Nah. …Well, don’t get me wrong, the rich absolutely should be taxed, sure, but that’s a different debate.
We don’t have a nationally mandated minimum wage in Finland. Because the unions set their own minimum wages (which they adjust frequently to market conditions) and the unions also have actual legitimate power.
Maybe they should try this stuff in America too. It’s fucking awesome.
Americans have been convinced that is socialism and therefore the greatest evil.
If there’s a minimum wage, there should also be a maximum wage, but I may be a communist, idk.
The people in the meme aren’t getting their wealth from their wages
Which is why this policy usually goes by maximum income or income cap
Maximum wage used to be a thing. It’s how we got insurance tied to employment.
Imo, nothing about what you just said is communist in nature, as we are defining terms for a continued labor market.
The US minimum wage hasn’t changed in TEN YEARS?! You guys need to revolt, that is awful.
To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I’ll let you guess which states don’t.
The ones where the people are most afraid of communism and think minimum wage is socialism?
That’s a bingo
You just say “bingo”.
For anyone about to downvote - it’s a quote from Inglorious Basterds ^
It’s an older quote, sir, but it checks out.
Lemming, chill
But you said—
50 states makes this game too difficult. Can we just guess colors instead?
I live in a red state with an $11/hr minimum wage. We got that by amending the constitution, thereby overriding the legislature which was opposed to the increase. Unfortunately $11/hr is not even close to enough to live on here so apparently it’s time to raise it via another constitutional amendment. Sigh
Gotta double it to catch up, and pin it to inflation at the same time so it stops falling behind.
Surprisingly, Florida has a higher minimum wage–nearly double that of the federal minimum, and will reach $15 in 2026. Of course, you can’t survive on that working 40 hours a week.
And most people in those states that don’t have their own don’t work for the federal minimum wage. My state has no minimum wage, and most “minimum wage” jobs start at something like $10-12.
start at something like $10-12
Which is still garbage. How does someone survive today on less than $25,000/year?
Yes, it’s not meant to support a family on, but it’s totally possible to live on, especially if you live with other people (e.g. have a roommate). A 2 bed apartment is something like $1200-1500, so if you cut that in half (i.e. roommate, dual income family, etc), that’s about 1/4-1/3 of a $25k/year wage, which is about what PF writers suggest.
And this is starting pay at the crappiest jobs, many easy to get jobs pay closer to $15/hr. The only people actually making $10-12 are teenagers, college students, and people with limited/negative employment history.
The solution here, IMO, isn’t to increase the minimum wage (that’ll end up reducing jobs), but to supplement the income of people who do those jobs (i.e. something like UBI).
The solution here, IMO, isn’t to increase the minimum wage (that’ll end up reducing jobs)
Research has found that increasing minimum wage does not reduce jobs.
Employment typically lags policy, and stores will prefer to raise prices than potentially reduce their ability to service customer needs. However, the higher the minimum wage goes, the more attractive replacements for workers become, meaning there will be more investment into kiosks and other ways to reduce headcount.
I think we’ll really see how things will work in the next economic correction when stores cut costs to retain customers. So I’m less interested in data from a couple months after the policy change (basically the Berkeley study) and more interested in data 2-5 years after the change. Will fast food companies increase the pace of developing digital replacements for workers?
I don’t have a link handy, but there was a study that showed that fast food businesses didn’t reduce staffing when they replaced cashier’s with kiosks. Rather, they shifted employment to areas that couldn’t be replaced with a kiosk, enabling the staff to meet the increased demand and increased sales that were a result of the kiosks.
Live with their parents. It’s doable to “survive”, it’s just that someone cannot “thrive”, i.e. live the American Dream, or have health insurance, thus getting back to your point about survival, although that’s generally considered a separate thing than income, bc e.g. someone could be on their spouse’s health plan.
