181–190 of 694 posts
>> Ms. Ramos, the Apple janitor, lives down the road in San Jose. She >> pays $2,300 monthly for a two-bedroom apartment where she and her >> four children live. Before overtime and taxes, her $16.60 an hour >> works out to $34,520 a year. Her rent alone is $27,600 a year, >> leaving less than $600 a month once the rent is paid. Assuming she's only losing 20% to taxes and other deductions, she can't even cover rent.…
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I just _had_ to rebut some of these: Apple got initial funding of only 250k, and that was split between equity and loan, very feasible even with a 400k yearly cap. (And I'd also note that 10% of "any money over that" still adds up given some of the salaries paid to top execs) Secondly, Google's initial funding was only 100k in 98` dollars. The significant 25m round was from kleiner perkins and sequoia, and I certainl…
And what about all the other companies funded by the same people who funded Apple, Google, and Facebook, that never became profitable? I'm curious how much capital is spent on failures in addition to the companies that pan out.
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"Rich people invest all of their money back into the economy" - if it really worked like that we wouldn't be discussing inequality.
I'm curious where you think their money is.
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Income inequality has been increasing since the 1970s, so I submit the underlying cause cannot have been a policy change in 1986.
Around the same time that the gold standard was dropped and banks started creating money out of thin air.
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I think in both cases, it's just the market. There is a demand for engineers which is more than for janitors, and with more limited supply. Everything else is just moving money from one pocket into another, it doesn't have economic significance.
Agree. In a capitalist society, this is par for the course. If you try to build systems to remove this inequality, you have to move towards communism since you will then need far more complex control mechanisms.
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It's not even the point of the example and they address that in the article. They point is that the janitor at Kodak had opportunities to advance her career, whereas the janitor working at Apple has none because she doesn't even for the Apple.
But she's also not taking computer classes in her spare time, and work is approximately he same number of hours leaving approximately the same amount of spare time ... even if she were taking computer classes it would not be a reasonable comparison, because taking computer classes in the 1980s was a much more rare and advanced thing than taking them today. It'd have to be something more like quantum mechanics classes…
How can somebody have the mind to take classes when they haven't had a holiday in years? Or when they work from 6p.m. to 2a.m.?
We should tax wealth, not income. [1] The majority of income the top 0.1% make is from investments and gets taxed as capital gains, only about 15% of their income is taxed as ordinary income. [2][3] We have an economic system where it's dramatically easier to make money the more money you already have. If you have $50M, you can park it in an index fund to get 4% returns and make $2M every year just off of your invest…
What about just printing money? Not ideal obviously, but there'd be no way to avoid the inflation "tax".
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> You can't self-study your way to becoming a lawyer or a doctor. That's because the law doesn't allow it.
It would be insane if it did.
See "Competition & Monopoly In Medical Care" by Frech, pg. 54 for a detailed discussion.
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? Not sure if you're making a point or trying to be funny, but socialism is far from a Soviet (or even a Cold War) thing. European countries pioneered mandatory paid vacation and paid medical leave over a century ago, a fundamental workers' right which the US still does not give its citizens.
I always thought the people that left Europe for USA did it for a different life, not to get socialism and get back in line with the herd. But it seems that the people in California had afterthoughts about this and decided to go commie. Not kidding, Hacker News commenters are very much biased towards socialism - take it from a guy that was born and lived in a socialist country and had the chance to feel it the hard w…
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yes, very few paid the top rate. but that's the point, the excess income was being thrust back into the economy, driving innovation and creating jobs not just languishing in someone's bank account.
> thrust back into the economy This is another variation on the "rich people hoard cash" theory, which is completely false. Rich people invest all of their money back into the economy. Even bank deposits are invested back into the economy (when the bank loans it out). Scrooge McDuck cash vaults do not exist.
