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To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

nytimes.com

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Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#611

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

sokoloff wrote: post #609
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but if we're going to live in the land of inheritance then we need to toss the ideas that "anybody can make it" or "I earned this." >I don't want to live in a world where "I farm this land, just as my father, his father, and his father for 5 generations has done." is not possible. Why not? A man works hard to support himself but allowing four generations of free-riders seems like a pretty bad idea. It strikes me…

I don't know how much time you've spent on family farms, but from what I've seen, I'd not describe them as "free-riders" on the land or on past generations.

Then they can earn the farm the same way their father or grandfather did. If they can't earn it why should they have it? That's what meritocracy means.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#612

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

conanbatt wrote: post #554
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no Friedman acolyte. Are you actually opposed to meritocracy?

I think the concept of a meritocracy requires someone to decide what is meritocratic and all goes to hell from there. Its like saying that you are going to base justice on "protecting good people and punishing bad people". I can be swayed otherwise if I was shown what a meritocratic system would look like, but most of the times I heard that word it was as a criticism of laissez-fair capitalism that would rarely claim…

>Its like saying that you are going to base justice on "protecting good people and punishing bad people".

That's exactly what our justice system is... Sometimes we fail at abstracting our morality to the courts but that's exactly what our goal is.

>I can be swayed otherwise if I was shown what a meritocratic system would look like, but most of the times I heard that word it was as a criticism of laissez-fair capitalism that would rarely claim to be meritocratic.

So your logic is "people usually use meritocracy as a knock against capitalism" and then establish your premise? "meritocracy is bad"? Doesn't make any sense. A perfectly meritocratic system doesn't exist and probably never will but systems which try to promote equality of opportunity are generally good. Our defense of "meritocracy" comes from the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Behind it, it becomes obvious you would want to live in a society which provides a relatively equal chance for everybody and which, if you seize that chance, will reward you.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#613

Post by AdrianB1 »

tchaffee wrote: post #481
AdrianB1 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay small taxes and you get great value, good for you. Other people pay much bigger taxes and get nothing in return. Tax based healthcare is robbery, richer people are not sicker and there is no justification to pay for services a percentage of your income. Otherwise you should pay for groceries a percentage of your income, for gas, for rent etc, so in the end everyone is equal in what they can buy. Better tha…

I pay a lot of taxes. It's worth it for me to live in a country with healthy and educated people and that's just the very short list. If you don't value those things, don't live there.

And where do you want me to go? On the Moon? I live in a country where I have a decent salary by US standards, but due to taxation I am on the poverty line, also by US standards. Former east-European communist country, currently just socialist with taxation around 60-70% for all income, no matter how small or big. So, where do I need to go for a decent living?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#614

Post by AdrianB1 »

GuiA wrote: post #151
AdrianB1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was also born and lived in a socialist country, not sure I get your point. If being "in the herd" means that janitors get vacation, medical leave, and don't have to work from 6am to 2am like the janitor in the article, it's an alright herd I'd say.

You know that an employer is calculating the overall cost per year and the overall productivity per year. If you want to work X months and get 12-X months of vacation, just tell the employer and you will get a reduced salary and paid vacation, so in the end you cover your total cost. Medical leave? Buy an insurance that covers medical leave. Everything has a cost, who should cover it, the Holly Pope? Big salary? Well that poor janitor earns 10 times a Chinese janitor in a big city and 50 times a Chinese janitor in rural areas. You janitor is extremely rich by comparison, why don't you pay some more tax to help the Chinese janitor? Or your moral fiber ends to your border?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#615

Post by vwcx »

fzeroracer wrote: post #547
esarbe wrote: post #321

What strikes me the most when looking at many of the comments here is the blatant disregard for human suffering that extreme inequality and the resulting poverty cause. The current economical status quo is accepted as a given and all the harm it causes is dismissed with the shrug of a shoulder. "It can't be helped, the poor sods should have made better life choices to avoid ending up as janitor" is the attitude by wh…

Part of the issue seems to be that in America people simply don't understand inequality. I've had a fair amount of conversations with coworkers that simply didn't 'get' being poor or living in poverty because they never had that experience. At the same time they had a strong belief that they earned everything and that we live in a meritocracy. As you said it essentially comes down to 'they should've made better choic…

I agree with you. I see two threads of meritocracy in American life:

1. The meritocracy tied into Christian belief - that person has sinned (whatever you interpret sin to be), therefore of course their life is like that.

2. The ignorance of never having experienced a life where your merit doesn't influence your personal success. One sickness, accident, etc, usually starts to 'cure' this mindset.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#616

Post by pjmorris »

scott_karana wrote: post #244
pjmorris wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are what give fiat currencies their value. No taxes, no fiat currency. If you don't believe me, consider why the US dollar has value at your local store and the Monopoly dollar doesn't.