And then there are all sorts of tricks to go below minimum wage too… including having more black people locked up and working in for-profit prisons than were ever used as slaves; or Waffle House’s trick where someone only gets a base wage of like $3.25 an hour and then while the minimum $7.25 per hour is guaranteed, in order to get more than that they have to make up the difference with tips (on what is <$10 meals).
But how do you help people when (a) things like the electoral college and gerrymandering exist, (b) preachers say from the actual, literal pulpit that God commands to vote Republican, and (c) those areas vote conservative not only for themselves but also apply that to the nation at large, e.g. keeping Mitch McConnell in power, and making abortion illegal in those states.
TLDR: it’s how they choose to live. And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those “rights” further.
And they might be about to fight an actual civil war to extend those “rights” further.
Well we know how American civil wars end, and the country could use some more Reconstruction
10 years… how refreshingly optimistic…
In 2007, Congress passed the increase to 7.25 to take effect in 2009. The minimum wage change 15 years ago was passed 17 years ago.
I wonder how hoarders of wealth will be thought of in the distant future. If we survive, I hope they are seen as fools with misguided goals, and criminals for being vacuums of human potential.
People should be contributing ideas, creativity and wisdom instead of worrying about their next meal.
The US minimum wage hasn’t changed in TEN YEARS?!
The vast majority of employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat. Wages have been rising (particularly post-COVID, after a few million Americans dropped out of the labor force for some mysterious reason) as demand eclipses supply.
And a big reason AI has caught on as a techno-panacea is business analysts are looking at the median age and size of the labor force, the stark hostility to immigration, and the perpetually increasing need for technical work, then realizing this is going to put huge upward pressure on wages unless much of that workforce can be automated away.
But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.
You know, something always feels a little off with an underpantsweevil comment. I could never put my finger on it though, always seems so close to being factual but for some reason skewed. I think it’s the declarative statements which turn out to be more of an opinion or editorial piece that’s only backed up by other vague references much like a matt walsh or tim (can’t remember his last name) might make.
Wages have been rising…as demand eclipses supply.
This is a weird general statement that reinforces that “supply & demand” is a worth-while endeavor that has worked out for everyone economically and socially. Of course wages have been rising… it would be beyond a depression if the average salary went down for the past couple of years. The important caveats are completely missed though…
While salaries are up, salary growth is down — the increase in average earnings is lower compared to the 7.3% rise between 2021 and 2022. The gender pay gap, while shrinking by 1% over the last 10 years, was only cut by 0.7% between 2022 and 2023. This means the average male makes $63,960, while their female counterparts make an average of $53,404
The average white male earns $64,636, while the average Hispanic or Latino male makes $47,996 annually.
With the annual inflation rate for 2023 at 3.4% for the year — up from 3.1% previously — salaries aren’t keeping up. A Smart Asset report based on MIT’s Living Wage data found that the average salary required to live comfortably in the U.S. is $68,499 after taxes.10 This is nearly $10,000 higher than what the average salary currently is. link
AI… are you talking about like a general AI or chatgpt? What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of “AI” into their program is a problem for sure, but it’s just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around. If anything, the companies are spending more trying to make it work (which it doesn’t).
Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked - “AI” checkout was actually powered by 1,000 human video reviewers in India.
Here is an article by the Mckinsey Global Institute.
One of the biggest questions of recent months is whether generative AI might wipe out jobs. Our research does not lead us to that conclusion, although we cannot definitively rule out job losses, at least in the short term. Technological advances often cause disruption, but historically, they eventually fuel economic and employment growth.
This research does not predict aggregated future employment levels; instead, we model various drivers of labor demand to look at how the mix of jobs might change—and those results yield some gains and some losses.9 In fact, the occupational categories most exposed to generative AI could continue to add jobs through 2030 (Exhibit 4), although its adoption may slow their rate of growth. And even as automation takes hold, investment and structural drivers will support employment. The biggest impact for knowledge workers that we can state with certainty is that generative AI is likely to significantly change their mix of work activities.
