Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the point: there is almost certainly work being done now for $10/hr that is not economically worth being done if the lower limit by statute is $15/hr. If someone is capable of holding down that $10/hr job but not capable of landing a $15/hr job, they are harmed by an increase in minimum wage in two ways: 1. The direct loss of job, income, status. 2. They are now shopping in an economy where the goods/services…
>If someone is not capable That mindset continues to be disgusting to me. Humans are some of the most impressive creatures on Earth; baring actual disability, you can teach them to do all sorts of things. I'm going to love watching the tech scene's existential panic over the next 2 decades as the population increasingly realizes that making CRUD apps and junk SAS is a job many Americans are more than capable of doing…
The rich are hoarding economic growth
81–90 of 157 posts
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise taxes on the 0.01%, it's the only way.
But you cannot do that!! I'm part of those who will get to be the 0.01%!! How could you take away my money that I will purposely wrote in my check from the monopoly that I will own with my company.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
For every problem there is a solution which is simple, elegant, and completely wrong. So here's my attempt: 1. Remove subsidies including tax writeoffs like depreciation. Either an asset brings value or it doesn't. 2. Tax revenue not profits. Either you make a profit selling a thing or you don't. Fancy tricks like buying an item from a fully owned subsidiary and selling it at a loss to compensate for profits from ser…
Meat industry would collapse due to 1. Daily foods like steak, bacon, eggs, milk would get extremely expensive leaving the population to lousy unsatisfying vegetables. Might solve the obesity epidemic :) Might also cause riots because people are not used to eating yucky foods like vegetabables.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#84Why is there no talk about the dramatic increase in the supply of workers over the last 40 years? Globalization has brought millions out of poverty and those people are now competing with Americans when they wouldn't before. It makes sense from an economic standpoint that the price of labor would not rise when the supply is increased and is likely the cause of income inequality in the US.
> It makes sense from an economic standpoint that the price of labor would not rise when the supply is increased and is likely the cause of income inequality in the US. So why are CEO salaries still going up? Is there not increased competition for C-level positions in companies from globalization? If not, why not?
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#85The title and the tone of the OP are a bit inflammatory for my taste, but the data and graphs from the research paper are eye-opening: most economic growth in the US over the past three decades has indeed gone to the top 1%, and particularly to the top 0.01%, leaving everyone else behind.[1] Here's the money shot: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Sc... However, rather than debate the causes o…
1) There might be a way to have higher productivity than we have now. This can't be why, it's always a goal regardless right?
2) Strategies should be considered than intentionally reduce productivity and/economic growth in order to increase worker compensation. Now things get tricky - productivity helps everyone, it makes the things we buy cheap, it boosts our standard of living. Is such a strategy even feasible?
3) There might exist some kind of goldilocks plan whereby growth and productivity are not affected, yet average compensation grows substantially. Again, kind of gets into uncharted economic waters no?
4) It wouldn't be about economics. It's just about fairness, morality, and maybe the self-interested prevention of civil unrest. It's policy not to change economics, but to change politics, who gets what, move things around, etc.
I don't doubt there are some all around good win-win ideas that could be implemented, but as a category it doesn't seem full enough to be game changing.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Raise taxes on the 0.01%, it's the only way.
Most of them derive annual income via capital gains, and it's pretty much a voluntary tax. One either borrows against the asset, so zero selling occurs, or harvests some tax losses from other assets before they execute a sale on an appreciated asset.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you cannot do that!! I'm part of those who will get to be the 0.01%!! How could you take away my money that I will purposely wrote in my check from the monopoly that I will own with my company.
