Which of these bad policies will the US abolish by 2050?
➕
Plus
64
Ṁ3554
2050
79%
Affirmative action
72%
the jones act
56%
Subsidies for corn/HFCS
53%
Disparate impact doctrine
35%
Rent control
34%
H1B caps
34%
Social promotion in school
27%
First-past-the-post voting
24%
Federal subsidies for a negative-sum signaling arms race in higher education
22%
Non-land property taxes
20%
Buying a latte with bitcoin incurs capital gains because bitcoin counts as property instead of currency
16%
Feds arresting people for plots that the feds planned and recruited them for (entrapment)
12%
Payroll taxes
11%
Sales taxes
8%
Wage control
5%
Income taxes

Each resolves independently to a % based on my judgment of how completely the US has abolished them.

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Have you thought about creating the same market but for the EU instead? It might be interesting to compare the two. I thought about creating that market myself but I figured it would be better for both markets to have the same person judging them for better consistency

I don't currently have enough mana to create them, but here's a list of suggestions:

- the most important civil servant cannot be fired even if they're manifestly unfit for the job (i.e. presidentialism)
- lack of proportional representation
- the death penalty
- locally-controlled zoning
- little preventative and no abstract constitutionality control (the Supreme Court can most often only say someone's constitutional rights have been violated after the fact)
- executive-run elections
- executive-linked prosecution
- drug criminalization
- the upper house of the legislature has more power
- very limited freedoms of the air

@JonathanRay will you moderate this question if there's disagreement over whether a given policy is bad? E.g. some people still support the death penalty even though it's obviously, Saudi-Arabia-uses-it bad.

@BrunoParga No. Death penalty question is fine

All these policies are indeed absolutely terrible, but there's a lot of ruin in a nation, and it's far from obvious that people will come to their senses in the next quarter-century. Compare for instance to previous timeperiods of a similar length, such as the past quarter century: how many similarly-horrible policies have been abolished over that timespan? Most of the polices listed here survived that entire period untouched; the number of them that will be abolished in the upcoming years is hopefully nonzero, but that there are multiple 50%+ entries topping this list seems like it doesn't take base rates seriously. I hope I'm wrong, of course. One way I could be wrong is that to the extent good choices are correlated, a shift in a positive direction could have a cascading effect. One can hope.

Buying a latte with bitcoin incurs capital gains because bitcoin counts as property instead of currency

?

@MilfordHammerschmidt Will Capital gains tax still apply to small spends of bitcoin

@JonathanRay Is that true? You have to pay capital gains tax when spending bitcoin?

@MilfordHammerschmidt @JonathanRay I understand you would prefer not to pay taxes, but if Bitcoin were treated as currency you would still have to pay this tax, you have to pay taxes on foreign exchange gains too. So unless you have some reason why Bitcoin should be a special get-out-of-tax-free card, then i don't understand the problem here.

@MilfordHammerschmidt If I use the credit card of a foreign bank account to buy a coffee, somewhere along the cahon currency conversion happens but I don't think I ever actually report it as income?

@ShakedKoplewitz right, because you almost certainly didn't buy the currency in dollars at a significantly lower cost basis than you later sold it for dollars. But if you had, you would have to pay tax. https://www.gskassociates.net/post/foreign-exchange-gains-and-losses-accounting-and-tax-treatment#:~:text=Foreign%20exchange%20gains%20and%20losses%20are%20taxable%20and%20deductible%20respectively,arising%20from%20a%20trade.

@ShakedKoplewitz In that case the money is converted at the same time as you spend it so there is no capital gain.

In another scenario, If you had cash in Swiss francs that went up in value relative to the dollar and then you spent it on chocolate, I’m not sure whether or not that would be a taxable gain

@MattLashofSullivan I've failed to read the legalese there. Under what circumstances would I have to pay taxes on this? If I bought a thousand euros when euros are cheap and then used that bank account to buy coffee in America, would I have to report gains if euros had gone up by 0.1%? By 20?

@ShakedKoplewitz I'm not sure of all the details, but i just wanted to establish the principle that forex gains are taxable - so treating BTC as a currency wouldn't get one out of tax. And you can bet that if a foreign currency had gone up 10000% the IRS would make sure that those gains would not be tax-free

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