Many arguments have been made re why the rich and the super-rich are paying more taxes than we think, but in the last 20-25 years Republican policies have clearly favoured tax breaks for the them and that's where the bulk of income inequality really got juiced. It's not about envy of those who are more successful; it's funny how when we …
Many arguments have been made re why the rich and the super-rich are paying more taxes than we think, but in the last 20-25 years Republican policies have clearly favoured tax breaks for the them and that's where the bulk of income inequality really got juiced. It's not about envy of those who are more successful; it's funny how when we talk about asshole billionaires Warren Buffett's name never seems to come up. He's the one talking about how he pays less taxes than his secretary, and as we learned a few years ago, Donald Trump paid $750 in his annual taxes a few years ago. I don't know how well-paid Elon Musk's employees are but the conditions at Amazon's warehouses for the rank and file are notoriously bad and underpaid. So while Bezos play with his rocketship, and he's doing it for the coolness factor, not because he's trying to demonstrate safety (only the superrich can afford it anyway), his warehouse people are struggling to make ends meet.
We can blame ourselves for that as well; we've been partly trained by the Walmart mentality to value low prices and ignore sweatshops in the Third World and even in our own land; until recently Walmart was the dirt standard for lousy, shitty pay. But bargain basement prices are now a necessity as wealth funneled from the bottom to the top. My sister-in-law commented to me last year that she and my brother are almost getting to the point where it would be worth it for them to vote Trump, but they won't do that because they have a responsibility to everyone who can't afford a seat at their table. And while they do well for themselves, they're nowhere close to being Bezos, Musk or Trump.
Perhaps raising minimum wage would be a good start, along with bringing back the perks of a job that contributed to how well-off someone was, like affordable healthcare. Since the rich famously hate anyone getting 'government handouts', maybe tax them higher is their employees' salaries don't meet a certain standard; those employees would then quality for a gov't UBI stipend.
It's a complicated subject, but higher wages = higher prices = all boats lifting. Costs would be reduced all around in other, less tangible ways in the forms of lower poverty and crime rates. I'm not interested in 'punishing' people for being successful, but an awful lot of their wealth in recent decades came from tax breaks by Republicans, not because of increased effort, and Darwin knows Bezos has never sweated his ass off in his life. The money flowed upward, much of it unearned; now it's time to reverse some of that, esp since they'll feel a lot less pain than the poor and middle class did.
(1) Your and my critiques may not be motivated by envy or resentment of the rich, but I do not think we can dismiss that for everybody. Reading social media and comments on news stories suggests that envy/resentment is at play in many cases - consciously or unconsciously.
(2) Resentful conservatives don't criticize Trump, because they think he's a class traitor who is on their side, and likewise progressives and Buffet. Both men criticize other rich people in their appeal to the masses.
(3) I do not know Trump's finances, but in general people whose wealth is in leveraged investments show (paper) profits some years and not others. They pay only at flat $750 filing fell in the years they lose money, so you'll see a spike at that exact taxes in a tax distribution chart. A fair way to evaluate such things would be to see what the average taxes were over a decade of ups and downs, but to fuel resentment, some authors prefer to "cherry pick" the years when some rich person paid essentially no taxes, and sweep under the rug the years where they paid large amounts in taxes. That's manipulation, not illumination. Read the stories about a weathy person paying little or no taxes carefully to watch for this factor (real news sources will note that specfic years in question, albeit buried rather than highlighted, while opinion pieces often omit that aspect entirely).
(4) Likewise I have come to be cautious about news regarding who benefits from tax breaks. As I have mentioned, about half of California's income tax revenues come from 1% of the population while a large part pay no income taxes; so if California did a 10% reduction in all taxes (fat chance), the news stories would frame this as "half of all tax relief went to the top 1%". So some tax breaks specifically benefit the rich more (eg: changes to estate taxes, which don't cut in until over $12 million so only affect the rich), and others have disproportionate benefit to the rich ONLY to the degree that the rich are disproportionately paying more to begin with. Conflating these two to foster a sense of unfairness is again, manipulation and deception. Call out the former, but stop pretending the latter is an obvious disgrace.
(5) I think it's misleading to blame the appeal of low prices on Walmart; this phenomenon shows up all around the world and through much of history. Walmart is a designated scapegoat, but objective analyses do not show that company as being unusually bad - it's just popular among liberals to imagine the worst. That is not to say that they are ideal, just that the alternatives may be just as bad in many cases, but it's less popular to call them out. Are you aware that Walmart long ago endorsed single payer healthcare? Why is that not mentioned?
