Tying the minimum wage to inflation (with some cap at, say 5%, to account for possible hyper-inflation) would be a good idea…
Now, why the cap? If the economy ever goes south in a bad way and hyper-inflation actually happens, people will have far more pressing concerns that the minimum wage…
Your quote is indeed interesting, especially this part:
has any right to continue in this country
And we see that happening. Tons of manufacturing jobs HAVE moved to China. Lots of customer support jobs have gone to India (most Indians understand English, being a former British colony). As an engineer, I am troubled to see that my former company used a lot of engineers Malaysia, despite the US being the birth place of the transistor, integrated circuit, and microprocessor.
I do completely agree that a CEO getting 5 million is rather ridiculous. Is a CEO really worth a salary of 3,000 times that of the janitor? Probably now. Still, HOW do you stop this, and WHY does it even happen? Imagine two companies doing the same thing. One pays its CEO 5 million, and the 2nd pays its CEO 1/2 million. If both perform the same, then the 2nd company should be in BETTER shape than the 1st. However, if the 1st is really a better businessman and improves the company by MORE than the 4-1/2 million difference, you could argue that he has earned his money. Is it also possible that CEO salary is a bubble that may collapse soon, once people realize that the CEO money could be better spent on dividends or R&D?
So, what I think I am saying is that salary disparity is a problem, so we agree in that. Where we disagree is in exactly how to fix it, and what even the root cause it.
Possibly true, but try asking that question of the people that were laid off when their jobs were moved.
Sadly, this is part of “globalization” and “free trade.” Where possible, jobs WILL move to where things are cheaper. As more and more businesses move there, salaries will rise in places like India, due to competition for the workers. Wages increase over there, and decrease over here. All other things being equal (skill level, languages, government protection from corruption, etc.), this will continue until the salaries and the standards of living are comparable across all countries. Of course, all other things are seldom equal, but I see no reason that a Chinese factory worker cannot make the same quality of product that an American worker can. Fifty years ago, Japanese cars were considered jokes. Today, they are considered among the best. This shows that design and manufacturing skills can be learned in a reasonable period of time.
The only real “solution” that I can see would be a protectionist economy with major tariffs on imports, but I can easily imagine this cure being worse than the disease.
I think there’s a simple point that’s being missed here by various posters. The strip may be making the point that a wealth tax is opposed for bogus reasons - that it would discourage productivity, when in fact the wealthy (or at least those who inherit wealth) are not all that productive. That’s arguable - some claim (and I don’t know if they’re right) that the top earners in the US work very long hours at work and at education. Naturally, that is a bit of an insult to kindergarten teachers, coal miners, nurses, and many others who work very hard at dangerous, necessary jobs and make very little.
Okay - but I think Piketty’s argument (full disclosure - I’ve only read reviews) is that working just doesn’t make as much as investing, thus automatically setting the stage for ever-increasing inequality where taxes are low. So in eras where taxes are raised for national emergencies such as the Depression and World Wars, there is temporarily less inequality. The 20s to the 70s were an anomalously egalitarian period, which much of America has mistakenly taken as the “normal” way of things. We still regard that as a kind of golden age, while we resist doing what was done then to create that situation. Instead, many regard that as a time when people were somehow “better” - all that Greatest Generation claptrap.
Now, you don’t have to loathe, mistrust, or even dislike the “rich”, who are as diverse a group as anyone else—they are probably as good, bad, generous, selfish, as the poor or anyone else—to decide that endlessly concentrated wealth has bad side-effects on the polity and society. Wealth has a way of bending politics, especially in the US right now where campaigns are funded by donations, and the SCOTUS refuses to see that as a kind of bribery, however dilute. Even if all rich people were kind and virtuous, hard-working and productive, , it still might not be a good idea to allow endless concentration of wealth.
I think most people would agree that a hypothetical situation of one person holding 99% of the wealth and 1% being distributed among everyone else is non-optimal, so the only question is how much inequality is bad.
