151–160 of 573 posts
And the Republic response to this is "soc1lism bad!!"
People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not. The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.
We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.
The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify.
"Half" is a gross exaggeration.
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> half of the US is living in abject poverty Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
The median (not average) household income in the US is 80K USD. p25 is 40K. p10 is 20K. They're struggling, sure.
But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
People are misreading the conclusion - the Covid related drop is normal and matches previous episodes, but the massive overall drop since 2000 is not. The situation on the ground is unchanged - the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed, but the overall pie has grown massively around us.
>the amount of labor being generated per person has not really changed im not really understanding what you mean. i dont get how labor is generated, in particular. do you mean to say the amount of total hours dedicated to labor per person or something else?
this is relatively unremarkable for those with an understanding of wage, labor, profit, price and capital. capitalism will always seek to reduce labor cost. during the epoch of neoliberalism it achieved great strides in this by reducing labor power through union busting by both thatcher and reagan in the UK and US respectively. it has also effectively curtailed any increase in the minimum wage for nearly 20 years as…
Marx fails to imagine a world in which labor actually has little to no value. His worldview is primarily that capitalists 'steal' the valuable labor. However it doesn't seem that that is actually the world we are in. Instead the intrinsic value of human labor seems to be slowly trending towards zero. And it kind of makes sense, same has happened with oxen labor, horse labor, etc.
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We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.
>and half of the US is living in abject poverty Source? All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
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Not the commenter you replied to, but one thing to note is that capital gains tax (at least in the context of investments in corporate equities) is applied after corporate taxes. Profits and reinvested earnings are taxed as profits, and they're two of the key components to valuing an equity. As such, when comparing income tax and capital gains, you should add the impact of corporate taxes. Incidentally, corporate tax…
If the income was earned through dividends, maybe this would be a reasonable argument. Most of the time stock just gets bought and sold by investors rather than the company itself though, so it's not clear why corporate tax would have anything to do with this. Sure, the stock price should somehow be tied to the actual value of the company, but for a while now it's been mostly indistinguishable from a Ponzi scheme oth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.
I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the commenter you replied to, but one thing to note is that capital gains tax (at least in the context of investments in corporate equities) is applied after corporate taxes. Profits and reinvested earnings are taxed as profits, and they're two of the key components to valuing an equity. As such, when comparing income tax and capital gains, you should add the impact of corporate taxes. Incidentally, corporate tax…
I've often wondered why we don't abolish corporation tax and instead tax capital gains and dividends like normal income.
I think this is part of a long term development where technology and globalization slowly erode workers bargaining power. Basically you only build a factory in the US if you can keep labour costs low enough and the manufacturing automated enough so that you can still compete with other manufacturing hubs.
The longer graph (starting at 1947) shows the shift in 2001 on more startlingly https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173 Corporate profit vs Labor income divergence (only up to 2018) https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/08/corporate-profits-ve...