(6) One tends to hear only part of the story about Amazon warehouses from certain biased sources. There are bad conditions in some warehouses, but I've also seen testimony from satisfied warehouse workers. They have in some locations paid well above local wages. They have offered to pay expenses for workers seeing an out of state abortion. Again, Amazon is a favored whipping boy, but to my most neutral assessment (to date, always under revision) they seem to be judged by a double standard. Amazon's raison d'etre is not low wages, but advanced logistical integration, from a market leading user interface, to advanced warehouse technologies with a mix of automation and workers, distributed warehouses, and tight integration with multiple shipping services. If you use Amazon to get decent price and fast shipping and generous return policies, that comes from their organizational structure, not from underpaying employees. (Again, that doesn't mean employees should keep organizing for a better deal, just that it's not on the whole as bad as progressives want to convince us with one sided coverage)
(7) UBI is an interesting concept to continue to explore. We could discuss it further, along with the important limitations of the pilot programs so far. But tying qualifying for UBI to which corporation one works for and what their employees earn is not UBI, it's some new tax/benefit regime you are proposing which should not be conflated with UBI.
(8) What I find problematic is any policy which rewards companies in fields where labor inherently needs to be well paid, relative to companies which are in an inherently lower wage market. So for example, considering that Microsoft or Google or Goldman-Sachs are good corporate citizens because their average wage (based on the market for the skills they need) is high, while Delilah's Janitorial Service is an evil company because they don't pay their employees as well. Any fair comparison will operate within the same industry and geographic region, and not yield misleading comparisons between industries. If the society could run by making everybody a software engineer or surgeon, that would be fine, but we also need less skilled jobs, and we cannot act as if the latter might as well go out of business unless they can pay wages competitive with software engineers.
(9) To be clear, I do favor higher marginal rates on income taxes (more progressive) and I am not a Republican or a free market zealot; my first allegiance is to honest and factual understanding of the world; my values then come into play on top of that, rather than instead of that.
(10) "higher wages = higher prices = all boats lifting" could be just another description of inflation. It's the *ratio* of wages to prices which matters, so tripling both is not gaining ground. And underneath all of this is the need to increase productivity - roughly, how much value is produced by an hour's labor - as the engine which can drive increases in that ratio.
(11) I would say that very little of the increase in wealth at the top was *created by* tax breaks. However, that growth may not have been inhibited enough by taxes. A tax break doesn't create wealth, it just inhibits it's growth less. Remember I'm for increased "progressive taxation", in large part because I want to inhibit that growth - because when its excessive, it's corrosive to a democratic society. But I nevertheless distinguish between the engines which *create* wealth, and the policies which partially *inhibit* undue concentrations of it.
(12) I think your picture of folks like Bezos is off kilter. That man had to put in more hard hours than 99.9% of people to create and build his empire. He did so in competition to other very intelligent hard working people. This is not the age of aristocracy, where most wealth is inherited and passive (eg: ownership of rentable property). Today, stats show, the wealthy on average work much harder than most people, with long stressful hours. So it does not serve us well to pretend they are the idle rich who have never worked hard. I would argue that the distribution of income is too wide, with people at the top earning way more than they should (hence, progressive income taxes to reduce that differential), but not that they don't work extremely hard. Our case for a less extreme disparity of income (and wealth) does not depend on falsely characterizing the rich, or the very rich, as typically slackers when the reality is the opposite. People who work harder or smarter deserve more rewards - but only to an extent, not as a blank check for exponentially increased rewards.
Nicole, I respect your writing a lot, and I hope you can see this partial pushback on some of what strikes me as "not deeply enough interrogated conventional assumptions" in the light it is intended. In no way do I mean to disrespect you; I'm more sharing some different and additional lenses through which one might gain additional insights about how the world works. I have found myself on a journey of questioning many of my prior opinions, as I find that some of them were based on assumptions which I had never examined in detail. The resulting reflections have sometimes changed my opinions, sometimes not; and even if they did not revers my opinions, they have have nuanced them more, or helped me defend them with more well considered arguments (while abandoning arguments I no longer hold as valid, even when I continue to support the overall direction based on other arguments). I'm primarily engaged in an imperfect collaborative search for truth, not trying to put people down who disagree, or ensure my tribal acceptance by regurgitating the conventional bullet points undigested.
No offence taken, and I don't mind the pushback. I would note that my opinions have formed over the last twenty years or so between experience and a lot of reading. My thoughts on a UBI are a bit sarcastic, I'll admit, but I continue to be annoyed by what I see as a lot of unnecessary income disparity, and sorry, a lot of it WAS juiced by Bush II's tax cuts.
Amazon's lousy working conditions have been well-documented, although I don't doubt there are some happy workers and perhaps decent warehouses there somewhere. But I've had a more jaundiced opinion of them since reading about CamperForce, which looks an awful lot like Amazon taking advantage of folks who lost everything in the Great Financial Meltdown, created by those at the top and who didn't suffer or go to jail for it.
Since then, other investigative pieces have demonstrated the lousy working conditions there, and while I'm sure Jeff Bezos worked hard initially, I'm quite sure he's not working nearly as hard as his factory workers, and much of that is wheeling and dealing and board meetings. He's not in the warehouses getting actual shit moved from one place to another, having to pee in a bottle because he's not allowed proper bathroom breaks. I've often wished there was a way to disguise him so he could work in his own warehouse for a couple of weeks under Amazon conditions, but there's no way you could disguise those offset eyes, everyone would know him immediately.