“But market forces are happening even in absence of legislative action. Union activity is reemerging as a socio-economic force. Not everything rests on a federal majority manually raising the wage floor.”
Interesting you’ve again promoted “market forces” (reminds me of trickle-down economics). Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance. The recent changes in the Biden administration shows that unions can stand a chance if the branches of government would actually support it.
Wouldn’t having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes? If the market determines the wage minimum, won’t your points become moot when there is no more demand? I’m just still flabbergasted that you believe “employers can’t pay the minimum rate, because their employees wouldn’t be able to do basic shit like travel to the jobsite or afford to eat.” I don’t know what social circles you are in, but this isn’t the reality most lower income people are facing.
This is a weird general statement that reinforces that “supply & demand” is a worth-while endeavor
It’s a fundamental pricing mechanism. Low supply pushes demand up.
What right-wing or doomscrolling blog are you reading about AI from? All these companies trying to cram some type of “AI” into their program is a problem for sure, but it’s just a fad which only the most useful implementations will stick around.
Efforts to shoehorn AI into daily business activity aren’t just at the retail end. We’re seeing it show up in doctor’s offices, to replace transcription services, and legal offices, to replace paralegals, and in IT to replace developers.
The implementation is routinely worse than the human labor it replaces, but the cost is so much lower that business owners will justify the transition.
Union activity has been beaten down by a war being waged for decades, proper legislation and officials protecting the rights of Unions are the only way they will continue to have a chance.
Union organizers who wait on corporately captured politicians to save them are fucked. You build the union first and you get the legislation later, when politicians recognize the union as a force worth pandering to.
By contrast, the Wildcat Strike and the Slow Down… hell, the very act of collectively bargaining, leveraged market force to exert pressure on employers.
Depriving businesses of their labor supply compels them to increase their compensation. That’s Econ 101 tier material analysis.
Wouldn’t having a federal majority, manually raising the wage floor, protect future workers when the AI revolution comes?
Sure. But you need a movement large enough to obtain the corruptive force of private capital first. Where do you get that movement?
By the time you have a coalition big enough to compel the federal government to change, you’ve already built a union big enough to force private industry to capitulate independent of a legislative fix.
Again, just baseless conjuncture that sounds “almost right”. You have the general principles, you even reference Econ 101, but analysis and expert opinion goes further (why there’s so many armchair champions out there, unfortunately). Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by. This just seems like base-level pandering that gets no where like a “group chat” on one of the mainstream news outlets.
Things do not happen in a sterile chamber. You can’t create union movements when they’re getting destroyed by officials
For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event. (link)
Your AI argument is fear mongering, as I stated above, with sources, a net increase in jobs is projected. This is the telephone/computer technology fear now for the 2020’s. You’ve yet to provide an actual argument for why technology shouldn’t proceed. Should oil and gas not go through the same transition? God forbid we have less administration and more skilled workers, as my sources concluded would be the outcome.
Yes, supply-demand is a fundamental pricing mechanism, as econ 101 will teach. Unfortunately the subsequent classes that economists take after also include the million different factors with changes that mechanisms output. For further understandings, I would suggest Unlearning Economics (here is one of his videos going over a Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on capitalism). He comes with credentials,
My background is as an economist who specialises in behavioural economics. I did my PhD in economics at the University of Manchester and from 2019-23 was a Fellow at the Psychological and Behavioural Science Department at the London School of Economics. I remain affiliated as a Visiting Fellow.
I have quantitative skills including mathematics, statistics, and coding which are illustrated by my PhD and current research. I am also a published author, with my book The Econocracy selling 15,000+ copies and having over 200 citations on Google Scholar. I also have excellent communication skills and have presented both my research and book at numerous conferences and universities.
Please cite some actual sources that have analyzed the systems and what your perspective has been formed by
Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is a solid one.
Richard Wolff also has a great podcast on the subject
Your AI argument is fear mongering
That is part of the strategy to depress wages, certainly. But substandard substitution is also a standard business strategy.
