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To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

nytimes.com

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Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#671

Post by peoplewindow »

GuiA wrote: post #436
peoplewindow wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is famous for having made its early cooks and massage therapists into multi-millionaires by giving them stock options. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/technology/12google.html?m... Remember that this NY Times article is designed to push emotional buttons. Their entire story revolves around comparing Apple against Kodak. There aren't really any deeper studies or figures provided. You could as well compare a c…

Except I work at such one big company, and talk to its security guards, shuttle drivers, cafeteria cooks, every single day. And what do they tell me? That once this ends, they're headed to Whole Foods for another shift. Or that they'll sleep in their car for a few hours tonight before heading to the next job, not seeing their kids. Or that they're struggling to pay for their mom's medical bills and have no clue how t…

Yes. Note I referred to early employees. Cooks and massueses got rich off Google in the days when there were only a few of them and the company was run by idealistic founders who weren't responsible to the stock market. Now there are hundreds or thousands of such people globally, and things went back to normal.

My point is that "janitor who became CTO" is not really a common story at any company, even at Kodak.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#672

Post by namarie »

Chris2048 wrote: post #670
jaggederest wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you making a modest proposal that people should go from four kids to one, post facto? I think everyone deserves to be able to have vacation time, especially single parents.

> I think everyone deserves To live a life free of consequences? As in have more kids, same quality of life? How will that work? > everyone deserves.. And who pays?

>To live a life free of consequences?

To live a fulfilling life without the constant fear of not being able to adequately provide for yourself or your offspring?

>And who pays?

Since it'd be us, collectively, as a society who would benefit it'd make sense for us, collectively, as a society to pay.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#673

Post by namarie »

sp527 wrote: post #545
mikeash wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that inequality is inescapable, but it's pretty obvious just by looking at a few decades of history that current levels of equality are absolutely not a given.

In this respect, I think you should look at history as a function of the maximum potential global throughput of wealth transfer as opposed to a function of time. The past few decades look more like several millennia on that scale.

Why should we look at it that way?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#674

Post by namarie »

user5994461 wrote: post #601
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then construction would increase, causing rents to fall.

Constructions cannot increase indefinitely. Land is a limited resources.

Neither can human population. At some point everyone would have houses.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#675

Post by Chris2048 »

namarie wrote: post #672
Chris2048 wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think everyone deserves To live a life free of consequences? As in have more kids, same quality of life? How will that work? > everyone deserves.. And who pays?

>To live a life free of consequences? To live a fulfilling life without the constant fear of not being able to adequately provide for yourself or your offspring? >And who pays? Since it'd be us, collectively, as a society who would benefit it'd make sense for us, collectively, as a society to pay.

> To live a fulfilling life without the constant fear

And this comes, for free, with no obligations? What is the standard for a "fulfilling life"? One child? A hundred? If I think my life will be fulfilled by skydiving, or playing XBox, or hookers and blow - should the state pay for those as well?

> it'd be us, collectively, as a society who would benefit

What you are describing is a market, but with no feedback or control; When someone ends up a burden on society due to a poor upbringing, does "society" get a refund?

If we are paying for people to bring up children, it would make more sense if the we initiated it; rather than people self-select for parenthood and get child welfare as an individual right.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#676

Post by barrkel »

banned1 wrote: post #635
barrkel wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The returns to capital (capital gains specifically) are taxed at a much lower rate than income, and they're not taxed at all until they're realized, which means they can be timed to offset losses. Then the government is effectively handing out a subsidy to people with lots of capital, even more so than the lower tax rate. "The market" not attractive enough - there's nowhere to put your money other than "the market" (…

https://taxfoundation.org/why-capital-gains-are-taxed-lower-... Is there a limit you see in taxes? Do you have investments yourself? Maybe you donated all of your investments to the government after realizing how little you were being taxed?

I most recently converted my investments into a house deposit. In effect, I propped up inflated house prices. It'll take a while before I have a significant investment position again.

Your last question is silly. The reason why I can simultaneously support higher taxes, yet not voluntarily donate money to the government, is because advocacy of higher taxes can raise far more money for government than my personal donations. Raising money to fund government is a collective action problem; if government relied on donations to run, it would fail because of freeloaders - in essence, a tragedy of the commons. But by collectively enforcing mandatory taxes we can make government work.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#677

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

barrkel wrote: post #676
banned1 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://taxfoundation.org/why-capital-gains-are-taxed-lower-... Is there a limit you see in taxes? Do you have investments yourself? Maybe you donated all of your investments to the government after realizing how little you were being taxed?

I most recently converted my investments into a house deposit. In effect, I propped up inflated house prices. It'll take a while before I have a significant investment position again. Your last question is silly. The reason why I can simultaneously support higher taxes, yet not voluntarily donate money to the government, is because advocacy of higher taxes can raise far more money for government than my personal dona…

> But by collectively enforcing mandatory taxes we can make government work.

It's arguable whether giving government more money results in government working better.

By some accounts government is a demonstration of waist and an exercise in excess.

Government departments are always chronically underfunded, primarily because no government department PR employee ever got promoted by saying "we have enough money".

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#678

Post by TimPC »

sokoloff wrote: post #642
TimPC wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(I'm agreeing with you, by the way.) My response above was addressing/objecting to a claim that accurate balance sheets are already being prepared upon death. There are huge practical issues with valuing illiquid assets. Much wealth, though is held in relatively liquid assets or in illiquid assets with valuation processes already established in a lot of cases (real estate valuation for property tax assessment as an e…

I think if a loophole exists for a collectible asset class wealth will accumulate there as part of tax planning. This can easily lead to bubbles and unfairness through asymmetric tax avoidance. I think it does pose deep foundational challenges for a wealth tax. Tracking income is far easier and many of the most common abuses defer tax rather than permanently avoid it. Under reporting of a hard to track quantity would result in less taxes permanently in the new system and measures to avoid it would represent a new level of reporting to government that many would find deeply invasive. Given all these flaws are the benefits large enough?

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#679

Post by URSpider94 »

jaggederest wrote: post #651
Chris2048 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that janitor have many vacations too? And decent college funds? Healthcare?

Yes, yes, and yes. Janitorial staff at a Ford plant in ~1965 would make enough to own their own house, vacation once a year (probably not by plane but...), and college was percentage-wise ridiculously cheaper - 30x if my calculations are correct, which they probably aren't, but hey. Healthcare would have unquestionably been provided by their employer. And all that on only a single income for a family of four, no less…

... and with a defined-benefit pension as well, meaning no need for 401k contributions out of their salary, and no risk of losing that money due to poor investment decisions.

Re: To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors

#680

Post by RealityNow »

pjmorris wrote: post #668
RealityNow wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is counteracted by the fact that employees now have the option of walking away from their jobs, and thus employers would have to raise wages to draw them in. Wages might rise in the type of jobs that nobody actually wants to do (eg. janitor), though wages may very well decrease in the jobs that everybody wants. UBI and government job programs aren't mutually exclusive. I do think the government should create mor…

> This is counteracted by the fact that employees now have the option of walking away from their jobs I don't see how either a UBI or a job guarantee limits employees from walking away from their jobs. The presence of a job, or an income, hasn't stopped many people from starting their own thing. > But either way, I think a UBI is necessary so that people have the option of working for themselves rather than being for…

UBI doesn't limit employees from walking away from their jobs, it enables them to.

> The option to work for yourself isn't taken away by a jobs guarantee.

Obviously. Job guarantee programs however still don't allow you to truly walk away from your job unless you're able to financially support yourself, whereas a UBI does.

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