Wal-Mart has done better in recent years, and I didn't know that about backing the single payer system; how are they doing on providing healthcare for their workers, most of whom, a few years ago, couldn't afford it? Let's remember, Walmart 'helped' them navigate various parts of the welfare system they'd need to survive since, back then, Walmart was paying shit after driving out the better-paying businesses out of business. I also remember reading an article several years ago - back in the '00s - about how lousily they treated their vendors who were essentially breaking even on doing business with Walmart, but they didn't dare *not* do business with them because if they didn't, their competitors will. I'm not quite sure how that would benefit their competitors - how much business can you afford to do with a #1 customer and only be breaking even? Maybe no one thought to break their competitors by refusing to do business with Walmart unless the latter agreed to a more equitable deal.
However, in recent years I acknowledge they've raised their wages (which meant everyone else could do the same) and also, lesser-known, Walmart underwent a large sustainability makeover several years ago, implemented efficient recycling and and waste treatment, better practices at the stores, and saved about $400M which benefits the environment. I've never forgotten that about them.
The fact is, wages have remained stagnant for decades for the lower and middle classes, and the middle one is disappearing. In the wake of the Great Financial Meltdown the class formerly known as middle slipped into poverty, with a rise in all the pathologies associated with the lower classes - a rise in domestic violence, divorces, criminal activity, and substance abuse. The very rich on Wall Street benefited mightily from the meltdown, and no one went to prison for it. Speaking of not going to prison, that reminds me of Trump. It's interesting he never released his financial records as president, so no, we *don't* know what he's paying or not, but I'd guess not much since he supposedly wasn't paying anything for years after one of his many bankruptcies. Although I doubt that's the reason why he won't release them - too many far more embarrassing, and likely illegal revelations there. If there's one thing many of us have learned about the rich, it's that the more they earn, the less likely they are to want to pay for anything, and Trump was famous for that during his real estate years in NYC.
Ever read the book "Bullshit Jobs" based on the viral essay of a few years ago? Very eye-opening and not specifically an indictment of the rich - more so just an overall poorly-structured economic system in which the most vital, necessary jobs pay the least. What if no one wanted to make a janitor's low wages? What if there needed to be a revolving schedule of various employees' turn to clean the restrooms? Why are teachers paid shit to educate future generations and so much more paid to entertainers like sports athletes and rock musicians? Not to diss those careers, but if we can afford to pay Michael Jordan millions we can afford to pay a teacher liveable wages AND maybe even support them with school budgets for something other than armed guards and defensive shooting training for teachers. I laughed as the BJ book dinged the financial services industry for being largely a bullshit industry, which has been my opinion since my last office job where our target market was big financial institutions. For a year and a half I scrutinized all the big players in North America and realized just how much of a scam so much of it is - nothing productive, just shifting money around for people high enough in the system, and there you don't have to even be a middle manager for that to happen. I think about 20% of what FIs do is truly vital - we do need a place to keep our money, buy insurance, get loans, support for entrepreneurship, pay America's labour force - but the rest of it is sheer horse shit and everyone knows it. The games bankers played with CDSs and ARMs led to the financial collapse and even *they* didn't understand the financial 'products' they were selling to clueless investors, with various 'tranches' of crap investments bundled in and buried so deep the sellers themselves didn't know what was there and didn't want to know. Just sell sell sell to the next chump.
As far as progressive taxation goes, I'd be in favour of one that scales back maybe a little less the more you make. You don't want to be taking like 50% of someone's pay or net worth - that's counterproductive. But for sure if you an afford a rocket ship, you can afford to pay more in taxes. America is very good to many of its citizens regardless of the carping that goes on about inequality - some of it coming from folks who just aren't trying hard enough (and I'm not thinking about any 'group' specifically - self-inflicted underachieving is a universal human sport). But I also don't think there should be a max on taxation - the more you make, the more you pay, but your taxes don't go up as much as they did several hundred million or a few billion ago.
BTW "Bullshit Jobs" has a great description of what a fucking waste of productivity much of the California entertainment industry is - how people are making huge sums of money literally doing little more than lunching with each other, (and expensing it), discussing a few putative business issues, and then going home to swim in the pool. It's amazing how little time is actually spent by so many of these people on creating better content, although obviously someone somewhere is doing it, as Netflix has produced many high-quality TV and movies in the last fifteen years that get a lot of kudos (I don't subscribe to even basic cable, so apart from one summer with Netflix several years ago, I don't read and hear about them).
I'm curious as to what you've read that you think might change my mind. I'm open to that. I'd especially like to read what you've got on how the wealthy work longer and more stressful hours than the hoi polloi. I'd like to know more about them.
Also, open to better/differing opinions on the UBI idea. Conservatives are skeptical of it, some of their skepticism is questionable but some of it isn't (particularly the idea that some people will coast. I disagree with them on why but I've seen it myself so I support 'strings attached' to make sure people are working to become or become again productive members of society).