It’s way beyond that, but the majority of the population has become weak and complicit. Either a general strike or full-on revolution is needed. I guess people will wait until everyone is suffering except the mega rich to be angry enough to break free from their day to day fantasy of blissful ignorance.
Because eXcEptIoNAliSm and mEriToCrAcY, tHe aMerIcAn dReAm!!!1122
It just goes to show how powerful the indoctrination really is.
Seriously, I made overtly anti-fascist comments on a politicalmemes post that are getting downvoted…
Edit for your reading pleasure: https://lemmy.world/comment/13098744
For what it’s worth, you’re spot on and I gave you my upvote lol
But yeah, the resistance to the truth in favour of temporary comfort is quite scary to watch as it unfolds live in front of our eyes, but that just means we have to say it louder.
Thank you! And very frightening, we absolutely need to keep repeating it and louder in this sea of propaganda. Though it seems history will repeat itself, and “comfortable”/ignorant people won’t budge until they are all personally affected and suffering themselves.
Yup, “first they came for…” seems as relevant as ever, it’s almost like we never learn (more like are deliberately kept ignorant and just comfortable enough to benefit the ruling class).
Minimum wage shouldn’t ever be a specific amount, it should be a percentage tied to some other economic metric, so that as inflation or cost of living rises, wages increase with it as well. This BS of having to wait for out-of-touch millionaire Congress members to approve of minimum wage increases is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Congress has raised their own pay multiple times since they raised the minimum wage back in 2009.
Actually, looking into it, it seems that they gave themselves an automatic annual pay raise back in the ethics reforms act of 1989! Fucking assholes.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/97-615.html
“The automatic annual adjustment for Members of Congress is determined by a formula using a component of the Employment Cost Index (ECI),…”
“…This adjustment formula was established by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989.”
In Europe we call this wage indexation, you should try it!
Don’t worry, we won’t.
Canadians and Europeans, hold on to this stuff. There are people trying to take away universal healthcare from Canada and Brexit happened. This shit can happen to anyone if you get complacent.
How about we just make minimum wage a percentage of the highest income in the country? Take whoever made the most money in a given year, divide that by 52 weeks, and then divide that by 40 hours. Then divide whatever the result of that is by 1000. This should be very reasonable basis. It still allows for a huge wealth gap, but asserts that nobody should make over 1000 times more than anyone else. You still get rich and poor people, so this is in no way a leftist policy. It’s a very moderate middle of the road one.
Anyway, looking at 2023. Not even examining his true income and how much he blew doing who knows what, Elon Musk had $95.4 billion net gain in wealth that year. Divide that by 52 weeks, 40 hours, and 1000 - we should make minimum wage $45865.38 per hour. And if that’s not reasonable or feasible, it just means he makes too much for the good of the economy.
Obviously, those people worked for their money. All the teenagers with minimum wage did was have a job, like some sort of peasant.
Make them pay people more.
Kamala Harris promises to tax the top 1%
Donald Trump promises to tax the bottom 50%
Democrats already have the government right now and before that was trump and before that was 8 years of democrats again.
So since 2012, democrats had the government for 8 years and republicans for 4 years.
What makes this time special that they will finally tax the 1%?
I still think that harris is better than trump a lot, but it kinda makes you think if these promises are just that, promises.
Dems had a house majority for 2 years before losing it in 2022, and have had a tied senate for 4 years, although technically there has been more R than D for all four but Independents caucusing with the D tip them to 51:49 currently. But, to argue your point, there has been meaningful changes in the last 4 years with changes to how the FTC, SEC, and FCC operates with some of the largest fines ever given to companies like Facebook as well as increased IRS funding which led to a proportional increase in audits for the wealthiest Americans.
And the Obama Era gave us a Medicaid Expansion, would have completely changed to a single payer system if not for Senate Republicans.
Next step: specific campaign promises unkept by end of term become criminal fraud
If you see these numbers and still think tax is the solution, you’re not paying enough attention.
