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I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
What's the difference?
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
+2
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
I was thinking about income disparity recently and wondered if there was a way to make it so that the larger the disparity between the highest and lowest paid employees of a company, the more corporate taxes they paid.
I'm sure it's not actually a good idea in practice, there's going to be ways to hide income I am sure, but incentivizing companies toward narrowing the gap sounds like something to pursue, rather than trying to explain to the frothing conservative fringe a new regulation on business.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I was thinking about income disparity recently and wondered if there was a way to make it so that the larger the disparity between the highest and lowest paid employees of a company, the more corporate taxes they paid.
I'm sure it's not actually a good idea in practice, there's going to be ways to hide income I am sure, but incentivizing companies toward narrowing the gap sounds like something to pursue, rather than trying to explain to the frothing conservative fringe a new regulation on business.
I think it's a good idea in practice. A CEO's income / wealth / stock holdings / everything cannot be %X higher than any particular employee's yearly income, or something along those lines.
The trick would be how to get reliable data for just how much wealth the CEO had.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
What's the difference?
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B.
Player A gives $40 to Player C.
Player C gives $40 to Player B.
Not really all that different. And it is absurd that human beings think there is a significant qualitative difference between the two.
Any business model where the guy at the top has the potential to make 380x the average worker is an exploitable one. In any financial/economic system the sociopath/psychopaths are going to rise to the top. Whether its capitalism/socialism/communism, the difficulty then is how to place checks and balances on runaway billionares so end up with the guy with all the chips at the table. It's just like poker, the guy at the table with the biggest stack just keeps collecting the small guys' anties if he throws them all in every turn. Think of the anty as interest and its really very similar. Sure some guys are going to double up but not very often. Viva la revolucion!
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
You know what would be crazy?
Passing laws that would prohibit this sort of scenario.
I agree, that would be crazy. We shouldn't do it.
There's a reasonable alternative in capping the size of businesses relative to their market. We're seeing this in the UK with the forcible division of the banks into smaller companies.
May not work with something like wal-mart, given that their influence is strongly geographical, so you run the risk of splitting one national dysfunctional operator into two or more regional ones.
Something like that you probably want to look at using planning law to restrict the ability to dominate a particular area.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
The source of money, and the entity to which that money belongs, are the same thing: Our collective belief in said money as a means of exchanging goods and services.
I mean...what do you think the source of money is?
Edit: That's likely one of the many problems in this conversation. A fundamental disagreement over whether money is a means of exchanging goods and services to alleviate the need for bartering systems, or whether money is an instantiation of a land-owning Christian man's hard work and value.
Or something something gold standard, I guess.
_J_ on
0
syndalisGetting ClassyOn the WallRegistered User, Loves Apple Products, Transition Teamregular
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
Which is exactly what is happening right now, where the awful minimum wage + companies hiring more people and giving them less than full time hours to avoid offering benefits to their staff creates a system where we the taxpayers subsidize their incomes with food stamps and income assistance. And then these same companies who are abusing their workers and gaming the system to pay them as little as humanly possible complain in turn about paying too much in taxes; a large part of which goes to making sure these same workers don't die in a gutter somewhere.
And the right, at least via the talking points and congressional leaders, are very opposed to raising the minimum wage, or really doing anything that forces/compels companies to take care of their workers.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
The law does necessarily have to state a living wage. Just something along the lines of the average employee salary must be at least a certain percentage of the highest paid employee's (CEO) salary. Because it does not require everyone's salary to be raised to a certain baseline level, it might avoid the potential blowback associated with simply raising the minimum wage, such as "it will just result in everything being more expensive."
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
Any measure that adresses this problem would almost certainly not touch anyone in this thread negatively. This is not a problem of income tax levels, even of banker bonuses. For these people income taxes are within rounding error.
This is a problem of corporate tax law and tax on investments. It is a global problem, about how freely money moves around the world untaxed because of how different tax codes interact and how that ends up with the money accumulating in the wealth in shares of these companies.
To solve this problem, you would need some kind of global summit to kill this race to the bottom. Because basically small countries are accepting fractions of pennies on the dollar to be the one where the money flows through (because the fraction is better than nothing at all), even though all parties involved knows every time this happens it lowers taxes on every multinational. And this screws over actual people because they are not free to move into a PO Box in Malta or the Cayman Islands, all they own is actual bricks, a car and debts to pay for that.