Sources: Preferably middle of the road, neither super right-wing nor super left-wing.
Hmm. There's a lot of material there, some of which I agree with and some of which I question. Let's take on some pieces; addressing everything would be a huge essay and many hours of work.
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I read the Wired story at your link, and did not find it as terrible as you perceive. The writer says she spent months interviewing Amazon workers (and mentions working for a week at a warehouse, tho perhaps she also worked other times?). From that, she chose a handful of people for the article. Are they representative, or selected for some other reason?
I'm mildly skeptical of the framing "taking advantage of folks who lost everything in the Great Financial Meltdown". The lead couple lost 100% of their investments ($250K and $200K) according to the article. I and my friends all lived through that too, but nobody lost anything close to 100% on invested money. How does that happen, unless one is investing in a very high risk/high gain option? It says that he believed that a $250,000 investment would yield $4000/mo (or $48K/yr, about 20% per year). Sound like a good, safe investment to you? Anyway, it's sad if he was given to think that was guaranteed and safe, and I would be happy to have any fraud investigated in that regard.
So they hit the road, broke. They had trouble finding work, until they encountered Amazon's seasonal work, which sounds like it proved a godsend in terms of better employment than they found elsewhere, although it was hard work with long hours. Some picker jobs involved a lot of walking, but according to the article that is changing as robotics handle more of the long distance stuff. Eventually, Amazon will likely automate more and more of the work, reducing their human labor needs, so that folks like the Stouts will have to do without Amazon seasonal jobs - will that be a boon to them?
Is that really such a horror story? Have you ever worked construction or in a factory? Or is your norm for comparison set by white collar work? It sounds like pretty much all of the jobs I had until I worked my way into computers, and which I'd still have been working had I not. It's unfortunate that they are doing that at a more advanced age, but is that Amazon's fault?
Before you answer, remember that the article involves selectivity. Go to indeed.com and look for what Amazon warehouse workers are paid today, and compare that to the local wages for equivalently skilled workers in those locations. I was seeing wages in the $16-25/hr range around the country (where minimum wage varies from $7.25 to $16ish).
What I'm driving at is: we can select stories of people who have suffered personal losses, and then contrast that with companies which paid above market wages yet it was still not enough. Does that justify singling out the company as a particular evil doer, in the mind of the reader juxtaposing selected people who suffered losses not (fully) their own fault, and a company (not responsible for previous losses) which is not making things right for them by paying them sufficiently above prevailing wages. It sets up the reader to think badly about the company, but I think unfairly so.
Criticizing the entire system of market based labor rates might be more appropriately targeted (tho such criticisms also need to be examined of course).
I am NOT any sort of Amazon apologist, I'm just trying to understand things in context. I tend to resist being stampeded nowadays, after finding that I have been taken in so many times. Most folks (including me) have a tendency to easily believe a good story that fits what they want to believe, without checking. We can partially compensate for that by also checking the stories we most want to believe, which have the appropriate white hats and black hats.
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> "But I also don't think there should be a max on taxation - the more you make, the more you pay, but your taxes don't go up as much as they did several hundred million or a few billion ago."
I don't know what you mean there. There is no maximum tax - the more income you have, the more you pay; the more retail you by, the more sales tax; the more expensive your real property, the more you pay. In the case of income taxes, you not only pay more total, higher income gets taxed at a higher rate. (I would add some more tiers at the top, but not too extreme). The one exception might be social security taxes. In general, the more you pay in, the more you can take out in benefits later. That at the bottom of the scale get back more than they paid in, those at the top get back less than they paid in (so it does already move wealth downward), but at all levels paying higher SS taxes bring more SS benefits than paying less. But the maximum taxed income for social security is $147K this year - which also limits their benefits. (There are proposals to remove the limit for taxes but revise the formulas so there are no increase benefits associated with the higher taxes).
Is that what you mean by max taxation? Or something else?
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About the fact that the wealth on average work very hard. I recall Daniel Markovits, who is a critic of the meritocracy and the wealthy, but nevertheless admits that the wealthy on average work longer hours, a reversal of historical trends; he speaks of the disappearance of the leisure class. See Sam Harris podcast 205 for an interesting interview (which is not to say that I endorse everything that either person says), or you can just google is name and find other articles.
CEO's in this study worked an average of 62.5 hours a week (including working on 79% of weekend days, and 70% of weekdays).
When I say "work hard" I don't mean that the high income folks tend to sweat and use their muscles a lot; but many jobs are intellectually and emotionally challenging nevertheless.
And let's be clear - I'm questioning the idea that high income folks in general don't work as hard or as many hours as most others do today - I am NOT asserting that means their pay is always appropriate! I think we need a pay differential to motivate people (rather than everybody getting the same pay regardless of contribution), but currently the curve is way too steep, with way too much reward at the top. Even if higher income people on average work pretty hard, there are limits to how much extra that should earn.
