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America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

fortune.com

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Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#111

Post by glimshe »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #97

I believe Americans are naive to the bad deal they're currently sitting with. It is the most materially wealthy place on earth, yet with terrible distribution – this is not a technical problem, it is a cultural problem. My favorite example is to describe a suburb. A lot of people in the world do not know how dystopian an American suburb is: many residents do not know their neighbors, acquiring food requires driving a…

I love suburbia.

I grew up in "walkable residential neighborhoods with cafes/restaurants/shops where neighbors interact" outside the US. Thank you, but no thank you. Crowded, nosy judgemental people, noisy and small properties with constant fights with neighbors.

You're projecting you personal tastes onto others and thinking everybody else is getting a bad deal.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#112

Post by vladvasiliu »

krapp wrote: post #95
dzonga wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era. if you can afford it - the US has excellent healthcare, you can also get organic food and dare I say better housing, private infra. what the US could/should improve on is have public clinics ie for preventative and quick care. public hospitals in the long run have many problems. in the U.K for example - I used priva…

>yeah the hostility started recently with trump and his ilk - fighting for nationalism of a bygone era. It definitely didn't start with Trump, it just became policy under him. Trump would never have had a chance if Americans didn't already blame immigrants for the effects of neoliberalism rather than the billionaires who put it into practice, and if the rural white populace weren't already afraid losing the cultural…

> If you can afford it, anywhere has excellent healthcare.

I don't think so, judging by the many heads of state and other filthy rich people choosing to get healthcare in the West instead of their local countries.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#113

Post by vladvasiliu »

m4rtink wrote: post #49
microtonal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For instance, if you are less than 50 and on private health care through your employer than you're very likely going to have better healthcare access than anywhere in Europe and Canada. Your healthcare insurance being dependent on your employer seems like hell though. They will always have enormous bargaining power over you and I think it also leads to chilling effect, when your health is literally dependent on your…

Isn't employer dependent healthcare basically slavery, blackmail or both ?

This often comes up in discussions pitting the US against the EU countries.

I'm not familiar with all of them, but here in "free, socialized healthcare" France, if you don't have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to "employer-dependant healthcare" in the US, you're going to have to pay out of pocket quite a lot of money. Maybe not as much as in the US (not familiar with that country), but very much not free. Think dental, glasses, needing to spend a night in a hospital for whatever reason (even public ones!), etc. On top of your salary being much lower.

Sure, you don't need an employer to have a mutuelle, you can pay for your own. But it's usually pricier and worse coverage.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#114

Post by gadders »

inigyou wrote: post #99
gadders wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if they made the minimum wage $1m/year then we would all be rich! /s

I know on Reddit this sort of thing earns you karma but it doesn't work like that on HN.

I don't go on Reddit, but you seem to still have people on here who are hard of thinking and believe that increasing the minimum wage has no second or third order effects.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#115

Post by gadders »

Ekaros wrote: post #57
charcircuit wrote: post #10

>If the U.S. changed some policies – such as increasing the federal minimum wage – 46 million people could earn enough to rise above that fair pay line. You can't just raise minimum wage and expect people to make more money since businesses need to fire everyone who aren't worth the new minimum wage and then those newly unemployed people will depress wages for other jobs since there is more labor on the supply side.

On other hand if you can not afford to pay your employees wages they can survive on you do not deserve to be in business. You should go out and any resources you use should instead be used in way that can reasonably sustain workers.

As much as I think you can't raise minimum wage indefinitely, I kind of agree with this a bit as well.

I would be in favour of some sort of mechanism that ties "Number of your employees needing additional benefits to survive" (Universal Credit in the UK) to "How much in profits you can give to shareholders". Even an annually published official list of "inadequately paying companies" would be something.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#116

Post by gadders »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #34
gadders wrote: post #31

"We set the bar at half of what a typical American household earns. " Yeah, relative income isn't really a good measure. You want to raise the floor for people, not (necessarily) narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Wealth inequality itself causes a great number of ills in this country. We should absolutely aim to lower this gap as a goal in itself.

Well, I guess there are two parts of it:

1) Raise the floor for everyone

2) Work to make sure that the path for talented (however you define that) people to go from low earners to high earners is as simple as possible.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#117

Post by fragmede »

inigyou wrote: post #91
anonym29 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training kids how to respond to school shootings is like training kids how to respond to dual engine failures on an airplane. It happens, it's just statistically so unlikely to ever happen to your kid, that the drill essentially serves as ideological propaganda reinforcing fear of the idea of the threat far above and beyond the statistical risk actually posed by the threat itself. And as a reminder, Europe sees more…

School shootings in America are not statistically unlikely, they are a regular occurrence.

It is statistically likely that one will happen somewhere in the country , but it is also statically unlikely that it will happen at the one you are at.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#118

Post by robtherobber »

throw5 wrote: post #87
rjh29 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding an NHS dentist is nearly impossible in most of the UK, though.

In the UK, most people simply get Bupa dental insurance. A basic plan costs like 25 pounds per month. Affordable I'd say. Many people spend more than that on beer and public transport. I know that does not help someone who has become homeless or lost their job and cannot afford the 25 pounds a month (300 pounds a year). That is why I say it is important for people who are employed to get a Bupa insurance plan. Most p…

Whilst I understand that reasoning, I disagree with it. Private insurance should not be necessary to begin with, and if it must exist for whatever rational reason, the insurance should be public as well. Anything that has to do with healthcare (not talking about optional cosmetic surgery, of course) should be handled by / via public healthcare services.

Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#119

Post by Arodex »

anonym29 wrote: post #100
Arodex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a reminder, the heat killing Europeans right now is caused by America pumping ungodly amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere with virility-signalling cars and air conditioning set to 60 fahrenheit everywhere. You are literally mocking Europeans for being killed by your waste.

CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India. Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel. You're welcome. Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire…

>CO2 emissions have been consistently declining in both the USA and Europe for over 2 decades now. The bulk of the CO2 increase over that time period comes from China and India.

Global warming didn't start two weeks ago, nor two decades ago. Most of human generated CO2 and most of the calories accumulated by greenhouse effect are still directly caused by Americans, both in absolute numbers and relative per capita.

>Americans also invented the solar photovoltaic panel.

Americans also elected PV panel haters, and are still destroying whole regions to extract more oil, both overseas and at home.

>Also, since we're playing this game right now, I'd be remiss to not remind you that American individuals do over an order of magnitude more charitable giving than the entire EU combined, on a raw dollar basis.

Hi, cool, are you going to give AC units to Europe? And the Middle East? And India/Bangladesh etc.? Maybe we should prosternate at your feet and thank you for you magnifiscence, oh great solvers of problem you caused.

Re: America pays workers just 27% of what its wealth allows – the worst in the OECD

#120

Post by sokoloff »

jibal wrote: post #13
sokoloff wrote: post #3

> We measure resources by using per capita gross domestic product – the amount of money in a country evenly divided among its entire population. GDP is not "the amount of money in a country". GDP is the monetary value of goods and services produced within a country during a given period (a flow, measured in dollars-per-year). The amount of money in a country is a measure at a point in a time (a stock, measured in dol…

That text is linked to a graph where the X axis is years.

“The first is an apple and the second is an orange.”

“The first is linked to something showing the author knows it’s an apple.”

“Agreed.”

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