A system is what it does. Our system created this disparity, and will continue to allow it to grow as long as it exists. Any solutions within the acceptable limits said system has set out will never stop it, only placate the masses enough to stop us from tearing it down.
You don’t have to go that far back to find a time when the rich were heavily taxed and income disparity was much smaller. Keep going back and you can find other times when the disparity was greater and the rich were taxed less.
The best outcome may require the system to be torn down, but it’s clearly also possible to tax the rich significantly more even with the system already in place.
Exactly. Post WWII the tax on the richest was 90%, it stayed there until the mid 60s when it was lowered to 70% and then in the early 80s Reagan and that congress lowered it to 50%, then briefly to even below 30%.
It probably wouldn’t have happened without the combined effect of the Great Depression rolling directly into WWII. With those two events, it was possible to raise taxes that high, and the rich actually (to a large extent) paid them.
Even though the “Again” part of MAGA is very ill-defined, I think a lot of MAGA supporters would point to the post WWII era as a time that America was great. A greater shared prosperity was probably a significant reason why things felt so great then. Unions were strong, rich people were heavily taxed, and everyone was better off.
For varying definitions of “everyone”…
I don’t think there was anybody in the 1950s who was much worse off than they were in the 1930s. Yes, it took a while for women, non-whites, non-straights, etc. to get their full rights. But, even with fewer rights than a married white christian man, things were improving for them too. But, obviously, there’s a reason that the MAGA theme resonates much more with old straight white men than it does with anybody else.
Lmfao, looking back longingly at feudalism (with a stop over in the cold war era? Because that was such a prosperous time for so many in society /s) I’m guessing isn’t making the point you think it is. You’re literally arguing in favour of maintaining a disparity. The size of isn’t the point, it’s existence in the first place is.
Maybe have a think with yourself about why you’re so attached to the idea of there being a rich and ruling class at all, whose graces and willingness to pay back a tiny percentage of the money they extracted by exploitation society should depend on…
What the hell are you talking about? We’re talking about increasing taxes for the ultra-rich. Saying ultra-wealth people should be paying >90% tax has nothing to do with feudalism, and it certainly isn’t supporting the concept of a rich and ruling class.
All I’m saying is that taxing the rich is good and necessary for as long as they exist. Sure, our current system is a disparity engine, but it’s not impossible for us to dilute the effects of it with progressive tax policies, as has been done in years past.
Personally I don’t see it as a choice of either tax the rich or abolish capitalism. I see the two goals as mutually connected to liberation and progress: tax the rich until we can replace the system with a better one.
Building coalitions around progressive policies within the current system can help shift more people into alignment with post-capitalist thinking. Fomenting divisions between socialists and progressives does the opposite; solidarity forever.
and it certainly isn’t supporting the concept of a rich and ruling class.
It certainly is. There shouldn’t be any people who have that much more than everyone else that a tax bracket that high should even exist. To get to that point you have had to be exploiting others, and allowing them to continue to exploit society and have vastly more power than anyone else, as long as they pay back some (even 90%, that still leaves the likes of Musk and Bezos billionaires) is still maintaining the status quo, no matter how socialist it makes you feel (90% tax isn’t socialism, workers owning the means of production is, which leaves no room for such disparity). So feel free to ask yourself that same question I asked above.
E: as for feudalism, that’s all capitalism is - feudalism with extra steps. You having been indoctrinated to believe there needs to be a ruling class doesn’t mean that’s true.
I agree that there shouldn’t be any people with that wealth, and so does the person you were responding to. But taking away 90% of people’s money above a reasonable threshold is definitely not going to help those people become ultra rich. It would make becoming ultra rich more difficult, and instead spread the wealth across the wider population - decreasing wealth disparity.
And although there is almost certainly a better way possible, this method is relatively easy to implement and is an obvious improvement over our current situation. So we can just go ahead and do it while we continue to find consensus on a better system in the long run.