Many arguments have been made re why the rich and the super-rich are paying more taxes than we think, but in the last 20-25 years Republican policies have clearly favoured tax breaks for the them and that's where the bulk of income inequality really got juiced. It's not about envy of those who are more successful; it's funny how when we talk about asshole billionaires Warren Buffett's name never seems to come up. He's the one talking about how he pays less taxes than his secretary, and as we learned a few years ago, Donald Trump paid $750 in his annual taxes a few years ago. I don't know how well-paid Elon Musk's employees are but the conditions at Amazon's warehouses for the rank and file are notoriously bad and underpaid. So while Bezos play with his rocketship, and he's doing it for the coolness factor, not because he's trying to demonstrate safety (only the superrich can afford it anyway), his warehouse people are struggling to make ends meet.
We can blame ourselves for that as well; we've been partly trained by the Walmart mentality to value low prices and ignore sweatshops in the Third World and even in our own land; until recently Walmart was the dirt standard for lousy, shitty pay. But bargain basement prices are now a necessity as wealth funneled from the bottom to the top. My sister-in-law commented to me last year that she and my brother are almost getting to the point where it would be worth it for them to vote Trump, but they won't do that because they have a responsibility to everyone who can't afford a seat at their table. And while they do well for themselves, they're nowhere close to being Bezos, Musk or Trump.
Perhaps raising minimum wage would be a good start, along with bringing back the perks of a job that contributed to how well-off someone was, like affordable healthcare. Since the rich famously hate anyone getting 'government handouts', maybe tax them higher is their employees' salaries don't meet a certain standard; those employees would then quality for a gov't UBI stipend.
It's a complicated subject, but higher wages = higher prices = all boats lifting. Costs would be reduced all around in other, less tangible ways in the forms of lower poverty and crime rates. I'm not interested in 'punishing' people for being successful, but an awful lot of their wealth in recent decades came from tax breaks by Republicans, not because of increased effort, and Darwin knows Bezos has never sweated his ass off in his life. The money flowed upward, much of it unearned; now it's time to reverse some of that, esp since they'll feel a lot less pain than the poor and middle class did.
(1) Your and my critiques may not be motivated by envy or resentment of the rich, but I do not think we can dismiss that for everybody. Reading social media and comments on news stories suggests that envy/resentment is at play in many cases - consciously or unconsciously.
(2) Resentful conservatives don't criticize Trump, because they think he's a class traitor who is on their side, and likewise progressives and Buffet. Both men criticize other rich people in their appeal to the masses.
(3) I do not know Trump's finances, but in general people whose wealth is in leveraged investments show (paper) profits some years and not others. They pay only at flat $750 filing fell in the years they lose money, so you'll see a spike at that exact taxes in a tax distribution chart. A fair way to evaluate such things would be to see what the average taxes were over a decade of ups and downs, but to fuel resentment, some authors prefer to "cherry pick" the years when some rich person paid essentially no taxes, and sweep under the rug the years where they paid large amounts in taxes. That's manipulation, not illumination. Read the stories about a weathy person paying little or no taxes carefully to watch for this factor (real news sources will note that specfic years in question, albeit buried rather than highlighted, while opinion pieces often omit that aspect entirely).
(4) Likewise I have come to be cautious about news regarding who benefits from tax breaks. As I have mentioned, about half of California's income tax revenues come from 1% of the population while a large part pay no income taxes; so if California did a 10% reduction in all taxes (fat chance), the news stories would frame this as "half of all tax relief went to the top 1%". So some tax breaks specifically benefit the rich more (eg: changes to estate taxes, which don't cut in until over $12 million so only affect the rich), and others have disproportionate benefit to the rich ONLY to the degree that the rich are disproportionately paying more to begin with. Conflating these two to foster a sense of unfairness is again, manipulation and deception. Call out the former, but stop pretending the latter is an obvious disgrace.
(5) I think it's misleading to blame the appeal of low prices on Walmart; this phenomenon shows up all around the world and through much of history. Walmart is a designated scapegoat, but objective analyses do not show that company as being unusually bad - it's just popular among liberals to imagine the worst. That is not to say that they are ideal, just that the alternatives may be just as bad in many cases, but it's less popular to call them out. Are you aware that Walmart long ago endorsed single payer healthcare? Why is that not mentioned?
(6) One tends to hear only part of the story about Amazon warehouses from certain biased sources. There are bad conditions in some warehouses, but I've also seen testimony from satisfied warehouse workers. They have in some locations paid well above local wages. They have offered to pay expenses for workers seeing an out of state abortion. Again, Amazon is a favored whipping boy, but to my most neutral assessment (to date, always under revision) they seem to be judged by a double standard. Amazon's raison d'etre is not low wages, but advanced logistical integration, from a market leading user interface, to advanced warehouse technologies with a mix of automation and workers, distributed warehouses, and tight integration with multiple shipping services. If you use Amazon to get decent price and fast shipping and generous return policies, that comes from their organizational structure, not from underpaying employees. (Again, that doesn't mean employees should keep organizing for a better deal, just that it's not on the whole as bad as progressives want to convince us with one sided coverage)
(7) UBI is an interesting concept to continue to explore. We could discuss it further, along with the important limitations of the pilot programs so far. But tying qualifying for UBI to which corporation one works for and what their employees earn is not UBI, it's some new tax/benefit regime you are proposing which should not be conflated with UBI.