As long as this situation is not adressed globally, this race to the bottom can only continue. Politicians pay lip service to stop it, but there are no actual solutions proposed, let alone try and acted upon. In part because the first one to do so just loses money, and you need to get everyone aboard to finalize it.
To clarify, I am not angry at the companies for picking the route that causes them to pay the least taxes. I view companies as amoral entities that try to optimize money for themselves, and the only way to make them behave is to regulate them. I am angry at how the regulators have let this happen.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
Why does it matter whether an employee gets money directly from an employer, or from a confiscatory tax regime?
If under both scenarios the employer loses the same amount, and the employee gains the same amount.
One idea that has been bandied around is the idea of tax law that starts from the principle that the amount of tax levied will depend initially on the businesses turnover rather than their profit.
This is mostly aimed at schemes like starbucks claiming never to have made a profit in the UK because every year they pay a fee to their EU parent company in Luxembourg for the use of the Starbucks trademark that is coincidentally slightly greater than the amount of profit their UK operation would have made, had they not paid it.
There are issues with this, in that you would want to keep the incentive on the part of the company to invest and thus generate economic activity, but it would invert the current situation where our desire to encourage investment enables business arrangements that have no purpose but the avoidance of tax liability.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
I would vehemently disagree that it is a good solution that government has to pressure every company into behaving nicely under threat of sanctions instead of actually making laws to make them behave nicely.
we could also find some way to grow the job market so that people who are on government assistance and working at Wal-Mart can quit and leave these jobs for students and kids living at home who don't need to subsist on them.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
if the beneficence of wal-mart (or other corporation of your choice) toward its employees could be relied upon, we wouldn't face this issue in the first place
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
Why does it matter whether an employee gets money directly from an employer, or from a confiscatory tax regime?
If under both scenarios the employer loses the same amount, and the employee gains the same amount.
because of the confiscatory tax regime part.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
we could also find some way to grow the job market so that people who are on government assistance and working at Wal-Mart can quit and leave these jobs for students and kids living at home who don't need to subsist on them.
Then we wouldn't have to raise taxes.
Internationally this solution has tended to revolve around free or heavily subsidised higher education and free or heavily subsidised childcare.
It usually goes along with other attempts to remove barriers to economic participation such as widely implemented public transport schemes and social housing.
It's very difficult to implement that kind of solution without reasonably high taxation.
There are long term problems - wealth could continue to overwhelmingly flow to those who are already wealthy. But it's not a certain bet, and there are much, much more effective measures available to deal with that than "confiscate all their shit and give everyone on the planet $5."
Also, it wouldn't be $5.
1% of World's population has $110,000,000,000,000
World population: About 7,140,000,000
So, it would be about $15,400 per person if we distributed the 1%'s wealth.
I say it is pitchfork time.
The closest historical example I can think of where a similar program was enacted would be the voucher privatization program in Russia in the early nineties.
You'll note that this program abjectly failed to improve standards of living for the poor. Concentration of wealth in Russia actually increased.
So you'll forgive me for thinking this is a really fucking dumb idea.
It's interesting that folks will utilize the notion of American Exceptionalism to justify a wealth of shitty ideas. But when it comes to an alternative economic model they will cite how the model failed in other countries as evidence of its impossibility. "It didn't work in Russia so it can't work here" doesn't jive with the notion that Americans are super-special and different.
I am not saying that you, in particular, are doing this. You're just making a Hasty Generalization.
Well, I typically think that American Exceptionalism is fundamentally retarded in just about every way, so not so much.
The generalization isn't terribly hasty, I just didn't type the entire argument out because of time constraints. But let's dig in, since I'm now at home and not on a phone.
The Russian voucher program was a failure for a couple reasons that are broadly applicable to people in poverty:
1): Poor understanding of/education on the benefits of holding assets long-term instead of cashing them in for immediate gain.
2): An significantly higher need for liquidity in general.
3): A generally outstanding need for specific goods and/or services - getting a car fixed, getting caught up on bills, etc; that is, this need existed prior to receiving the disbursement.
