Just out of curiosity how do you propose to fund the military, whom you support in the name of patriotism, without taxation?
6 Likes
Equalisation of suffering? No.
Minimisation of suffering? Yes.
Taxing the rich causes little suffering; taxing the poor causes great suffering. Ergo, tax the rich.
21 Likes
What, take knowledge from those who have it and give it to those who donât? What are you, a communist?
15 Likes
If weâre cutting programs that I donât see any personal benefit of, might I suggest we purchase fewer fighter jets? Because Iâm not seeing a personal benefit in it and theyâre expensive as all get out.
15 Likes
Apologists for the rich-coddling status quo are both morally and intellectually bankrupt.
As long as the poor are being so comprehensively fucked and the middle class is disappearing, the rich deserve to be reamed. The moral basis for this is plain, so a giant fuck you to the apologists on that score; it shouldnât require explaining.
What should really also not require explanation is something that preeminent capitalist Henry Ford understood: if the poor are screwed, the economy tanks. He paid his workers double the minimum wage so they could afford to buy his cars; if the poorest half of the populace actually have disposable income, the economy thrives, along with the investments of the precious bloody fatcats.
Furthermore, they get to live in a society that isnât beset with crime and disease, and brims with the cultural and technological fruits of a great mass of folks being further up Maslovâs hierarchy of needs.
But nooo, itâs the world of the fucking crab mentality for everyone instead, because short-sighted arsehole greed.
11 Likes
The mortgage deduction has always been a peculiar American institution borne mostly of accident. And it makes no sense, as with housing, being subject to supply and demand, making it easier to support a mortgage simply means that prices rise until the number of buyers who can afford houses equals the number of sellers.
However, what this also means is that if you abolish the madness that is the mortgage deduction, housing prices will plunge (unfortunately, it wonât help affordability, as theyâll drop to keep the total drain the same). And as you can imagine, nobody wants to be the politician thatâs responsible for making people poorer (even on paper).
Corey wants to blame the rich for this one, but honestly, unless heâs finally defining rich as able to buy a home, it isnât just the rich fighting against losing this deduction. Pretty much everyone involved in the housing market - buyers, sellers, builders, financers, and promoters are fighting hard for this.
Iâm pretty getting rid of this is another bit of common sense that the public wonât stand for.
Yes, and a pony, please.
I got pretty hot under the collar over some previous @fche comments, and since he put his full name in his account, did a little google. Hope this doesnât qualify as some kind of low-level doxxing, but (assuming I have the right dude) he has a public website with the first line of his bio stating that he started life in Hungary in the 1970s. I hate the dudeâs posts, and the general attitude toward humanity that they imply, but living at the tail end of a pretty bad time in soviet rule is hardly ânot knowing anything about the subject.â I totally agree with you that his comments, devoid of this context, do really seem to be willfully ignorant about wealth, inequality and well, fairness in general, but it at least brought me from âJakcie-Chan-grabbing-head-jpgâ to âOhhh, weâre entering this conversation from VERY different anglesâ
6 Likes
Or at the very least stop trying to use predatory markets as a vehicle for social welfare programs. Somehow that always goes pear-shaped. (But yeah, all housing should at least be not-for-profit)
He paid his workers double the minimum wage so they could afford to buy his cars
No, he paid his workers âdouble the minimum wageâ because that was what the labour market demanded. It would be economic suicide (or a pyramid scheme) for its employees to be its own customers.
See also The Story of Henry Ford's $5 a Day Wages: It's Not What You Think
#FreeThePonies
6 Likes
Just out of curiosity how do you propose to fund the military, whom you support in the name of patriotism, without taxation?
Oh, never mind. You consider funding the military to be patriotism but all other forms of government are evil.
4 Likes
My wife recently told me about a company who upped their bottom pay to 70k/yr, and like magic productivity improved, moral improved, employee retention improved, ect⌠She looked at me like it really was magicâŚand I asked her, âSo?â. Well what if all employers did that? My response was easy, âThen we would all be making the same bottom pay, you just devalued the money.â She didnât exactly get it. (There was further discussion where she did understand what I was saying, but that was long and drawn out.)
Itâs like when we watch some HGTV renovation shows in California, I live like a god damn king compared to people who want to live in some of these places. Sure I could move to California, but Iâd need to make three times as much as I do now to enjoy a similar lifestyle, which has little to do with the minimum wage.
5 Likes
-
No, itâs neither a pyramid scheme nor economic suicide for your own employees to be able to buy what youâre selling in most cases.
-
I love that the Forbes opinion writerâs counter-example is a company building products that wouldnât be of any use to an individual worker. Yes, yes, youâre so very clever.
Maybe the old saw needs to be updated for the literal-bloodyminded: if youâre selling something to the general public, your employees ought to make enough that they could buy it too.
9 Likes
without taxation?
You must be confusing me with someone else. I did not argue for zero taxation in this forum.
The paid wages so his employees could buy his cars thing appears to be apocryphal, but to say that itâs a pyramid scheme is ridiculous. That Forbes article starts off with a ridiculous parallel to Boeing. I might counter: Should a bakery pay their staff enough to buy bread?
The thing is, Boeingâs business model doesnât involve most Americans owning planes, while Fordâs business model does involve most Americans owning cars. Most people working for Ford in North America today own cars. If that were not the case then car manufacturing would be a tiny niche industry.
If we care to use Ford as an example, then we know for a fact that he increased wages, and that he advocated paying high wages to employees as a matter of good business. He wasnât lagging behind the labour market, forced to pay what others paid, he was leading it, increasing wages and forcing others to come along.
You donât have to pay your own employees enough to buy your product, depending on what your product is, but someone has to buy your product, and a big middle class was the engine that made economic expansion possible, and any individual business can either pay into that or not. Itâs the prisoners dilemma, and you have to choose whether you subscribe to a logic that gives everyone shit or a logic under which everyone does well.
16 Likes
So youâre okay with taxes then? That doesnât exactly square with your calls for government to be significantly reduced if not eliminated since you believe the free market is the best arbiter of whatâs good.
4 Likes
How does that work in a global economy? As with the same issue I brought up above regarding living somewhere like the rural South to say San Francisco, if a multi-national is building all the cheap things we buy (in the US) in China for pennies how would that change the market if all the labor was state side? Does your average Apple store employee really make enough to afford a $700 phone? I mean after paying bills, insurance, food, and savings? Realistically wouldnât it be better for Apple to assembly the phones in their local markets and just take a profit hit?
I say this as someone who lived through their job being sent to Mexico because the company could make an extra $5 per item, which was usually less than 1% of the retail cost.
in most cases
Careful there - if you start qualifying gross statements like that, we might actually get close to quantifying them. At which point youâd lose.
For it to be in a companyâs interest to mass sell products to its very own employees, it would have to have a profit on the sale. For there to be a profit, the revenue would have to be greater than the cost. For that to happen, the price of the widget (revenue) would have to be greater than the salary (cost) of the person expected to buy it.
(It doesnât matter if you apply scaling factors like âone only buys a $widget every 10 yearsâ etc. Those scaling factors affect both sides of the equation.)
Of course, as an -incentive- for better productivity / retention, companies do routinely offer to sell company stuff at a discount to employees. But that is not a source of profit, and is not tied to salaries or affordability, or any goofy concept about how âyour employees ought to make enough that they could buy it tooâ.
However, people who work for you making cars does work as free advertising, just for one. I know plenty of people who work in the auto industry, at levels from shop floor to high-falutinâ engineers. Not only are they paid well, but they all get cars as part of a cheap employee deal. Clearly you know more than the people running trans-national manufacturing industries though.
5 Likes