(8) What I find problematic is any policy which rewards companies in fields where labor inherently needs to be well paid, relative to companies which are in an inherently lower wage market. So for example, considering that Microsoft or Google or Goldman-Sachs are good corporate citizens because their average wage (based on the market for the skills they need) is high, while Delilah's Janitorial Service is an evil company because they don't pay their employees as well. Any fair comparison will operate within the same industry and geographic region, and not yield misleading comparisons between industries. If the society could run by making everybody a software engineer or surgeon, that would be fine, but we also need less skilled jobs, and we cannot act as if the latter might as well go out of business unless they can pay wages competitive with software engineers.
(9) To be clear, I do favor higher marginal rates on income taxes (more progressive) and I am not a Republican or a free market zealot; my first allegiance is to honest and factual understanding of the world; my values then come into play on top of that, rather than instead of that.
(10) "higher wages = higher prices = all boats lifting" could be just another description of inflation. It's the *ratio* of wages to prices which matters, so tripling both is not gaining ground. And underneath all of this is the need to increase productivity - roughly, how much value is produced by an hour's labor - as the engine which can drive increases in that ratio.
(11) I would say that very little of the increase in wealth at the top was *created by* tax breaks. However, that growth may not have been inhibited enough by taxes. A tax break doesn't create wealth, it just inhibits it's growth less. Remember I'm for increased "progressive taxation", in large part because I want to inhibit that growth - because when its excessive, it's corrosive to a democratic society. But I nevertheless distinguish between the engines which *create* wealth, and the policies which partially *inhibit* undue concentrations of it.
(12) I think your picture of folks like Bezos is off kilter. That man had to put in more hard hours than 99.9% of people to create and build his empire. He did so in competition to other very intelligent hard working people. This is not the age of aristocracy, where most wealth is inherited and passive (eg: ownership of rentable property). Today, stats show, the wealthy on average work much harder than most people, with long stressful hours. So it does not serve us well to pretend they are the idle rich who have never worked hard. I would argue that the distribution of income is too wide, with people at the top earning way more than they should (hence, progressive income taxes to reduce that differential), but not that they don't work extremely hard. Our case for a less extreme disparity of income (and wealth) does not depend on falsely characterizing the rich, or the very rich, as typically slackers when the reality is the opposite. People who work harder or smarter deserve more rewards - but only to an extent, not as a blank check for exponentially increased rewards.
Nicole, I respect your writing a lot, and I hope you can see this partial pushback on some of what strikes me as "not deeply enough interrogated conventional assumptions" in the light it is intended. In no way do I mean to disrespect you; I'm more sharing some different and additional lenses through which one might gain additional insights about how the world works. I have found myself on a journey of questioning many of my prior opinions, as I find that some of them were based on assumptions which I had never examined in detail. The resulting reflections have sometimes changed my opinions, sometimes not; and even if they did not revers my opinions, they have have nuanced them more, or helped me defend them with more well considered arguments (while abandoning arguments I no longer hold as valid, even when I continue to support the overall direction based on other arguments). I'm primarily engaged in an imperfect collaborative search for truth, not trying to put people down who disagree, or ensure my tribal acceptance by regurgitating the conventional bullet points undigested.
No offence taken, and I don't mind the pushback. I would note that my opinions have formed over the last twenty years or so between experience and a lot of reading. My thoughts on a UBI are a bit sarcastic, I'll admit, but I continue to be annoyed by what I see as a lot of unnecessary income disparity, and sorry, a lot of it WAS juiced by Bush II's tax cuts.
Amazon's lousy working conditions have been well-documented, although I don't doubt there are some happy workers and perhaps decent warehouses there somewhere. But I've had a more jaundiced opinion of them since reading about CamperForce, which looks an awful lot like Amazon taking advantage of folks who lost everything in the Great Financial Meltdown, created by those at the top and who didn't suffer or go to jail for it.
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-camperforce-amazons-nomadic-retiree-army/
Since then, other investigative pieces have demonstrated the lousy working conditions there, and while I'm sure Jeff Bezos worked hard initially, I'm quite sure he's not working nearly as hard as his factory workers, and much of that is wheeling and dealing and board meetings. He's not in the warehouses getting actual shit moved from one place to another, having to pee in a bottle because he's not allowed proper bathroom breaks. I've often wished there was a way to disguise him so he could work in his own warehouse for a couple of weeks under Amazon conditions, but there's no way you could disguise those offset eyes, everyone would know him immediately.