In short, poverty conditions you not to think long term. There's no point. For one, it's overwhelming enough to drive a man mad; even if you can get passed that, something is going to happen that demands immediate attention and will fuck up you carefully down-to-the-penny balanced three-month budget anyway. When you get a windfall, you spend it immediately, because otherwise it's going to slowly leech away in ways such that, psychologically, you'll feel as if you never got anything.
Conversely, those who already have their heads well above water are in a prime position to take a short-term loss buying up as much of the assets just disbursed to the population as possible. They'll end up living like kings, and know it, and have the luxury of enough extent wealth or a high enough income that they are unlikely to have immediate needs that require liquidity. The result is simply replacing the old oligarchy with a new one - possibly more diffuse, but not certainly.
In addition, there is a very specific problem unique to those who are living at the subsistence level: they have no (or very limited) access to markets. Even in the event that you give them 15k, there's not a hell of a lot they can do with it, because getting somewhere that can actually absorb that liquidity is, ah, problematic. The regions we're talking about are gigantic and almost by definition have terrible infrastructure. New markets are not guaranteed to emerge; the odds are rather significantly stacked against them doing so. Because I'm an admitted cynic, I think you'd be more likely to see a lot of itinerant swindlers suddenly pop up than anything else.
I would like to hear a 'grow the economy' situation that does not involve government investment (so that you don't need taxes to pay for it) nor deregulation which can impact the working class.
Because as above, I am of the viewpoint that the problem behind this statistic is not that individual tax income levels are somehow massively wrong, but that corporate tax law is wrong. If you refuse to adress the biggest money siphon from the working class to the wealthy (the working class spending their money on stuff in stores owned by the rich people), and refuse to adress the way the working class gets money (by refusing adjusting minimum wages etcet), how is this situation going to change.
For me, this is in essence there being no(t enough) trickle down in trickle down economics. When that movement started in '80s the promise always was that all ships rise with the tide. But instead only the luxury yachts have risen, while the rest is either treading water or increasingly drowning.
Steam: SanderJK Origin: SanderJK
+1
Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
we could also find some way to grow the job market so that people who are on government assistance and working at Wal-Mart can quit and leave these jobs for students and kids living at home who don't need to subsist on them.
Then we wouldn't have to raise taxes.
A great way to grow the economy would be to raise the minimum wage such that every job that exists is something that a person can support themself on. Teenagers and college students may not NEED to support themselves, but those dumb fucks would be economic heroes what with spending all their money on pokemons and bubblegum.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
Why?
I get that you believe this.
What I want is your argument for it.
firstly it's cheaper
secondly it connects earning to individual achievement rather than political power, which incentivizes achievement rather than divisive politics
thirdly liberty should be the default, and solutions that reduce it should never be chosen when other solutions exist
fourthly it's not at all clear that an increase in the minimum wage or more drastic "maximum wealth ratio" laws would help, and I prefer not to take actions that dramatically reduce liberty without a clear benefit.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
What would happen instead: WalMart spending at least as much money successfully preventing any such regulatory scheme from being enacted, and instead receiving hefty tax cuts.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
Why?
I get that you believe this.
What I want is your argument for it.
firstly it's cheaper
secondly it connects earning to individual achievement rather than political power, which incentivizes achievement rather than divisive politics
thirdly liberty should be the default, and solutions that reduce it should never be chosen when other solutions exist
fourthly it's not at all clear that an increase in the minimum wage or more drastic "maximum wealth ratio" laws would help, and I prefer not to take actions that dramatically reduce liberty without a clear benefit.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
What's the difference?
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B.
Player A gives $40 to Player C.
Player C gives $40 to Player B.
Not really all that different. And it is absurd that human beings think there is a significant qualitative difference between the two.
this is a dishonest representation that would be wrong even if it were correct.
It's obviously different to receive $50 from A and to receive $50 from C simply because different things are different. a=a, stop being a robot.
But your formula is wrong because the actual situation is:
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B as compensation for work done.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B as compensation for work done .
Player C takes $40 from Player A through its enforcement power, regardless of A's opinion or desire to do other things with it, including give it to B as compensation for work done.
Player C gives $40 to Player B as compensation for nothing.
It looks somewhat the same to B, though the incentive structure is entirely different
to A it is very different indeed.
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
What's the difference?
