Billionaires Build

The problem in Flint and in countless American cities is not incompetence but the invasion of private equity into government. The truism that somehow capital is better at unprofitable public goods like water, prisons etc than the evil lazy government ignores the fact that the steep decline in competent management stems from the clientelist willingness to sell off public properties to private equity under "city managers" who are unaccountable and hold more power than elected officials.

The right-wing strategy is consistently to smear competent government systems while working tirelessly to undermine them with the final goal to sell them for cheap to private interests.

There is a LOT that competent legislation could do to rein this in. But it isn't in the interests of the investor class. So no, the $140 missing part is not the problem, it was a thoroughly corrupt city management that was the problem, and it's brought to you by the same ideology that sees taxing the rich as "unproductive."

I don’t think we should make claims based only on what seems apparent to us.

That isn’t a good path to finding the truth. It only exposes hidden biases and assumptions.

Nice, this is great! I now feel like digging in might be productive here.

> You've made claims like "this is Germany+" without actually supporting that claim.

I wasn't like, making a legal statement or whatever. You're arguing "this is communism with extra steps" and my point generally is that these prescriptions largely exist in democratically socialist, productive, EU countries. There are actually not that many communist countries that aren't also authoritarian so, I don't think the "communist" characterization is super useful. But, either way I'll expound.

- Enshrine the right to organize

You wrote that the NLRA already created this "right", but it's been hobbled by the Taft-Hartley act [1] and subsequent legislation in multiple states [2].

On the other hand, Germany (like many other EU countries but unlike the US) has ratified the "Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention", which, well it's in the name [3].

- Require equal profit sharing across all employees

Profit sharing is pretty common across EU countries, but it takes different forms and certainly isn't equal. The coop corporate structure is closer to my thinking here but, admittedly it's not mainstream yet.

- Require significant worker representation on corporate boards

We covered this one but, yeah generally the idea here is for workers to have a big say in how their company is run. Definitely not the majority though; my personal preference would be that there were no majority and representation would be equally divided between workers, c-suite/owners, and shareholders, but baby steps.

- Heavily tax relatively high salaries, e.g. if everyone makes $1m then 0 tax. If one person makes $100k and 99 others make $1, insane super tax them down to $100 (include tricky stuff like bonuses or whatever)

High CEO pay is (variously) subject to tax penalties in Germany [4] [5]. And it seems to be working; their ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 136x, just over half the US' at 265x [6]. That's not wonderful and I'm sure there are other factors but, these problems are tricky and one policy probably won't fix it all in one fell swoop.

It's also worth saying CEO pay is generally bad and not meritocratic [7].

- Heavily tax nationally high salaries with a progressive income tax

Germany's 3rd tax bracket is higher than anything in the US and kicks in around $69k (USD) [8].

- Heavily punish tax dodging

Germany does this a little [9] [10] but, obviously not enough. Re: simplify the US tax code, no administration since Reagan has done this, for reasons outlined here [11] [12]. TLDR tax prep is big business, and--like I said before--our tax code does a lot, and changing it creates winners and losers.

- Set the minimum wage to a living wage and pin it to the CPI

Germany has a comparatively high minimum wage of €9.35 ($11.33), but I don't know enough to say if that's a living wage or not. Something that's nice about their (relatively new, 2015) law is they have to update it at least every 2 years [13].

- Abolish "right to work"

I've been wrong about what this is called my whole life. Apparently what I mean is "at-will employment". Mea culpa. But, still the US has it and Germany doesn't. We should get rid of it.

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OK that's my prescriptions. I do feel like what I've described is the natural evolution of democratic socialist policies in the EU, exemplified not just by Germany but other big EU countries as well and definitely don't qualify as communism. But I think a lot of people think democratic socialism is communism so, maybe we just have a definitions problem.

I'll quickly respond to your minimum wage point and say that you can peg minimum wage to a State's CPI, and cities can create their own minimum wages. New York/New York City do this, for example. I wouldn't say that States are handling this well; 1 in 4 kids grows up in poverty so, something is off.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Organise_and_Collecti...

[4]: https://www.firma.de/en/company-formation/ceo-salary-in-a-gm...

[5]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11573-020-00978-y

[6]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/424159/pay-gap-between-c...

[7]: https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation-...

[8]: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/germany/individual/taxes-on-per...

[9]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ubs-group-face-93m-penalty-11...

[10]: https://www.espn.com/soccer/news/story/_/id/1613004/bayern-m...

[11]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/why-are-taxes-...

[12]: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11417676/elizabeth-warren-tax-...

[13]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany

> Or is cultural and social inheritance as influential as genetic inheritance

No, it isn't. For intelligence, in adulthood, it clearly isn't. For harder to measure skills, current estimates are at around half and half, but the error is mostly in the environment category. So much general-population variance is genetic (and that's only amplified at the highest skill levels - you need great 'cultural and social influence', but also great genes, lol)

> Did they try to marry their own? Naturally - out of snobbery and opportunism if for no other reason.

fun fact, the trait that shows the most assortative mating is intelligence. curious!

> I used to live in an upper middle class area, and a worrying number of the people were very polished thieves.

and I know a worrying number of lower class thieves. '20% of rich people are grifters' doesn't impune rich people as a whole, any more than Tony the crack money launderer impunes poors.

You are just gonna have to get a different account for me to respond to you. That username is super offensive.