Wal-Mart has done better in recent years, and I didn't know that about backing the single payer system; how are they doing on providing healthcare for their workers, most of whom, a few years ago, couldn't afford it? Let's remember, Walmart 'helped' them navigate various parts of the welfare system they'd need to survive since, back then, Walmart was paying shit after driving out the better-paying businesses out of business. I also remember reading an article several years ago - back in the '00s - about how lousily they treated their vendors who were essentially breaking even on doing business with Walmart, but they didn't dare *not* do business with them because if they didn't, their competitors will. I'm not quite sure how that would benefit their competitors - how much business can you afford to do with a #1 customer and only be breaking even? Maybe no one thought to break their competitors by refusing to do business with Walmart unless the latter agreed to a more equitable deal.
However, in recent years I acknowledge they've raised their wages (which meant everyone else could do the same) and also, lesser-known, Walmart underwent a large sustainability makeover several years ago, implemented efficient recycling and and waste treatment, better practices at the stores, and saved about $400M which benefits the environment. I've never forgotten that about them.
The fact is, wages have remained stagnant for decades for the lower and middle classes, and the middle one is disappearing. In the wake of the Great Financial Meltdown the class formerly known as middle slipped into poverty, with a rise in all the pathologies associated with the lower classes - a rise in domestic violence, divorces, criminal activity, and substance abuse. The very rich on Wall Street benefited mightily from the meltdown, and no one went to prison for it. Speaking of not going to prison, that reminds me of Trump. It's interesting he never released his financial records as president, so no, we *don't* know what he's paying or not, but I'd guess not much since he supposedly wasn't paying anything for years after one of his many bankruptcies. Although I doubt that's the reason why he won't release them - too many far more embarrassing, and likely illegal revelations there. If there's one thing many of us have learned about the rich, it's that the more they earn, the less likely they are to want to pay for anything, and Trump was famous for that during his real estate years in NYC.
Ever read the book "Bullshit Jobs" based on the viral essay of a few years ago? Very eye-opening and not specifically an indictment of the rich - more so just an overall poorly-structured economic system in which the most vital, necessary jobs pay the least. What if no one wanted to make a janitor's low wages? What if there needed to be a revolving schedule of various employees' turn to clean the restrooms? Why are teachers paid shit to educate future generations and so much more paid to entertainers like sports athletes and rock musicians? Not to diss those careers, but if we can afford to pay Michael Jordan millions we can afford to pay a teacher liveable wages AND maybe even support them with school budgets for something other than armed guards and defensive shooting training for teachers. I laughed as the BJ book dinged the financial services industry for being largely a bullshit industry, which has been my opinion since my last office job where our target market was big financial institutions. For a year and a half I scrutinized all the big players in North America and realized just how much of a scam so much of it is - nothing productive, just shifting money around for people high enough in the system, and there you don't have to even be a middle manager for that to happen. I think about 20% of what FIs do is truly vital - we do need a place to keep our money, buy insurance, get loans, support for entrepreneurship, pay America's labour force - but the rest of it is sheer horse shit and everyone knows it. The games bankers played with CDSs and ARMs led to the financial collapse and even *they* didn't understand the financial 'products' they were selling to clueless investors, with various 'tranches' of crap investments bundled in and buried so deep the sellers themselves didn't know what was there and didn't want to know. Just sell sell sell to the next chump.
As far as progressive taxation goes, I'd be in favour of one that scales back maybe a little less the more you make. You don't want to be taking like 50% of someone's pay or net worth - that's counterproductive. But for sure if you an afford a rocket ship, you can afford to pay more in taxes. America is very good to many of its citizens regardless of the carping that goes on about inequality - some of it coming from folks who just aren't trying hard enough (and I'm not thinking about any 'group' specifically - self-inflicted underachieving is a universal human sport). But I also don't think there should be a max on taxation - the more you make, the more you pay, but your taxes don't go up as much as they did several hundred million or a few billion ago.
BTW "Bullshit Jobs" has a great description of what a fucking waste of productivity much of the California entertainment industry is - how people are making huge sums of money literally doing little more than lunching with each other, (and expensing it), discussing a few putative business issues, and then going home to swim in the pool. It's amazing how little time is actually spent by so many of these people on creating better content, although obviously someone somewhere is doing it, as Netflix has produced many high-quality TV and movies in the last fifteen years that get a lot of kudos (I don't subscribe to even basic cable, so apart from one summer with Netflix several years ago, I don't read and hear about them).
I'm curious as to what you've read that you think might change my mind. I'm open to that. I'd especially like to read what you've got on how the wealthy work longer and more stressful hours than the hoi polloi. I'd like to know more about them.
Also, open to better/differing opinions on the UBI idea. Conservatives are skeptical of it, some of their skepticism is questionable but some of it isn't (particularly the idea that some people will coast. I disagree with them on why but I've seen it myself so I support 'strings attached' to make sure people are working to become or become again productive members of society).
