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True Rate of Unemployment

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Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wealth tax would also be beneficial in reducing wasteful stock buybacks. Without any benefits from high stock prices, boards and shareholders will be less inclined to impose those price targets on CEOs, CEOs will be less incentivised to "cheat" on quarter-based performance and the myopic share price performance view of their companies, hence will reduce stock buybacks and returning money to shareholders. That leave…

Why do you think a wealth tax would reduce stock buybacks? I don't see the relation.

Currently equity appreciation is desirable for HNWIs because wealth isn't taxed, only income realized is. The more their wealth appreciates, the more viable it becomes as collateral they can borrow against, raising their borrowing capacity. CEOs, the board and the major shareholders fall under this group too.

Stock buybacks artificially inflate equity value - cash rich companies buyback their stock just to deploy that cash and prop up their equity value. CEOs love this easy trick because it increases their equity holdings' value, and also lets them hit quarterly share price targets which allows them to accrue more equity options. But at the end of the day, this money isn't benefiting the company, so it's just air.

With a wealth tax, the incentive to acquire increasing wealth dampens somewhat. You're only taxed once you cross a certain threshold usually, but once you cross it, the resulting tax hit can be quite sudden and severe. You hold equity but you have to hand over a significant amount of cash immediately, so you'd have to liquidate your holding, which is why a lot of HNWIs hate it.

In fact, it's why there are active strategies (usually involving philanthropy and blind trusts) in Switzerland (which has a global wealth tax) that allow to optimize your wealth just so you stay below the threshold. But at least, that wealth isn't being hoarded and is being actively deployed in other ways.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#162
> Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.

The fact that "does not have a full-time job" is accompanied by "but wants one", but "has no job" isn't shows how unserious this statistic is.

So my 90 years old retired grandma is functionally unemployed? Same for my multimillionaire retired 50 years old uncle? Nonsense.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#163
post #44

Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative. I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.

Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them. It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

[flagged]

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.

There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides. "Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.

> If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.

What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#166

I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.

Or simply people who have 2 part-time jobs totally 40 hours.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#167
post #104

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…

Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want. I think AI will solve this in the future. It's…

For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wealth tax would also be beneficial in reducing wasteful stock buybacks. Without any benefits from high stock prices, boards and shareholders will be less inclined to impose those price targets on CEOs, CEOs will be less incentivised to "cheat" on quarter-based performance and the myopic share price performance view of their companies, hence will reduce stock buybacks and returning money to shareholders. That leave…

i did recently see something interesting where if you look at buybacks from the Mag7, they basically almost entirely offset vesting employee RSUs. which kind of makes sense, those RSUs have to come from somewhere or they dilute the current shares. i don't know that people on this website in particular would like the "solution" to that.

Fair point, and explains why I was downvoted. My focus was on mostly the usual slew of companies that don't reward their employees in stock options, but handsomely reward their CEOs - O&G, pharma and biotech, advanced manufacturing, etc.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

better off taxing people that own more than 1 property and leave people just trying to live alone.

I'd like to see both an automatically adjusting dynamic tax on owning more than one property in the same municipal or arbitrarily useful region, as well as dynamically banning the ownership of more than one. Everytime I mention this, I get "blah blah we have a democracy blah blah freedom" etc.. but it's no such a democracy if one particular age-range dor demographic of people owns all the assets and politically prote…

If I'm not mistaken there is a tax on secondary residences in France. I am not an accountant, but my understanding is there is a "taxe d'habitation" from which primary residences are exempt, but which must be paid on secondary residences.

Of course, this can be gamed via starting a real estate company which buys the secondary residence, claiming that it is for "business purposes", but the basic idea of using taxation to prevent the accumulation of real estate by the wealthiest individuals is present.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#170
post #104

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

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