If that's true, offshoring and tax havens would have no benefits.

I don't follow your logic. Offshoring has benefits independent of taxation. Tax havens have value in proportion to taxes, independent of the other effects of taxation. How does an effect of taxes on currency value diminish either?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#617

Post by Scea91 »

jiggunjer wrote: post #582
wonder_er wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I have an idea of what they're getting at. Another word for savings is "deferred consumption". If I earned 1000 dollars this month, and spent 700, I have 300 in savings, or, put another way, I deferred consuming 300 of those dollars. Now, 300 in a checking account doesn't do anyone any good but me, but if I took half of that money and invested it w/the bank at a 7%/year interest rate, I'd be investing $15…

"So, everyone spends money, no limits on it" . Not true, there are limits (e.g. in the form of leverage ratio caps) and not everything borrowed is immediately injected back into the economy (that might bump inflation too much). Imagine if banks couldn't 'print their own money', then businesses would depend on people investing to get funding and demand far outstrips supply. So we'd have economic contractions on a mass…

How does a regular bank print money?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#618

Post by eli_gottlieb »

aoeuasdf1 wrote: post #435
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetical scenarios are only valuable insofar as they're close to reality. In real life, if I'm taking home $400k/year in salary it's because I'm creating $1 million/year in revenue. Also in real life, a start-up business that will be worth $50 million usually has more like a 1% chance of success, so it's expected value is actually just about 25% more than the proposed salaried job -- less than my value-per-year a…

If one can create $1 million/year in revenue for $BIGCORP it's completely plausible that they could create $5 million/year in expected value on some better, innovative idea of they own (or a startup's). The only problem is that the second option comes with a double-digit probability of failure. Extremely progressive tax systems artificially distort this decision towards complacency and mediocrity. You mention people…

>artificially distort this decision towards complacency and mediocrity.

You seem to be assuming that Starting a Business is always better, more of an achievement, more awesome, than not starting one. I see no reason for this to be true. Maximizing revenue tends to have more to do with building market power than with achieving anything at all.

You're also deliberately shifting the goalposts here. You started out by saying that progressive taxes were bad because they penalize making more money. Now you're saying they're bad because they incentivize complacency and mediocrity, which are life-achievement qualities rather than economic quantities.

It looks like your underlying belief is: "people who make lots of money are heroes, and we need to encourage more people to be heroes, irrespective of what's good for the rest of society."

>Given a secure enough financial base off of which the logarithmic personal rewards factor is a non-issue, this is the primary driver for plenty of people that I personally know.

To be frank, it's their primary excuse for what they really wanted to do, which was to make as much money as possible. After all, how many are giving away their extra money to the most efficient administrator of human-welfare programs around, the state?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#619

Post by tchaffee »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #613
tchaffee wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay a lot of taxes. It's worth it for me to live in a country with healthy and educated people and that's just the very short list. If you don't value those things, don't live there.

And where do you want me to go? On the Moon? I live in a country where I have a decent salary by US standards, but due to taxation I am on the poverty line, also by US standards. Former east-European communist country, currently just socialist with taxation around 60-70% for all income, no matter how small or big. So, where do I need to go for a decent living?

That depends on what kind of work you do. All over the world the average worker is getting paid far less decade by decade if you account for inflation.

Is that really a problem with taxes? Or is that a problem of the ever expanding wealth gap? Assuming the salary for your job had kept up with inflation, and that you got a fair share of the productivity gains over the past few decades, you would be above the poverty line.

But let's say your taxes could be reduced to something like 40%. Obviously some public services would have to go away. I certainly wouldn't want that to be medical care or public education.

Maybe in your country there are problems with corruption and the taxes aren't be used very effectively? Again, that's not a tax problem, that's a corruption problem. If you were getting the benefit of those services, it would be less money out of your pocket and you would have more to spend.

> currently just socialist

I would also be careful with this category. There is no European country that is socialist. They are all capitalist, with private industry making up the bulk of the economy. There are a few social safety nets and services. But that's not socialism, is it?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#620

Post by TimPC »

sokoloff wrote: post #489
jordanb wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically the point of the estate tax: people are already producing a balance sheet of all the wealth for the purpose of distrusting it to the heirs. So tax the wealth when the estate changes hands and all the accounting is going to be done anyway.

My parents are going through updating their will. They have a collector car. It might be worth $50K, probably worth $70K, maybe worth $90K. They have a house. Might be worth $350K, probably $450K, maybe $500K. Provided their estate will not hit the federal exemption (it will clearly not) or state exemption amount (ditto), there is nothing to compel them to prepare a balance sheet with fair market values.

But how do you make a wealth tax fair if there is no need to prepare a reasonably accurate balance sheet? If it's a yearly tax the loopholes allowed without an accurate balance sheet are so extraordinary that it's reasonable to assume they will cause more problems than the tax fixes.
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