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B.
Player A gives $40 to Player C.
Player C gives $40 to Player B.
Not really all that different. And it is absurd that human beings think there is a significant qualitative difference between the two.
this is a dishonest representation that would be wrong even if it were correct.
It's obviously different to receive $50 from A and to receive $50 from C simply because different things are different. a=a, stop being a robot.
But your formula is wrong because the actual situation is:
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B as compensation for work done.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B as compensation for work done .
Player C takes $40 from Player A through its enforcement power, regardless of A's opinion or desire to do other things with it, including give it to B as compensation for work done.
Player C gives $40 to Player B as compensation for nothing.
It looks somewhat the same to B, though the incentive structure is entirely different
to A it is very different indeed.
I don't entirely disagree with you but like let's recognize that Step 3 in Scenario B is still "as compensation for work done."
Player B is doing the same work in both scenarios, so he's actually just kind of getting fucked by Player A in Scenario B and Player C is correcting that.
Almost all nations in the world believe in the existance of minimum wage and corporate taxes. The amounts vary of course, but they are generally roughly in the same ballpark. Is making these numbers higher itself a move towards less freedom?
And is tearing down esoteric constructions (That often include the scheme japan mentioned, where magically the right to use the company costs exactly the amount of profits you would've used otherwise) to dodge the corporate taxes also an attack on freedom? Because I see the latter especially as a gap in between the laws of nations. Almost none of these schemes exist within countries, they always do hops like Ireland->Netherlands->Malta or somesuch.
Is every dollar you forcefully take from a company a lessened freedom, than that is probably a fundamental disagreement where I would see little solution. Does this mean that in the ideal world, companies pay no taxes?
Is taking money via taxes from a company worse than taking it from an individual? Or should individuals ideally also pay 0% tax?
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
The source of money, and the entity to which that money belongs, are the same thing: Our collective belief in said money as a means of exchanging goods and services.
I mean...what do you think the source of money is?
Edit: That's likely one of the many problems in this conversation. A fundamental disagreement over whether money is a means of exchanging goods and services to alleviate the need for bartering systems, or whether money is an instantiation of a land-owning Christian man's hard work and value.
I'm not comfortable applying the concept of maximisation of liberty to a business.
Operations like Walmart are to the economy what coal fired power plants are to environment. It seems entirely appropriate for there to be regulations to limit businesses from having negative effects on the economy.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
Why?
I get that you believe this.
What I want is your argument for it.
firstly it's cheaper
secondly it connects earning to individual achievement rather than political power, which incentivizes achievement rather than divisive politics
thirdly liberty should be the default, and solutions that reduce it should never be chosen when other solutions exist
fourthly it's not at all clear that an increase in the minimum wage or more drastic "maximum wealth ratio" laws would help, and I prefer not to take actions that dramatically reduce liberty without a clear benefit.
Wait
Whose liberty is being drastically reduced here?
The CEO of walmart's?
And every other person who runs a business and makes over the arbitrary Monocle Cap
I wouldn't give a shit about Wal-Mart's CEO making $35 million a year if the average employee wasn't so poor they were eligible for food stamps
this can be applied to a shockingly large number of companies
Wal-Mart raise salaries? I can get behind this. It's certainly better than alternatives like "government takes some of the money to give it to the employees".
What's the difference?
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B.
Player A gives $40 to Player C.
Player C gives $40 to Player B.
Not really all that different. And it is absurd that human beings think there is a significant qualitative difference between the two.
this is a dishonest representation that would be wrong even if it were correct.
It's obviously different to receive $50 from A and to receive $50 from C simply because different things are different. a=a, stop being a robot.
But your formula is wrong because the actual situation is:
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B as compensation for work done.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B as compensation for work done .
Player C takes $40 from Player A through its enforcement power, regardless of A's opinion or desire to do other things with it, including give it to B as compensation for work done.
Player C gives $40 to Player B as compensation for nothing.
It looks somewhat the same to B, though the incentive structure is entirely different
to A it is very different indeed.
I don't entirely disagree with you but like let's recognize that Step 3 in Scenario B is still "as compensation for work done."
Player B is doing the same work in both scenarios, so he's actually just kind of getting fucked by Player A in Scenario B and Player C is correcting that.
assuming it didn't run the other way, and A is only paying so little because it is forced to pay the rest to C.
