You have to look at real wage per hour… In other words, how much stuff can you get with one hour of work. You also have to consider the amount of debt that has accumulated. There will be reckoning unless you do something.
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So the argument is that there is already enough money for investments, as evidenced by the fact that corporations are sitting on lots of cash. So if foreign money is coming into the financial system, it needs to go somewhere. If investments don’t rise then you have negative savings (debt or unemployment). And obviously it’s debt that has risen since unemployment is low.
Judge for yourself:
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American government admits tarifs, tax cuts, massive spending cuts are the plan
The U.S. is slashing jobs in theory because of their massive deficit, but are then pairing the massive cuts with a huge tax cut for the wealthy. Their debt issues are due to lousy economic policies and an unwillingness to raise taxes and live within their means.
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Reagan was a Republican…
Isn’t this an argument for more inequality? A tiny minority <1% hold the vast majority of the wealth and the other >99% get to fight over the scraps?
You can have a situation where inequality goes down because the middle income folks are crushed by the tariffs and economic impacts.
So the low and middle folks merge, with the professional class slice, and the tiny uber wealthy slice up top.
I have posted this before in another thread:
It’s an argument that we should focus on growing the pie, not how to slice it. If most peoples’ slice of pie is growing I don’t think we should flip the table in order to have a smaller pie with more uniform slices because we spend too much time getting FOMO on tiktok than being happy for all the stuff we have.
I was more stating that the wealthiest getting a bigger share would seem to result in wealth inequality becoming higher. Wasn’t debating what should be done on it.
Poly posted some stats on how it could happen, but I’d argue it’s more a case of inadequate stats to deal with a case where it’s the 0.1% (or even smaller) sucking up all the wealth.
Wealth inequality is strange…
I saw a video last night showing the suites on Singapore airlines and was thinking about how I’ll never be able to afford that (maybe with points), and then had to remind myself that the truly wealthy fly on their own 787s.
Meanwhile I’m watching people in my community moan about how rich our provincial politicians are getting with their “crazy high” salaries ($95k CAD) and was talking with a guy I play Warcraft with who makes $400/wk USD and I’m making more than the politicians are making.
Strangely, of the various groups, I’m probably near the top of the heap for proportion of my income going to taxes. The guy making $21k/yr is probably in a super low bracket because he just isn’t making anything. The guy flying around on a personal 787 isn’t paying taxes because everything is sheltered or run through 12 countries.
I personally don’t mind seeing the suites on the planes because I think people who pay massive amounts of money for these things are idiots
I would be curious to see the basis for the statement that the guy flying on the 787 isn’t paying taxes. There are various tax shelters like borrow on your equity but interest rates are high now which counterbalances that… and there are ways to pay less on sold stock but it’s never nothing. Transfer pricing is fraud and has penalties…Routing your money through 12 countries these days just would make 12 countries able to scrutinize your finances, although probably only one or two eg the US would do it. Carried interest is a big one that hopefully they get rid of soon. It reduces taxes, but not to nothing.
smh at the people who think 95K CAD is too much for a politician unless they think it’s a part time job. I would expect corruption to be the result if you don’t pay a politician a comparable amount to what they can get in the private sector.
Not that it proves anything, but is this guy working full time? Is he showing up to work in a normal state or after spending half his nights playing WoW
How high is $95k CAD relative to the average wage in your area?
Thats usually the marker that I would use.
Not sure about Canada, but in the UK there is a marked crabs in a barrel mentality that is often seen in more rural areas with lower average wages.
I’m not opposed to the suites on the planes. I’m just getting tired of seeing YouTubers, etc. doing trips I’ll never be able to afford. They were far more enjoyable to watch when they were doing trips that I might do at some point.
The basis for the 787 comment is that I’m seeing where Tesla is paying $0 in federal income tax and knowing some of the legal shenanigans business owner friends do. Yes, they’re paying some taxes, but at a rate lower than salary earners do for similar amounts of income. The 787 gets owned by a corporation rather than an individual, the trip gets structured as business and it becomes an operating cost rather than a personal trip. You could also go with Warren Buffets classic take that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.
Peter Thiel has $5 billion in capital gains in his Roth IRA that apparently aren’t taxable. Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has $5B in his tax-free retirement account, report finds
When I was in university, I worked for my dad, helping my grandma which made it feasible for him to pay me out of his corporation to go to university and use that as a business expense. Normal people would have had to pay taxes on the money they use to pay their kids while helping grandparents. He’d buy art work he liked for his office as office decor and then depreciate it and it ended up moving the art into his basement when he sold his business and retired.