I think there is a pretty widespread belief (among the right, mostly, I’d guess) that having an upper class deciding on the parameters of a good society and pressuring the poor via charity to conform to those parameters is a good idea. In that scenario, the only people living in true squalor are those who refuse to conform to the standards of those giving out charity, and who cannot muster the energy and cleverness to climb out of poverty without help. From the POV of the right, substitute “experts and academics” for upper class, and “entitlements” for charity…
You got me there. It started to get more complicated in my head as I wrote it and then I was too far gone to quit. I should have deleted that first clause…
I don’t think it was ever the claim that nobody poor can ever get ahead, but the numbers for the last several decades do show that far fewer are getting ahead, as the middle class shrinks and the ranks of the poor grow.
And the argument that all jobs are created by the rich is bunk. My last three employers were all basically upper-middle class, not millionaires by a long shot (one of them used to drive a beat up Toyota and eat baked potatoes every day for lunch.)
Look, I’m not interested in demonizing the rich, I’m just looking for ways to make life better for the most number of people, and the fact remains that since the 1950’s the tax rates on the wealthiest have steadily gone down, so they have gotten wealthier, while the unemployment rate has wavered between 3 and 10% independent of tax rates; considering how much wealthier the top 1% have gotten over the last decades, we should be swimming in jobs.
I agree with your point that even if the very rich were all very nice it would be a problem, so this is kind of a side note, but I think there are very good reasons to suspect that on average the very wealthy are more likely to be amoral and selfish than the average person.
If he didn’t choose to drive a beat up car he wasn’t upper-middle class by a long shot. If he did then the example is meaningless, as anyone can choose to live as if they were earning less than they actually are.
I’m going to stick with my view that there is no real middle class, just the working classes (some of whom may be running their own business, others may be on welfare) and those who earn money by exploiting the working classes. The working class boss may be a problem, but the exploiting class is a far bigger problem.
None of that changes that we are all slaves to the system. Yes, even the exploiting class.
Kevin, even though the haters here don’t appreciate all your hard work, I just want to let you know that I think you are an amazing person and I am glad America has people like you who are willing to sacrifice EVERYTHING they have just to have a shot at being great.
I don’t appreciate his attitude that it was all hard work and luck had nothing to do with it. I put in hard work, I sacrificed everything I had.
I LOST!
Thankfully I am in the UK where I am less likely to be pushed to the side as a failure, but it is a contributing factor in my ill health. Or is ending up on disability benefits actually winning?
But would it not be better to structure society so that those opportunities are more readily available to all? Because they manifestly are not at present.
I am on welfare (disability) and I have an unwritten deal with the DWP.
They don’t put me on workfare, I don’t set up a revolutionary union and take over the workplace turning it into a workers co-operative.
I know I wouldn’t last the full length of the workfare period, and I would lose my benefits when I eventually burn out, so I don’t have anything more to lose if ATOS (or their sucessor, who I don’t think will be any better) put me in the work related activity group.
And there are a few European countries where that is the mindset. But I think when many Americans hear something like “would it not be better to structure society…”, they get very upset, because that seems like a top-down dictatorial decree.
Americans have a kind of dual myth - one of perfect liberty, and one of an enduring, successful middle class. As Piketty says (I’m told, I’ve only read reviews), America’s era of a successful growing middle class could only happen with a lot of top-down intervention after the depression and through world wars. But this puts our two myths at odds with each other and creates a cognitive dissonance which just makes people frustrated and angry.
I’m curious why you are not worried about the side effects of people not having enough to live on? Do you think it only effects them, and not the economy as a whole?
The crimes by the rich are very real as you noted above when you commented on the “subprime” crisis. I’m not giving you much credit because you strike me as a classic spammer just kind of repeating the same Heritage/Cato type bumper sticker points over and over and over… right down to your classic, predictable, and unverifiable, Horatio Alger internet creation story. If I had a dime for every “self-made” libertarian internet poster I’d probably be hanging out with Hollingsworth…
You can’t even defend your own incorrect notions about entrepreneurship or economic mobility so you just resort to saying that I hate rich people while not working and spending all my time watching tv. I find this particularly funny as since about mid-January I’ve worked six days a week for the bulk of this year.
His comment is just ugly anyway, because it assumes that being on “wellfare” is such an awesome way to live. Most people on welfare would rather work for decent wages, but as we know, those kinds of wages and jobs are long gone now. It’s also a myth that most people stay on welfare, and that welfare has expanded. Benefits have in fact shrunk over the last decades. The biggest “welfare queens” in this country are the extremely wealthy and their corporations who take in more while giving back less.