You seem to be arguing that taxing the rich is somehow bad because it isn’t perfect. Your argument makes no sense. You are saying that taking their money helps them maintain a position of wealth. That makes no sense. Of course taking their money will make them less rich. Surely that’s easy to understand.
Please explain what you’re proposing. Are you saying to get rid of democracy or what?
How about we tax the rich so there are no billionaires, take the corporations out of housing and rentals and fix our gerrymandering? These would go a long way to fix the problems.
Can you please explain your line of thinking here? This person purpose more drastic measures than just taxing, and you jump on them being against democracy. How is democracy = some people being ultra rich?
Like, for me, democracy means people decide how the society is ruled, so Im excited to hear how changing the system to get rid of disparity is the same as abolishing democracy
What do you think that poster is proposing?
Look around, there’s States with a somewhat working mix of capital and social. Take that as a minimum, while some of them already talk about universal basic income.
Some historical presidents and judges literally sold you out. That’s not democracy, you’re a plutocracy.
Do you think that poster is specifically proposing these things? He’s talking about getting rid of the system.
Edit: Go deeper into the thread.
Honestly, i don’t see how you can fix it without starting anew.
It’s not really a great idea to troll the mod.
Why does that matter? I was asking you to explain your line of thinking, and you’re not even trying to answer my question Abolishing the rich is not an attack on democracy, som id like to hear your way of thinking here
Not sure if you’re pretending to be OP or you’re actually OP. Either way, this one is toast in this community.
Why does that matter? I was asking you to explain your line of thinking, and you’re not even trying to answer my question Abolishing the rich is not an attack on democracy, som id like to hear your way of thinking here
Edit: It was a temp ban anyway, don’t worry too much about it.
It seems to me that they’re hinting at abolishing capitalism.
One way to do that would be to
-
Mandate worker coop structure on all businesses
-
Institute a 100% land value tax
Taxing the rich doesn’t really solve the root of the problem. Abolishing capitalism pre-distributes wealth so that people don’t become billionaires in the first place. 100% land value tax encourages efficient use of land.
Has that ever worked?
Abolishing capitalism pre-distributes wealth so that people don’t become billionaires in the first place. 100% land value tax encourages efficient use of
This part. Having employee owned corporations doesn’t abolish capitalism completely. Although, I agree that it would be awesome.
There has never been a worker-cooperative-dominated market economy, but actually existing worker coops and employee-owned corporations don’t seem to create billionaires, and have more equitable distribution of wages.
Why does mandating all firms to be worker coops not abolish capitalism in your view?
I would suggest looking into what capitalism is before we have that conversation.
-
eat the rich, they taste like pork
I doubt they taste that good, but I guess we would need to try to know for sure.
I’m sure it depends on seasoning…
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Don’t you know,
Life is a Bitch!
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Out of the palace,
And into the ditch!
They have so much wealth it’s hard to visualise how much they have.
Eh, buying a president as your personal bitch and jumping around on stage with him in an undersized t-shirt with your belly sticking out like a brain damaged orangatan is a pretty good visualization of how disgusting this much money is.
buying a president as your personal bitch
Trump didn’t buy Musk. They’re ideological co-conspirators, eager for the day when they can each unleash the full force of the police state on their personal enemies. The fact that they both act like dim-witted children should warn the rest of us what too much money and too little social responsibility does to the human brain. Musk acts like a washed up 80s hack celebrity desperately flailing for attention because he’s fucked in the skull, not because Trump pays him to behave that way.
Errmm. Don’t think anyone thinks for a moment Trump is paying musk. Did you mix up your rich fascist dipshits?
It might be more akin to a Trump escort service. You can buy him for a few nights and go around seeing the sites (rallies) like some kind of weird instagram influencer where you can get the attention you’re craving (news cycle) and everyone will be calling you again (media) to reinforce how important you are.
Of course that only lasts for like a day since Trump is a gold fish, he’ll be back to insulting the industries and generally dismissing Musk unless he stays right in his peripheral view.