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Full time working for a hotel in Kansas. It sounds like he’s their handyman. He might be getting board as well as it sounds like he lives on site. However from his description, it doesn’t sound like a particularly nice hotel where there’s a building shutdown due to damage and he’s repairing a lot of damage because the owner was too cheap to heat some buildings and the pipes ended up freezing.
Paying your kids out of your business is a nice tax break that I should probably use more often. Trump does this too. By the way, the artwork in the business should have been declared as income once your dad took it, though I’m sure no one cares.
Board at a really cheap hotel is probably worth at least 15K a year so he’s really making 35K, still super low but the shock value is less
The Youtuber is probably deducting the cost of his influencer trip as a business, if he’s paying for it at all
Maybe other people enjoy these suites but I personally see travel as a point a to point b thing so it really doesn’t bother me that other people pay thousands more for a little extra room and more comfortable chair/sleeping accommodations and in effect subsidize my travel
The theory is that Thiel’s businesses paid corporate income tax so his Roth 401k wasn’t completely not taxed, but that is a loophole anyone who starts a business with shares can do… put your shares in your Roth. I guess it is a lot of effort though. And there’s no guarantee the corporate tax wasn’t somehow avoided too… other than that most companies do pay taxes.
That’s interesting about Tesla, have they made money yet if you sum up all their net incomes from all the years? If they haven’t, it would make sense they’re not paying taxes yet. Sounds like there’s more to the story though. Guess we need to close the carbon credit loophole if that’s how it is.
Average household income is $106k, median is $85k.
Average salary in the province from one source is $42k but province says average weekly earnings is $1280 or about $67k.
I think the difficulty is we’ve got high unemployment, and a lot of people work in the fishery.
The plan of a lot of people is they work 14 weeks at the fish plant to qualify for full employment insurance and the spend 30 to 32 weeks on EI. The 14 weeks are super busy with lots of overtime. The time on EI roughly equals their income while the fishing season was on. I think they’re making around $50k to $70k/yr. However, they don’t make CPP contributions while on EI, and they don’t have savings for retirement. They get to retirement, and then get reduced CPP benefits because of their limited contributions and so they’re low income. However, they live in rural areas and have paid off homes.
Then they hit theirs 60s and 70s, health issues start appearing and they need to come into the city more and more for medical care. They end up destitute as their plan was to live in a rural community and they can make a go of it there, but coming into town sucks up all their income.
Many of the fish harvesters make great money, particularly if they have a crab or lobster license. A lot of the money gets blown on toys, travel, alcohol, and drugs. Then they go broke when the quotas get cut back because stock productivity declined for a few years. Many people are lousy at dealing with patchy income e.g. you make $100k to $3000k in a few weeks, and then need to make it last the rest of the year and possibly next year as well.
I can’t feel too bad for people whose plan is to work for 14 weeks a year and nothing the rest of the year. If they have to live a really basic life on government charity when they’re old, well, that’s what they were doing the rest of their life too, weren’t they. I wouldn’t begrudge them food, shelter, and medical care but after that?
I feel a little worse for those who can’t deal with patchy income, but still… .it happens once a year or once every 2 years? then you’d think people would realize after maybe 5 years what they need to do.
Just looked into Tesla’s miniscule federal income tax more and apparently it’s partly accelerated depreciation doing it (other than the carbon credits and carryforward loss)… hopefully it means they pay more taxes later.
Having spent the past close to 30 years working at universities and at research centers with really smart people and now having to deal at work on a regular basis with more non-academic co-workers, and members of the public and with some family members, I’ve learned I’ve been living in a bubble of smart people.
I haven’t had to interact with the people who are dumber than average on a consistent basis very often. I’m seeing now that they often don’t learn. They often struggle to think long term. They often don’t understand nuance. They have no concept of fractions. Math is often beyond them. Many of them make the same harmful mistakes over and over again. Smart people repeat their mistakes, but they take steps to mitigate the effects of their repeated mistakes. The dumb ones post memes about how they grew up not wearing seat belts, drinking and driving, smoking, and using hard drugs and they turned out ok.
And when you point this out to people they probably call you a bad person who should feel bad about pointing these obvious issues out.
It used to be that these people were in a minority, but they have grown in size to such an extent that their entire cohort is self-sustaining.
Thats how we ended up with Trump.
People like @stochiki don’t see this. They still think that manufacturing can solve this problem via reshoring, but he ignores that the vast majority of these people are largely uneducated and have few skills.
The new normal is the politics of grievance. These folks have a lot of grievances, and that is precisely what Trump taps into because Trump also has many grievances himself.