Tightly connecting your work to your wage is important... distributions from the government at one (or two or three) removes are not really compensation for work done.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
Why?
I get that you believe this.
What I want is your argument for it.
firstly it's cheaper
secondly it connects earning to individual achievement rather than political power, which incentivizes achievement rather than divisive politics
thirdly liberty should be the default, and solutions that reduce it should never be chosen when other solutions exist
fourthly it's not at all clear that an increase in the minimum wage or more drastic "maximum wealth ratio" laws would help, and I prefer not to take actions that dramatically reduce liberty without a clear benefit.
Wait
Whose liberty is being drastically reduced here?
The CEO of walmart's?
And every other person who runs a business and makes over the arbitrary Monocle Cap
I'm OK with this.
Operating as a business means you have the power to affect people on a scale that an individual doesn't, especially if you're in charge of a major company.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that if those effects are undesirable then we should seek to restrict them? There's a parallel here with laws against things which can theoretically do no harm in specific instances but which have a net negative effect on society as a whole.
Posts
What's the difference?
I agree, that would be crazy. We shouldn't do it.
Well on the one hand it's me giving more of my money to people for their hard work.
And on the other it's the government taking my money to set up a larger welfare state.
so those are very different.
I'm sure it's not actually a good idea in practice, there's going to be ways to hide income I am sure, but incentivizing companies toward narrowing the gap sounds like something to pursue, rather than trying to explain to the frothing conservative fringe a new regulation on business.
ultimately there isn't a ton of functional difference between the kind of redistributive programs we have now and are discussing expanding, and just passing a law that says everybody gets paid a living wage. Money's fungible.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I think it's a good idea in practice. A CEO's income / wealth / stock holdings / everything cannot be %X higher than any particular employee's yearly income, or something along those lines.
The trick would be how to get reliable data for just how much wealth the CEO had.
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B.
Player A gives $40 to Player C.
Player C gives $40 to Player B.
Not really all that different. And it is absurd that human beings think there is a significant qualitative difference between the two.
Money is fungible when you have the money.
All The Money In The USA isn't fungible in that regard, unless you first assume that it all belongs to one entity that can spread it around independent of its sources.
And that is not the case. Unless... I mean, you can mail me a check for $100 right now because "money is fungible". You need my address?
What do you mean, you don't think that's how it works.
There's a reasonable alternative in capping the size of businesses relative to their market. We're seeing this in the UK with the forcible division of the banks into smaller companies.
May not work with something like wal-mart, given that their influence is strongly geographical, so you run the risk of splitting one national dysfunctional operator into two or more regional ones.
Something like that you probably want to look at using planning law to restrict the ability to dominate a particular area.
The source of money, and the entity to which that money belongs, are the same thing: Our collective belief in said money as a means of exchanging goods and services.
I mean...what do you think the source of money is?
Edit: That's likely one of the many problems in this conversation. A fundamental disagreement over whether money is a means of exchanging goods and services to alleviate the need for bartering systems, or whether money is an instantiation of a land-owning Christian man's hard work and value.
Or something something gold standard, I guess.
Which is exactly what is happening right now, where the awful minimum wage + companies hiring more people and giving them less than full time hours to avoid offering benefits to their staff creates a system where we the taxpayers subsidize their incomes with food stamps and income assistance. And then these same companies who are abusing their workers and gaming the system to pay them as little as humanly possible complain in turn about paying too much in taxes; a large part of which goes to making sure these same workers don't die in a gutter somewhere.
And the right, at least via the talking points and congressional leaders, are very opposed to raising the minimum wage, or really doing anything that forces/compels companies to take care of their workers.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The law does necessarily have to state a living wage. Just something along the lines of the average employee salary must be at least a certain percentage of the highest paid employee's (CEO) salary. Because it does not require everyone's salary to be raised to a certain baseline level, it might avoid the potential blowback associated with simply raising the minimum wage, such as "it will just result in everything being more expensive."
I'm struggling with the parallel here.
Deciding to tax Walmart to a greater extent and then distributing that money to walmart's employees as benefits is functionally indistinguishable from merely compelling Walmart to pay its employees enough that the benefits aren't necessary.