You got it backwards friend. In the grand scheme here Trump isn’t comparitively rich, he has an empire that constantly hemorrhages money but value wise he is sitting around 3. 6 billion.
Musk’s currently valued at around 269. 8 billion. He spends a ridiculous amount of money on super PACs and uses his purchase of different platforms to kill news stories that show Democrats in a positive light and bankrolls a lot of Republican stuff. Musk isn’t being bought, Trump is.
They hate each other. They all do.
But the difference between Trump’s wealth and Musk’s wealth is very close to Musk’s wealth.
A billionaire’s worth isn’t the size of the bank account but the limit on the credit card.
To date, I’ve seen nothing to suggest either Trump or Musk have a limit on how much they can borrow and spend. That’s largely because our historically fascist oligarchy of banking executives love their brand of politics.
Yeah, it’s one of the reasons Anna Sorokin took so much.
Banks were falling over themselves to lend money to her. They thought she was one of them.
Thanks for sharing this! I had not seen it in a while.
Q: What’s the the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?
A: About a billion dollars.
Better yet, end all taxes on individuals. Instead, all taxes should be levied against corporations, and they should cover the entire bill for a functioning society… And society should democratically decide what that entails. Tax the corporations so much that their stock prices fall back to realistic numbers. Then we won’t have any of these fake billionaires who’s “wealth is tied up in stocks”, but also they can get loans against them. It should be very easy to get “rich” by working yourself, it should be very hard to get rich “letting your money work for you”
Maybe a hot take, but I actually think individual progressive taxes are great. Have a generous tax free threshold, but individual taxes stops excessive wealth hoarding and (in the case of inheritance tax) dynasties
I agree, and on inheritance anything over like $1m should be taxed heavily. Anything over say $10m or so should be taxed at or near 100%.
Inheritance tax is very good and fair. But a tricky problem is that if one place has a big inheritance tax, and another place doesn’t - then rich people basically just put all their money in the place with no inheritance tax. … We should do it anyway, but it does mean the bulk of that money probably won’t get taxed.
Yeah, the race to the bottom is always an issue. It should still be done, but it needs to be considered.
It’s just an extra step… Everyone gets a paycheck from a corporation of some kind… Instead of hundreds of millions to deal with, the IRS could just focus on the companies
Ok, so every American company becomes the subsidiary of a company registered in Bermuda or Ireland. They report no profits from their American subsidiaries, so they pay no taxes.
Corporations don’t have to “live” anywhere, so they don’t have anything to lose by ceasing to exist in high tax areas and “moving” to low tax ones. It’s why companies based in Kansas City switch back and forth from being Kansas-based or Missouri-based, whatever’s convenient for their taxes.
If they want to sell their shit in the US they have to allow us to audit them everywhere
So, they don’t sell their shit in the US. Problem solved.
Someone will fill their shoes… That’s the beauty of the free market
Let me guess, you’re an American who has never lived outside the US?
That’s correct
A tax on the amount of CO2 released per person, both directly and indirectly?
Good, but hard to measure fairly. Essentially all the emissions for everyone are ‘indirect’. They are the result of the processes used to produce the goods we consume, etc. So then, should the consumer be responsible for those emissions directly, or should it be the factory workers, or the people who own the factory, or the people who supplied the fuel that was used to run the factory, or the people who payed the people who supplied the fuel… etc.
We could think about untangling it, but probably easier to just tax the rich and then tackle the CO2 problem separately - probably by also taxing the people who own the factory for emissions.
The tax will burden the end consumer the most - perhaps that’s what’s need to end especially polluting buying habits: charge the true cost.
I am not a tax expert (IANATE?), but with all the tax havens and multi-national businesses would they not just relocate? I am very much interested in the simplification of the tax code such that the burden shifts back to those keen on wealth extraction. I just dunno what that looks like as code and in impementation.