Sources: Preferably middle of the road, neither super right-wing nor super left-wing.
Hmm. There's a lot of material there, some of which I agree with and some of which I question. Let's take on some pieces; addressing everything would be a huge essay and many hours of work.
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I read the Wired story at your link, and did not find it as terrible as you perceive. The writer says she spent months interviewing Amazon workers (and mentions working for a week at a warehouse, tho perhaps she also worked other times?). From that, she chose a handful of people for the article. Are they representative, or selected for some other reason?
I'm mildly skeptical of the framing "taking advantage of folks who lost everything in the Great Financial Meltdown". The lead couple lost 100% of their investments ($250K and $200K) according to the article. I and my friends all lived through that too, but nobody lost anything close to 100% on invested money. How does that happen, unless one is investing in a very high risk/high gain option? It says that he believed that a $250,000 investment would yield $4000/mo (or $48K/yr, about 20% per year). Sound like a good, safe investment to you? Anyway, it's sad if he was given to think that was guaranteed and safe, and I would be happy to have any fraud investigated in that regard.
So they hit the road, broke. They had trouble finding work, until they encountered Amazon's seasonal work, which sounds like it proved a godsend in terms of better employment than they found elsewhere, although it was hard work with long hours. Some picker jobs involved a lot of walking, but according to the article that is changing as robotics handle more of the long distance stuff. Eventually, Amazon will likely automate more and more of the work, reducing their human labor needs, so that folks like the Stouts will have to do without Amazon seasonal jobs - will that be a boon to them?
Is that really such a horror story? Have you ever worked construction or in a factory? Or is your norm for comparison set by white collar work? It sounds like pretty much all of the jobs I had until I worked my way into computers, and which I'd still have been working had I not. It's unfortunate that they are doing that at a more advanced age, but is that Amazon's fault?
Before you answer, remember that the article involves selectivity. Go to indeed.com and look for what Amazon warehouse workers are paid today, and compare that to the local wages for equivalently skilled workers in those locations. I was seeing wages in the $16-25/hr range around the country (where minimum wage varies from $7.25 to $16ish).
What I'm driving at is: we can select stories of people who have suffered personal losses, and then contrast that with companies which paid above market wages yet it was still not enough. Does that justify singling out the company as a particular evil doer, in the mind of the reader juxtaposing selected people who suffered losses not (fully) their own fault, and a company (not responsible for previous losses) which is not making things right for them by paying them sufficiently above prevailing wages. It sets up the reader to think badly about the company, but I think unfairly so.
Criticizing the entire system of market based labor rates might be more appropriately targeted (tho such criticisms also need to be examined of course).
I am NOT any sort of Amazon apologist, I'm just trying to understand things in context. I tend to resist being stampeded nowadays, after finding that I have been taken in so many times. Most folks (including me) have a tendency to easily believe a good story that fits what they want to believe, without checking. We can partially compensate for that by also checking the stories we most want to believe, which have the appropriate white hats and black hats.
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> "But I also don't think there should be a max on taxation - the more you make, the more you pay, but your taxes don't go up as much as they did several hundred million or a few billion ago."
I don't know what you mean there. There is no maximum tax - the more income you have, the more you pay; the more retail you by, the more sales tax; the more expensive your real property, the more you pay. In the case of income taxes, you not only pay more total, higher income gets taxed at a higher rate. (I would add some more tiers at the top, but not too extreme). The one exception might be social security taxes. In general, the more you pay in, the more you can take out in benefits later. That at the bottom of the scale get back more than they paid in, those at the top get back less than they paid in (so it does already move wealth downward), but at all levels paying higher SS taxes bring more SS benefits than paying less. But the maximum taxed income for social security is $147K this year - which also limits their benefits. (There are proposals to remove the limit for taxes but revise the formulas so there are no increase benefits associated with the higher taxes).
Is that what you mean by max taxation? Or something else?
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About the fact that the wealth on average work very hard. I recall Daniel Markovits, who is a critic of the meritocracy and the wealthy, but nevertheless admits that the wealthy on average work longer hours, a reversal of historical trends; he speaks of the disappearance of the leisure class. See Sam Harris podcast 205 for an interesting interview (which is not to say that I endorse everything that either person says), or you can just google is name and find other articles.
CEO's in this study worked an average of 62.5 hours a week (including working on 79% of weekend days, and 70% of weekdays).
https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-ceos-manage-time
I've seen other indicators, but these are quick.
When I say "work hard" I don't mean that the high income folks tend to sweat and use their muscles a lot; but many jobs are intellectually and emotionally challenging nevertheless.
And let's be clear - I'm questioning the idea that high income folks in general don't work as hard or as many hours as most others do today - I am NOT asserting that means their pay is always appropriate! I think we need a pay differential to motivate people (rather than everybody getting the same pay regardless of contribution), but currently the curve is way too steep, with way too much reward at the top. Even if higher income people on average work pretty hard, there are limits to how much extra that should earn.