You sound like you need some Toffifee or Werther's original.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#88We know there are serious problems. I think the general direction we are going to try to solve them is a good start, but without severely improving the current plans, will be completely inadequate and repeat history in some ways. Many people have looked at the US' economic situation and compared it to China or other areas and predicted that the relatively high wealth and consumption in the US just cannot continue due…
Things I'm really concerned about are water, and immigration. With the ongoing anti-science stance by Conservatives toward global warming, areas in Africa and others are going to be displaced and destabilized. Add to that radical Islamic terrorism and you have a recipe for something big actually happening.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#89The title and the tone of the OP are a bit inflammatory for my taste, but the data and graphs from the research paper are eye-opening: most economic growth in the US over the past three decades has indeed gone to the top 1%, and particularly to the top 0.01%, leaving everyone else behind.[1] Here's the money shot: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9013427/Sc... However, rather than debate the causes o…
For every problem there is a solution which is simple, elegant, and completely wrong. So here's my attempt: 1. Remove subsidies including tax writeoffs like depreciation. Either an asset brings value or it doesn't. 2. Tax revenue not profits. Either you make a profit selling a thing or you don't. Fancy tricks like buying an item from a fully owned subsidiary and selling it at a loss to compensate for profits from ser…
Are you familiar with the reason the concept of depreciation exists in tax law? Because profits are what the government is trying to tax. Contra your point 2, it makes no sense to tax revenue in a way that ignores expenses. You'd be taxing two businesses the same, whether or not those revenues were just eaten by expenses.
But once you're taxing profits, you need a sane model of what constitutes business profits, and which handles more than the (very atypical) case of "buy a block of stuff, then sell it for more". At any given moment, a business has inventory and capital equipment, which is not completely used up, nor sold. How should that affect profit?
When you say "don't allow depreciation writeoff", then you're saying one of two things, neither of which maps to a good model of "how much profit is this business making".
You're saying either:
1) Any capital good should be booked immediately as a pure expense. That would imply that businesses can forever defer taxable profits simply by spending all profits on such equipment. "Oops, don't owe taxes -- again -- because we bought another robot. Sorry!"
2) Any capital good should be completely non-deductible as an expense. This would mean that one class of expense somehow "doesn't count" merely because it happens over years rather than the moment you buy it (e.g. wear-down of a saw vs purchase of electricity).
Depreciation schedules do not exist as some giveaway-subsidy for capital good purchases, but to recognize the economic reality that the truth is somewhere in the middle; that a capital (durable) good does not immediately decrease profits, but does function as an expense over a longer span of time.
In an ideal world, we would have an auction to get the market value of each used capital good to know how much value the business lost as the capital good lost its value. But this would be horribly expensive and convoluted, so businesses are allowed to assume a certain schedule. The harm of such an approximation is minimal; any discrepancy between the schedule value vs the true market value is realized as income or loss when the good is sold.
tl;dr: Depreciation is not a subsidy, but a recognition of the true effect of capital good usage on a business's book value and therefore taxable quarterly profits.
Late edit: Disclaimer: not an accountant, just my understanding of the logic behind depreciation in tax law.
Re: The rich are hoarding economic growth
#90This is why I appreciate the $15 an hour minimum wage movement. Paying people more is better then taxing the rich more. The super-rich own congress but at the city and State level there is depending upon the state some room to grow wages. Higher wages equals fewer people on public subsidies which is good for cities and states.
Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich! Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-h... Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results. http:…
This argument -- "well, if you think a little increase in the minimum wage is good, then you must think any increase in the minimum wage is good, or you're not being consistent!" -- gets trotted out by somebody on HN every time the subject comes up. And c'mon. If I believe that San Francisco's minimum wage hikes to $14 and $15 an hour are not going to cause undue economic collapse here, that does not somehow obligate me to believe "hey, if that works, we can raise the minimum wage to ELEVEN BILLIONTY DOLLARS AN HOUR with minimal impact, too!" Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.
"Most past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs." That quote is...from the FiveThirtyEight article that you linked to. The evidence so far seems to be that some of the time, for some levels, minimum wage increases do really work out in real life. The UW study criticizes the methodology of past studies, but it's at least worth acknowledging that there's criticisms of the UW study which are not, despite Fox's take, "this is not the result the socialists wanted." Notably, UW's study excludes businesses with multiple locations but only one account with Washington State's unemployment office, which eliminates 38% of the state's workforce from consideration, including all chain fast food and retail workers. They exclude them specifically because they can't get "location-based" data for workers in those cases; while that may be true, being inconvenient to UW's methodology doesn't render that data irrelevant.