What are you talking about?
This is a problem of corporate tax law and tax on investments. It is a global problem, about how freely money moves around the world untaxed because of how different tax codes interact and how that ends up with the money accumulating in the wealth in shares of these companies.
To solve this problem, you would need some kind of global summit to kill this race to the bottom. Because basically small countries are accepting fractions of pennies on the dollar to be the one where the money flows through (because the fraction is better than nothing at all), even though all parties involved knows every time this happens it lowers taxes on every multinational. And this screws over actual people because they are not free to move into a PO Box in Malta or the Cayman Islands, all they own is actual bricks, a car and debts to pay for that.
As long as this situation is not adressed globally, this race to the bottom can only continue. Politicians pay lip service to stop it, but there are no actual solutions proposed, let alone try and acted upon. In part because the first one to do so just loses money, and you need to get everyone aboard to finalize it.
To clarify, I am not angry at the companies for picking the route that causes them to pay the least taxes. I view companies as amoral entities that try to optimize money for themselves, and the only way to make them behave is to regulate them. I am angry at how the regulators have let this happen.
I am talking about Wal-Mart recognizing that it should pay employees more, possibly because it realizes that the alternative is being forced to do so by a confiscatory tax regime or arbitrary "maximum earning ratio" laws, and having realized this, doing it double-quick.
Why does it matter whether an employee gets money directly from an employer, or from a confiscatory tax regime?
If under both scenarios the employer loses the same amount, and the employee gains the same amount.
This is mostly aimed at schemes like starbucks claiming never to have made a profit in the UK because every year they pay a fee to their EU parent company in Luxembourg for the use of the Starbucks trademark that is coincidentally slightly greater than the amount of profit their UK operation would have made, had they not paid it.
There are issues with this, in that you would want to keep the incentive on the part of the company to invest and thus generate economic activity, but it would invert the current situation where our desire to encourage investment enables business arrangements that have no purpose but the avoidance of tax liability.
I would vehemently disagree that it is a good solution that government has to pressure every company into behaving nicely under threat of sanctions instead of actually making laws to make them behave nicely.
Then we wouldn't have to raise taxes.
if the beneficence of wal-mart (or other corporation of your choice) toward its employees could be relied upon, we wouldn't face this issue in the first place
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
because of the confiscatory tax regime part.
it is better for people and for the economy that companies pay a better wage, instead of having that wage taken and redistributed.
Why?
I get that you believe this.
What I want is your argument for it.
Internationally this solution has tended to revolve around free or heavily subsidised higher education and free or heavily subsidised childcare.
It usually goes along with other attempts to remove barriers to economic participation such as widely implemented public transport schemes and social housing.
It's very difficult to implement that kind of solution without reasonably high taxation.
Well, I typically think that American Exceptionalism is fundamentally retarded in just about every way, so not so much.
The generalization isn't terribly hasty, I just didn't type the entire argument out because of time constraints. But let's dig in, since I'm now at home and not on a phone.
The Russian voucher program was a failure for a couple reasons that are broadly applicable to people in poverty:
1): Poor understanding of/education on the benefits of holding assets long-term instead of cashing them in for immediate gain.
2): An significantly higher need for liquidity in general.
3): A generally outstanding need for specific goods and/or services - getting a car fixed, getting caught up on bills, etc; that is, this need existed prior to receiving the disbursement.
In short, poverty conditions you not to think long term. There's no point. For one, it's overwhelming enough to drive a man mad; even if you can get passed that, something is going to happen that demands immediate attention and will fuck up you carefully down-to-the-penny balanced three-month budget anyway. When you get a windfall, you spend it immediately, because otherwise it's going to slowly leech away in ways such that, psychologically, you'll feel as if you never got anything.
Conversely, those who already have their heads well above water are in a prime position to take a short-term loss buying up as much of the assets just disbursed to the population as possible. They'll end up living like kings, and know it, and have the luxury of enough extent wealth or a high enough income that they are unlikely to have immediate needs that require liquidity. The result is simply replacing the old oligarchy with a new one - possibly more diffuse, but not certainly.
