</author><text>This is a pretty surreal move:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The law says the money will help taxi businesses to adopt &amp;quot;new technologies and advanced service, safety and operational capabilities&amp;quot; and to support workforce development... [Larry Meister, manager of the Boston area&amp;#x27;s Independent Taxi Operator&amp;#x27;s Association] said the money could go toward improving a smartphone app his association has started using, or to other big needs.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not an anti-regulation guy most of the time, but this doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem like regulation -- they&amp;#x27;re &lt;i&gt;literally giving money&lt;/i&gt; to a fading industry because they are incapable of keeping up. I don&amp;#x27;t want to see cab drivers turn into homeless drifters, but this just seems wrong.&lt;p&gt;Making a more efficient competitor pay to help taxi companies make their service better? The whole reason these companies exist is because taxi companies have been utter garbage for years and got the government to elbow out competitors. Am I missing something? Surely the burden for &amp;quot;do things better and buy nicer equipment&amp;quot; falls on the taxi companies, not the other organizations that are embarrassing them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Overall quality of life&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; can mean a lot of different things, depending on how you measure. Do you mean the arithmetic mean, the median, the quality of life of all members of the population, or something else? And while we&amp;#x27;re at it, it&amp;#x27;s worth considering how &lt;i&gt;the population&lt;/i&gt; is defined -- all Americans? All westerners? All humans?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve found that the appropriate answers tend to differ considerably depending on these definitions, and there is nowhere near a consensus for which is the right one to strive for.</text></comment>