"Some Internet Archive employees have elected to receive some of their pay in Bitcoin in April."
so it's not all employees, not all of their pay and not all of the time, as I expected from the headline.
Giving employees the option to take pay in bitcoins is a completely different issue to mandating it, as the title seems to imply.
If I'm on my computer, I'm not going to pull out my phone to scan it. If I'm on my phone, how would I even scan it?
I - as do many others - have a Bitcoin wallet application with some change on my phone. Having the QR code here makes it easier to contribute something.
In recent political events, US spending got hiked about 50% from ~$2T to ~$3T a year (with modest growth associated with inflation and a growing population). Initially this was under the Bush administration and the auspices of bailouts and the like, but the Obama administration has made these increases part of the permanent baseline. The conflict here is whether to hike tax revenues 50% as well, or cut the budget back towards where it was in 2007 or so. Perhaps more Americans would support proposed additional taxes if they thought the additional government spending over the past several years had materially impacted their lives in a positive manner? Economic decisions are made on the margin, after all; it's a question of more taxes or fewer, and not like anyone's seriously calling to disband the fire department (of course, the hype says differently).
(Any spending related to Obamacare once it goes into effect is not even addressed in these figures, so it would be additional.)
More imminently, there is a lot of hype about how a catastrophic "sequester" would end up shutting down the federal government and ending meat inspections and starving social security recipients (Democrat hype) or shutting down the military and starving all our veterans (Republican hype) -- however, even with the automatic sequester, the federal government budget would be larger in 2013 than in 2012; it's only a cut relative to the growth that was previously baked into certain budget assumptions.
Other fun bits: In December the Republicans proposed tax reform which would have raised revenue by keeping rates low but limiting deductions. The Democrats didn't like the plan, they got their way, and ultimately there were tax hikes instead. Besides not fitting with the headline programme of "let's tax the rich!!" a salient reason that the Democrats didn't like this plan is that state income taxes in a lot of high-tax states electing lots of Democrats are also a major source of income-tax deductions. That bit didn't get a lot of press.
(Oh, and the campaign promise that's still on Barack Obama's website? $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in new taxes, to close the deficit? Yeah, the White House has proposed budgets and they don't look anything like spending cuts.)
1. For a given desired government outcome there exists some optimal taxation level. (This is a function, f(desired_outcome) = optimal_level, not a constant; I'm not assuming a particular desired outcome here.)
2. Unless you think the desired taxation level is 100%, it is possible to tax more than the optimal.
3. Even given optimal taxation it is still possible to obtain a suboptimal result.
Given the sheer staggering size of US government intake, and particularly the growth of the intake in the past decade with very little apparent growth in government services to show for it (bear in mind the sharp growth began under Bush and predates the financial crisis), it is hardly irrational that some people might think that we are currently experiencing either or both of a tax intake greater than the optimal or results not commensurate with the taxes taken in by the government, in which either case the logical conclusion is to not simply blindly increase taxes, either taking us further from the optimal tax base or feeding an inefficient system yet more money to spend suboptimally.
The per capita spend of the US government in 2013 is going to be ~$12,000 on a per capita debt of ~$55,000[1]. The per capita spend of, say, France, was on an income of 1.55 trillion Euro [2] and a population of 65.5 million, about 2300 Euro per capita, about $3000ish. It's not exactly unfair to wonder what we're getting for that much more money.
[1]: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_per_capita_spending.h...
[2]: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/france/government-spending , though you'll have to fiddle with it a bit
[3]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#...
So social programs would be voluntary. ala non-profit organizations such as Kiva that utilize technology, the internet and volunteerism (instead of highly bureaucratic systems with no quality control) to affect social change.
Of course this is all an extremely radical thought experiment. But it seems to be the coming side-effect of technology.
It's all fun and games until you work 4-5 years, and maybe you can get a couple of pizzas with your savings. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0