In addition, there is a very specific problem unique to those who are living at the subsistence level: they have no (or very limited) access to markets. Even in the event that you give them 15k, there's not a hell of a lot they can do with it, because getting somewhere that can actually absorb that liquidity is, ah, problematic. The regions we're talking about are gigantic and almost by definition have terrible infrastructure. New markets are not guaranteed to emerge; the odds are rather significantly stacked against them doing so. Because I'm an admitted cynic, I think you'd be more likely to see a lot of itinerant swindlers suddenly pop up than anything else.
Because as above, I am of the viewpoint that the problem behind this statistic is not that individual tax income levels are somehow massively wrong, but that corporate tax law is wrong. If you refuse to adress the biggest money siphon from the working class to the wealthy (the working class spending their money on stuff in stores owned by the rich people), and refuse to adress the way the working class gets money (by refusing adjusting minimum wages etcet), how is this situation going to change.
For me, this is in essence there being no(t enough) trickle down in trickle down economics. When that movement started in '80s the promise always was that all ships rise with the tide. But instead only the luxury yachts have risen, while the rest is either treading water or increasingly drowning.
A great way to grow the economy would be to raise the minimum wage such that every job that exists is something that a person can support themself on. Teenagers and college students may not NEED to support themselves, but those dumb fucks would be economic heroes what with spending all their money on pokemons and bubblegum.
firstly it's cheaper
secondly it connects earning to individual achievement rather than political power, which incentivizes achievement rather than divisive politics
thirdly liberty should be the default, and solutions that reduce it should never be chosen when other solutions exist
fourthly it's not at all clear that an increase in the minimum wage or more drastic "maximum wealth ratio" laws would help, and I prefer not to take actions that dramatically reduce liberty without a clear benefit.
"Taking the wage and redistributing it" has a nonzero administration cost. It is therefore more efficient to just pay the dude more on the front end.
What would happen instead: WalMart spending at least as much money successfully preventing any such regulatory scheme from being enacted, and instead receiving hefty tax cuts.
Wait
Whose liberty is being drastically reduced here?
The CEO of walmart's?
this is a dishonest representation that would be wrong even if it were correct.
It's obviously different to receive $50 from A and to receive $50 from C simply because different things are different. a=a, stop being a robot.
But your formula is wrong because the actual situation is:
Scenario A:
Player A gives $50 to Player B as compensation for work done.
Scenario B:
Player A gives $10 to Player B as compensation for work done .
Player C takes $40 from Player A through its enforcement power, regardless of A's opinion or desire to do other things with it, including give it to B as compensation for work done.
Player C gives $40 to Player B as compensation for nothing.
It looks somewhat the same to B, though the incentive structure is entirely different
to A it is very different indeed.
I don't entirely disagree with you but like let's recognize that Step 3 in Scenario B is still "as compensation for work done."
Player B is doing the same work in both scenarios, so he's actually just kind of getting fucked by Player A in Scenario B and Player C is correcting that.
And is tearing down esoteric constructions (That often include the scheme japan mentioned, where magically the right to use the company costs exactly the amount of profits you would've used otherwise) to dodge the corporate taxes also an attack on freedom? Because I see the latter especially as a gap in between the laws of nations. Almost none of these schemes exist within countries, they always do hops like Ireland->Netherlands->Malta or somesuch.
Is every dollar you forcefully take from a company a lessened freedom, than that is probably a fundamental disagreement where I would see little solution. Does this mean that in the ideal world, companies pay no taxes?
Is taking money via taxes from a company worse than taking it from an individual? Or should individuals ideally also pay 0% tax?
Don't talk about money then.
Let's talk about wealth.
Operations like Walmart are to the economy what coal fired power plants are to environment. It seems entirely appropriate for there to be regulations to limit businesses from having negative effects on the economy.
And every other person who runs a business and makes over the arbitrary Monocle Cap
assuming it didn't run the other way, and A is only paying so little because it is forced to pay the rest to C.
Tightly connecting your work to your wage is important... distributions from the government at one (or two or three) removes are not really compensation for work done.
I'm OK with this.
Operating as a business means you have the power to affect people on a scale that an individual doesn't, especially if you're in charge of a major company.
Doesn't it seem reasonable that if those effects are undesirable then we should seek to restrict them? There's a parallel here with laws against things which can theoretically do no harm in specific instances but which have a net negative effect on society as a whole.