51–60 of 86 posts
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> US's absurdly low income tax rates for the wealthy The top 20% of earners pay over 80% of the income taxes. That's low?
Yawn, what percentage of total income in the US is earned by the top 20%?
Over the last 2 years we've been having a stock buyback craze, where corporations can issue unlimited amount of debt and use the proceeds to repurchase stock in an illiquid market pushing the stock to record highs.
Shaming CEOs into lowering their pay may work, but these same CEOs will only be rewarded more in options and stocks which do not have the SEC reporting treatment.
And this will only incentivice them to buy back even more stock, levering up companies even faster, transferring stakeholder value to shareholders while leaving bondholders footing the bill, and assuring of a promptly bankruptcy filing once interest rates rise.
I am not sure what the big deal is with this. I vaguely understand why regulators want this to be public knowledge. I have no understanding of why effort is being spent in opposing this.
Because putting more items into filings costs money and creates the possibility of liability if anything is off. Think of your tax return. Rigorous legal and financial document preparation is expensive. Large corporations can afford the bloat of thousands of regulatory requirements, smaller companies not so much. These added costs are borne by society in the long run, similar to how airline security regulations somet…
One additional number to be calculated, after the reams of numbers have already been calculated. If your accountant and lawyer cannot get that right, it's time to find new ones.
Seems like the most worthless piece of data you could gather about a company.
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> US's absurdly low income tax rates for the wealthy The top 20% of earners pay over 80% of the income taxes. That's low?
As long as there are rich people there will be folks complaining that the rich don't pay enough taxes.
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The owners of the company? i.e. Shareholders. It's not anyone else's business. Workers are free to renegotiate their contract, resign, buy shares, or start their own company. Who else other than the owners should decide?
That would be true if they success of the company was 100% depending on the companies ability alone, however it's not. There are many factors external to the company itself that are involved in creating successful companies.
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Who decides that and is it true or fair? If the CEO earns 25x the average employee salary would it be clear that they add 25x more value to the company than any other employee?
The owners of the company? i.e. Shareholders. It's not anyone else's business. Workers are free to renegotiate their contract, resign, buy shares, or start their own company. Who else other than the owners should decide?
Serfs are free to renegotiate their constitution, move, buy land from their king, or start their own kingdom.
Now all these options sound a little more silly... Because we accept the power structure of feudalism.
But many doubt there is any power structure in capitalism.
Landless wage labourers? Yes. Debt based economies? Yes. Taxes given as handouts to the owners? Yes.
The differences between the structure of two are far more subtle than most people like to believe.
We are at a point on political democracy, that's great - but economically we are still kinda stuck in the 1700s ... We could try to democratize that too.
Part of the problem is that neoliberalism suggests that everyone should act like an entrepreneur, a CEO if you will. This is actually as silly as implying that if everyone acted like a prince or princess in feudalism, it would have been a fair system.
But you point to the "self made man". Statistically speaking, those are about as rare as someone marrying into royalty in classical feudalism. Pointing to that fact of course, didn't make feudalism fair either.
There's a real, leaky (they all are), power structure imposed by the system that can't be undone by the power of magical thinking.
Can someone explain to me why we're outraged that CEOs make lots of money? I truly don't understand it. My presumption is that CEOs are adding enough value to be worth their pay, just like every other worker (should be).
Because the level of CEO pay compared to average employee pay is at all time highs. It's gone from 20x the average employee in 1965 to 295x in 2013. Do you think CEOs are 10x more effective than they were in the 60s? http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-continues-to-rise/ And yes, you can easily counter saying that private companies are allowed to pay their CEOs whatever they want, which is absolutely true, but at…
Why is that for you to decide? The world has become globally competitive since the 1960s, which means it takes a lot more work for a CEO to run a company successfully.
"but at the same time many people are growing concerned about a wealth gap in the US - that the rich are getting subtantially richer, while the middle class haven't seen meaningful gains in a long time. That absolutely has an impact on society as a whole."
This will continue to happen when we put more and more restrictions on owning and starting a business, which is ironic, because this is what many of the politicians that claim to be helping the middle class, are proposing.
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Yawn, what percentage of total income in the US is earned by the top 20%?
The top 25% earn 67% of the income and pay 86% of the taxes. How many of the taxes do you think they should be paying?
But to answer your question, I think income after $1m/yr should be taxed at close to 90% and that capital gains should also be considered part of that income. We can start there.