Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are writing is another version of water/diamonds story. Basically WTF happened that diamonds, which nobody needs, are worth a lot, but water, which everyone needs, costs basically nothing? The answer was something called marginalism. Well worth reading about, and I can't do justice to it in a few sentences. Of course marginalism itself requires you to think about value in a certain way, often a very technica…
Thanks, I didn't know the term "marginalism", I'll look it up.
Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive. When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.
$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on
Maybe not, but it's a lot of money for most families to pay someone else to take care of their kids.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money. Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precise…
Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.
I agree childcare you pay for is often expensive - I was thinking more of the unpaid work done by stay-at-home parents and families caring for their own elders - who earn no direct salary for their efforts. But nobody would say they ought to stop.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a non sequitur. Total compensation vs. inflation is not a measure of inequality.
Yes, but the grandparent claimed that > and almost none of the gain has gone to those at the bottom of society which is not true, since real compensation at the bottom of society has also gone up.
By all the numbers I've seen, that's not really the case. For one example, according to the Congressional Research Service[1], inflation-adjusted wages for the bottom 10% of earners have been stagnant since the start of the 1980s, and inflation-adjusted wages for the bottom 50% have been nearly stagnant, with small gains that consist almost entirely of women's income getting closer to parity with men's.
[1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/search/#/?termsToSearch=r450...
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, is that true? > So on average, those in the highest earnings bracket will pay 56 percent of their taxable income to the taxman (31 percent in local income tax plus 25 percent in national income tax), but a top earner living in Dorotea would pay 60.15 percent. https://www.thelocal.se/20180111/does-swedens-tax-system-rea... That sounds higher than the US. Maybe not that much higher than particularly high tax place…
Marginal tax rate in places with most top earners, like California and New York, is around 50%, if you add together both federal and state taxes.
Just used a tax calculator, in Stockholm gross of 500k USD annually was net 210k USD: https://se.neuvoo.com/tax-calculator/?iam=&uet_calculate=cal...
In NYC it'd be net 284k: https://smartasset.com/taxes/new-york-tax-calculator#xyAZi4N...
So yeah, it's much higher in Sweden. The effective tax rates are 58% vs 43%.
Re: Valuing Productivity, Not Profession, Could Reduce U.S. Inequality
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not simply accommodate the savings rather than constantly trying to confiscate them? A dynamic monetary system can do that. I don't understand this obsession on the left with behaving like Robin Hood. Wealth taxes will not alter the power position of the rich. All it does is get up the nose of the rich and require us to pay those people who want to play Robin Hood. QE labour hours however, and the power of the we…
I'm not sure I understand what your proposal is but the answer to your question of "why wealth tax", the answer is pretty much because it's simple to convey and rally behind. Deficit spending (or straight up "money printing") could provide benefits to those who need it without taxation, but decades of political obsession over "how are we gonna pay for it" means that people feel better if a policy of "buy X" is follow…
By definition if you spend more, you tax more. Every amount of govt spending is matched by an increase in taxation to the penny for any positive tax rate. The only thing that stops that is increases in private saving along the route.
Why do you want to stop increased saving?
The 'wealth tax' doesn't work because it doesn't stop the 'wealthy' from bidding on the thing government is trying to buy. So you are just going to cause inflation.
Why not try explaining to people how the system actually works?