Hard work alone has never led to economic gains. Hard work leads to economic gain when it is economically valued and when you're in a position to extract some portion of the value that it produces. Unfortunately, we as a society are not very good at 1. communicating this truth to people at a young age and 2. aligning these two things
Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
251–260 of 343 posts
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#252Welcome to the late-stage capitalism. Unless capitalists start paying the same tax rate as W2 workers, the inequality will continue to favor capitalist class and exploit the worker class. This will not happen until the working class wakes up and demands to lower W2 wages massively and simultaneously tax everything and everyone who has been evading and decreasing their corporate/ultra high net worth taxes thus far. Ev…
The most prosperous moment of the USA was when rich people paid 97% of their income in taxes.
The highest marginal tax rate in the US was 94% in the mid 1940s, and that doesn’t even mean people were paying 94% of their income to taxes. If you look at federal revenue as a percentage of GDP in decade intervals, starting from 1944, you’ll find that the ratio hasn’t changed much since then [1]. Funny enough, it has actually crept slightly upward.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Income taxes are higher than capital gains taxes. This isn't based on economic theory or anything, it's just a political choice we have made as a country. We've chosen to reward those who move money around and trade capital more than we reward those who labor. And this at a time when, supposedly, the country is trying to increase its ability to build things. I thought this specific fact worth mentioning.
This is simply incorrect. To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages. In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited abil…
Balderdash! Inflation and risk do not round to zero for wage income - wage income for the most part is NOT indexed to inflation and is certainly NOT guaranteed.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent is pointing out that the labor theory of value is nonsense. How much something is worth is totally unrelated to how hard or how long someone worked on it.
Rejecting the labor theory of value was a choice, not some eternal truth of economics. There’s no reason a society couldn’t be organized around labor values—other than the fact that such societies (or the movements that would give rise to them) are routinely destroyed or destabilized by one pre-existing superpower or the other. Capitalist realism, in other words.
You could organize an economy around labor-as-value, at least in terms of how workers are paid and goods are priced, but you have to be extremely diligent that you're directing work towards useful endeavors.
You can't escape that people will evaluate how useful goods are to them. Goods which are priced way lower than their utility will get snapped up, goods priced way higher than their utility will go unsold.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most prosperous moment of the USA was when rich people paid 97% of their income in taxes.
The highest marginal tax rate in the US was 94% in the mid 1940s, and that doesn’t even mean people were paying 94% of their income to taxes. If you look at federal revenue as a percentage of GDP in decade intervals, starting from 1944, you’ll find that the ratio hasn’t changed much since then [1]. Funny enough, it has actually crept slightly upward. 1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Thanks for the 94% correction. But there is no need for the percentage of GDP to increase, it's only enough that the richer pay more, so less will be payed by the lower classes. Not only that, but a reduction in loopholes is also needed. The goal is not to prevent people from making more but to prevent concentration of wealth, so we need to make it harder and harder for huge fortunes to accumulate instead of supporting it.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like Gates, Musk, Buffet are only a side show. They are there because of support from Wall Street. They're new but at the same time indistinct from old money and working for the same goals. Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. It is even good for capitalism to have these new people as a showcase, so billions will believe they can be the next, when winning the lottery…
OK so its not only about luck and existing capital. >Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. We are not talking about the global pool of wealth - we are talking about capitalism which is decidedly smaller. You can take out Putin, Saudi Aramco, etc.
> we are talking about capitalism which is decidedly smaller
not true. The size of the capitalist US economy dwarfs Saudi Arabia and Russia combined.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is simply incorrect. To make the tax incidence on wages and capital gains equivalent, you must first deduct losses due to inflation and risk. For wages, inflation and risk round to zero. For long-term capital gains inflation and risk are large and often the majority of the "gain". Short-term capital gains are already taxed like wages. In the US, unlike some other developed countries, there is a very limited abil…
Your point is undercut by the vastly lower effective tax rates rich Americans pay vs middle class workers. It's the norm in this country for someone making millions of dollars/year to pay a significantly lower tax rate on that income than anyone working a decent paying job. A horseshoe shaped tax graph by income is clearly against the intent and spirit of a progressive tax code so something is very much broken and ha…
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Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> government increasing the costs of hiring people This is lazy thinking. If the government is indeed increasing costs, this is happening to everyone across the board. So why would anyone in particular be affected by this? It could even be true in a situation where profits were falling across the economy, but the numbers show that profits are INCREASING for most companies in the US at least. So how can these companie…
> If the government is indeed increasing costs If? It's a certainty. For starters, the only reason HR departments exist is to try to comply with all the regulations. HR departments are expensive. For seconds, all the "employer contributions" to payroll taxes. Then there are all the wage laws, and mandatory this, and mandated that. All increase costs of employing people, which comes out of the employees' pockets one w…
As I said above, everyone is subjected to the same work regulations, so it becomes a moot point. It is a form of tax, so that is not an issue that affects a single employer. And it doesn't come from "employer pockets" any more than the cost of raw materials. Every business owner treats the cost of raw materials with all taxes as a given, but then when it comes to workers they whine as if it was the end of the world. It only shows they're whining and frankly annoying people.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you might have got the causation a little reversed. "Leaving the nest" is hard to do when you can't find a job to pay rent with.
Elaborate. What causation did I posit? It seems like you are defending against something I did not say. I would agree 100% that if you cant find a job its hard to move out of your parents house.
Ah, perhaps I read you wrong. I got the sense that you thought that these people were unemployed, and depressed about their economic future, because they were "failure to launch" kids.
Re: Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who's hiring even those people?
When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis, I had a handful of internship and full-time offers at various national labs and similar orgs thanks to my supervisor tipping me off about those opportunities and making introductions on my behalf. When you participate in things beyond your classes, you get an "in" on certain paths unavailable to other folks. You're not any smarte…
> When I was an undergrad researcher back during the height of the Great Financial Crisis,
Keep in mind that was 17 years ago, how do you know the job market is at all the same now?