Sure, they can relocate. But you could structure the law so that you can’t sell anything then. Apple is free to leave the US and not pay taxes, but then they are not allowed to sell anything in the US, have any offices in the US or hire anyone in the US. Of course such a law would never happen. But it’s absolutely possible in theory.
But you could structure the law so that you can’t sell anything then.
So, why would they sell anything? What incentive does a corporation have to do business in a region where taxes are punishing? Why not just focus their efforts in Europe, South America and Asia?
It would be like Cuba. If you want a car, you can buy one… but it’s going to be a Franken-car built from the parts scrounged together from the last time there were car companies operating in the country.
The incentive is to make a profit. It would just be enormous profit instead of an unimaginable one.
Plenty of companies concentrate their efforts in places that are the most profitable and ignore areas that are less profitable.
Just look at how many companies are only available in the US and not available in Europe, Asia, even Canada. Sure, they might get around to the US eventually, but it would be lowest priority since it’s the least profitable territory.
Being a huge market is still a major factor. A company would still prefer to do business in a 300M population English speaking country with a 10% profit margin, than a 10M population country with a 30% profit margin. But you are correct, companies that don’t want to pay taxes would leave. I say good riddance.
Right now, a lot of companies start in the US because the US is the best place to start. 330 million people, one language, good profits, etc. But, a punishing tax might mean that the profit margin is much less than 10%. 10% is a huge profit margin for most businesses, so it might drop from say 5% to 1%. At that point, Europe looks a lot more promising as a place to start. 450 million people, for the most part it’s one regulatory zone, you do have to have things in multiple languages, so that’s a bit difficult.
Then, after Europe there’s east Asia: Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan. Then slightly poorer countries like Indonesia and India. Maybe South America next.
The US would be near the bottom of the list if it was the only country with a punishing tax rate.
They’d still be profitable… At the end of the day the workers create the wealth. All we’d be doing is putting that wealth towards what we collectively agree on before anyone can take it as profit. But, there’d still be profit left over.
They’d still be profitable, but less profitable, so they’d be lowest priority.
If you’re American, you may not realize this, but there are a lot of products and services that are only available in the USA because that’s the most profitable place for them. The companies have plans to eventually expand to Canada, and then maybe Europe, but the focus is now on the US because that’s where the profit is.
If the US had extremely high taxes for those companies, they’d focus elsewhere. Sure, eventually they’d get around to the US once they saturated the European, Asian, Canadian, Mexican, South American and African markets, but it would never be a priority. And, for a lot of companies, “getting around to serving the US market” just wouldn’t happen.
Well I’d hope those other places would follow suit. But also, the free market would still allow others to fill the shoes of the companies that left. And whether a company pays a worker who then pays taxes, or whether we cut out the middleman and the company just pays the taxes directly, it’s the same amount leaving the company. But also, if corporations actually had to pay taxes maybe they’d start pushing on each other to stop gouging the government.
But also, the free market would still allow others to fill the shoes of the companies that left.
The Free Market would also allow them to set up their business in Europe and go for that market instead. And, since they make a much bigger profit in Europe than in the US, that would be their focus. The only companies that would set up in the US are the ones that are not able to make the bigger profits available in Europe.
This is basically like the car market in the USSR after WWII. The major American, European and Japanese automakers didn’t operate there, but of course that didn’t mean there weren’t any cars. It just meant that there weren’t any good cars.
If they want to sell their shit in the US they have to let us audit them everywhere and tax accordingly
At this rate, we’re going to have our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. How much is enough? How big does that pile of money need to be?
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That’s not how exponential growth works. A ×10 increase in 1.2 years implies a ×1010 increase in 12 years. According to these numbers it should be ×10 in 6 years which roughly aligns with the end of the decade.
lol i seriously messed up the math there sorry, thanks for pointing it out
You misspelled hang.
Tax solves problems
Violence solves result of problem
People are super mad at the Chinese police for arresting Jack Ma, prosecuting him, and having the guy do community service work for a few years. But that’s honestly way better than a guy that greedy and exploitative deserves.
Eat*
