Semantic Cease Indicators, Shares, and Flows

Eliezer Yudkowsky as soon as described a psychological trick referred to as a “semantic stopsign.” That is when somebody proposes a solution to query in a manner meant to terminate additional inquiry. As he places it, a semantic cease signal “isn’t a propositional assertion, a lot as a cognitive site visitors sign: don’t assume previous this level.” He provides an instance of how the potential of new know-how permitting us to change our biology raises every kind of questions for the longer term – and an acquaintance of his who makes use of “democracy” because the proposed answer to the entire points raised. Yudkowsy says:

The important thing sign that a solution serves as a semantic cease signal isn’t the reply itself – it’s whether or not the reply is supposed to function a blocking mechanism from asking the subsequent apparent query. Real solutions facilitate additional dialog, whereas semantic cease indicators stop it. 

One frequent semantic cease signal I see as of late comes when asking the sorts of people who find themselves inclined to help the proposals of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren about how the packages these Senators suggest will probably be funded. The frequent reply is “tax the wealthy!”, or one thing like “we’ll make billionaires pay their justifiable share!” 

However what’s the subsequent apparent query? How a lot more money can actually be introduced in by “taxing the wealthy” or “making billionaires pay their justifiable share”? And would that be sufficient to pay for the proposed insurance policies? 

Let’s begin with one thing raised in 2019 by the economist Antony Davies when he pointed out the next:

Politifact reexamined this declare in 2021 and rated it as “largely true.” As they put it, “The 2 figures are outdated [as of 2021, when the post went viral], however the thrust of the declare is correct: The estimated $5 trillion in wealth of the nation’s billionaires is sufficient to cowl about eight months value of federal spending.”

Even this overstates how a lot mileage you possibly can get from such a transfer. Elon Musk could also be value $225 billion in the mean time, however that doesn’t imply he has $225 billion sitting in his checking account. That quantity is overwhelmingly made up of the worth of his inventory holdings within the numerous firms he owns, together with different belongings like bonds, land, house fairness, and so forth. If the federal government needed to take all of Musk’s wealth to finance present spending, that may require Musk to massively dump belongings, which might drive down the costs of all these belongings and trigger a lot lower than $225 billion to be recovered. 

But it surely will get worse than that. Even in the event you seized all of the wealth of all billionaires, and even in the event you made the extremely unrealistic assumption that you possibly can the truth is get the complete worth of these belongings within the course of, that may solely cowl what the federal government is at the moment spending for a handful of months. However the City Institute estimated that Elizabeth Warren’s well being care plan would require $34 trillion {dollars} in extra authorities spending over the subsequent 10 years. $34 trillion over 120 months comes out to over $280 billion per thirty days. In 2023, Forbes estimated that the online value of all US billionaires was $4.5 trillion – decrease than what Politifact present in 2021, as Forbes notes greater than half of billionaires have been value lower than the earlier 12 months. Let’s be beneficiant and spherical that again as much as $5 trillion. At $280 billion per thirty days, seizing 100% of all the worth of billionaire belongings and (unrealistically) holding all that worth within the course of would cowl the extra spending Warren’s plan requires for lower than a 12 months and a half.

And it’s even worse than it sounds at first look. Wealth is a inventory, however spending is a circulate. The worth constructed up by rich Individuals represents a cumulative course of that spans many many years. Which means in the event you utterly tapped the billionaire effectively dry to run Warren’s program, you’ll be able to’t simply repeat that course of once more 16 months down the highway to maintain issues going. You possibly can seize all of Musk or Buffet’s wealth, however you’ll be able to solely do that after. Grandiose plans like these put forth by Warren and Sanders merely can’t be funded by going after billionaires and even simply “the wealthy” – and anybody who provides that reply is probably going caught in a semantic cease signal.