I remember when a $64,000 question was a seriously hard question that you had to go in a sound-proof booth to answer. — unenlightened
Do you think some kind of scheme should be put into place to help minimum wage workers in later life? I do. Maybe open up a pension/saving scheme to set up like I said? Good idea or bad idea? — I like sushi
Households survey released Monday, some 37% of Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense, up from 32% in 2021.
Well if he's got billions in income, he's theoretically paying income tax. — LuckyR
Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. From 2006 to 2018, when Bezos' wealth increased by $127 billion, he reported a total of $6.5 billion in income. He paid $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes, a true tax rate of 1.1%.
I could explain some of it, but won't.where do the loan repayments come from? — LuckyR
Good idea on paper. I would like an automatic benefit plan for minimum wage. The good argument is, the retail and food sectors really need people to work at low wage. They need people to stay at that level. The bad argument is, any employment benefits, including health coverage, is part of the compensation package. That is, you need to include that in the calculation of their overall compensation. So, the cost to the employers is much higher than the actual per hour rate. Labor is one of the most expensive costs in running a business. (Don't worry, come staff reduction, the highly compensated employees are always the ones being scrutinized. But this is for another topic).Do you think some kind of scheme should be put into place to help minimum wage workers in later life? I do. Maybe open up a pension/saving scheme to set up like I said? Good idea or bad idea? — I like sushi
... real wages have flatlined since the late 70s. That’s a robust explanatory data point. — Mikie
shit can happen to anyone — L'éléphant
Yes, I am ignorant about US. — I like sushi
I do question the ‘survey’ that states that over 50% are living pay check to pay check btw. — I like sushi
Frequent flights, trips to Europe, better food and alcohol, fashionable clothing and larger dwellings -- it's easy to outspend the family's combined salaries. — BC
Who gets the biggest pieces of pie is a matter of POLICY, not talent, luck, prudent investing, or any such thing. Since the 1970s, policy makers have been steering the pie slices to the top decile of income and the very top layer of wealth, the richest .0001%. 90% of us are dividing up a couple of small pieces and arguing over the crumbs. — BC
How is that anything but a Marie Antionette-like dismissal of the plight of the 90% of Americans who are getting screwed? — Mikie
can tell by your attitude you are not at all interested in discussion so bye bye — I like sushi
Uummm... there's no such thing as a "true" tax rate, including paper gains on investments. — LuckyR
The story’s main finding was that these 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018 while paying a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes. That amounts to what we called a “true tax rate” of 3.4%.
Below, we’ve laid out how we performed this analysis. Our story also included calculations of more typical American households in order to provide context for the ultrawealthy’s numbers, and we explain those here as well.
None of those are things we can do. That's the point. they're all things government can do.
Things we can do; — Isaac
4. vote differently (known as democracy :wink:) — jorndoe
True, but he is able to borrow against the value and spend what he has borrowed. So, it's like he has sold the stock, functionally anyhow, but he doesn't have to pay taxes on it. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The problem here goes beyond just tax avoidance though. Human ability tends to follow a roughly normal distribution. Wealth follows a power law distribution. This gets down to the issue of returns on capital generating a system where inequality expands if positive action isn't taken. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Obviously, this is not the way to do things, but there is something interesting about the idea of firms that are "large enough," being partly owned by the public (or by the workers at said firms, having unions on the boards, something done in Germany, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus
In any event, the labor share of all income in developed countries has been trending down for half a century now. — Count Timothy von Icarus
We will probably see over 50% of all income go to capital in the medium term. This is bad news for places with high wealth inequality. E.g., American income inequality is not nearly as bad as wealth inequality, where the top 1% owns 15+ times the share of the bottom 50%, and 90+% of all stocks and bonds are owned by the top 10%. AI will probably also have the effect of making returns on capital outpace wage growth. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That may be true, but most of us aren't doing that badly. We aren't starving, for the most part. We don't live in shanty towns unless we particularly want to. I guess my question would be: what really is the problem we're hoping to fix?
“My particular end should become identified with the universal end... otherwise the state is left in the air. The state is actual only when its members have a feeling of their own self-hood and it is stable only when public and private ends are identical. It has often been said that the end of the state is the happiness of the citizens. That is perfectly true. If all is not well with them, if their subjective aims are not satisfied, if they do not find that the state as such is the means to their satisfaction, then the footing of the state itself is insecure.”
So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself?
I would aspire to something greater than simply not having people starving in the street. IMHO, the main purpose of the state is to promote the freedom of its citizens. No state is secure when its people are unhappy, and a free people will not willingly choose what makes them unhappy. America in particular suffers from an artificial division between the public and private spheres, which is itself born of a conception of freedom that focuses too much on negative freedom, and not enough on reflexive freedom and social freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus
ocial Freedom then is the collective resolution of these contradictions through the creation of social institutions. Institutions, the state chief among them, objectify morality in such a way that individuals’ goals align, allowing people to freely choose actions that promote each other’s freedom and wellbeing. Institutions achieve this by shaping the identities of their members, such that they derive their “feeling of selfhood” from, and recognize “[their] own essence” in, membership.”
In the language of contemporary economics, we would say that institutions change members’ tastes, shifting their social welfare function such that they increasingly weigh the welfare of others when ranking “social states.” In doing so, institutions help resolve collective action problems.
We are free when we do what it is that we want to do, and we can only be collectively free when we are guided into supporting one another's freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus
So we have incredibly rich people in the world. Is that an evil unto itself?
Yes. For two reasons.
1. There is ample evidence that high levels of economic inequality lead to a greater risk of state capture by those with wealth. In our system, wealth can buy you political power and political influence, which in turn allows the wealthy to countermand the interests and expressed policy preferences of the vast bulk of the population.
2. Inequality itself is bad because human being naturally judge themselves based on those around them; we are naturally hierarchical. Hierarchy isn't necessarily bad; divisions that are too deep are.. To put it in psychological terms, I agree with Hegel that private property plays an important role in objectifying our will to ourselves and others. Think about how you learn things about someone from the books they display in their book case, or why teens blanket their rooms in posters. But when a great deal of people's total wealth adds up to essentially nothing compared with a small cadre of elites, their property becomes irrelevant to objectifying their will. — Count Timothy von Icarus
nah, we = voters — jorndoe
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