Don’t you feel you have the right to hand down your fortune to whoever you want to?
You see, now we are getting away from “income disparity is bad for the economy” into “it’s not fair that some people are born with more money than me”.
What’s worth more? A guy who sells a multi-million dollar project that keeps 50 people working for a couple of years? Or some housewife with a BA from Anywhere Community College getting paid to babysit a bunch of 8th graders?
That’s why free market is best. It doesn’t care about your riduculous biases. It just cares about who is more competetive.
More competitive at making money. Regardless of whether or not they do a single constructive thing in their life, regardless of how much harm they cause. And presuming that making money is some kind of worthy objective is itself a bias.
This is why my first condition was to eliminate opportunities for fraud. If this fails, yeah there are gonna be some people leeching off the people. A majority of wealthy people earn their wealth by fulfilling a societal need.
Some do merely have it passed down to them. But like I said they still fill a need even if we think they’re not working hard enough. They invest capital and consume.
My system simply improves conditions for all. There might be disparity, but guess what, life isn’t fair. It never will be. Government has no role in trying to prevent this.
It lowers prices. This allows people to purchase more things.
I would argue that our current system is far from being a true free market. Taxes, tariffs, and subsidies are proof of that.
When it comes to wealthy heirs, yes you are right about that. I don’t think an estate tax would be the worst idea in the world.
If you excel at something, it is YOUR job to put yourself in the best position for you to reap the benefits of your excellence. If you are truly productive and worth a lot of money, your services will be sought after by different firms. So that you’ll be making more money for yourself instead of someone else.
Yeah you are right on this point. An estate tax wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. I just think there might be ways around it like simply gifting the money to heirs before the wealth earner dies. I guess something could be worked out though.
One thing, I wasn’t looking for statements of ideology. Obviously freedom is great, yada yada. I’m asking about practical things that can be done to manipulate the economy so that all segments of the American populace rise as one. This doesn’t mean that the poor will make as much money as the rich. It means they would increase their income at the same percentage rate. Rich incomes go up by 3%, poor and middle class incomes go up by 3%.
The rising tide lifts all boats, but the so called 1% appear to perennially be at the top of a huge wave that’s getting bigger.
Not if the higher productivity is due to making fewer people work harder for less pay.
That’s a standard argument of the people who deify the free market. There is not, never has been and never will be a perfectly free market; so you’ll always have the excuse of “but the market wasn’t free enough!” It’s a way of avoiding admitting that the free market isn’t the magic solution to everything.
Nonsense. All of those firms will be out to exploit you, for one thing; competition is meaningless when there are no good choices. And you have to eat. You’ll take a job with one of them, you’ll get screwed, and they not you will reap the rewards. Or you’ll try to start out on your own and get stomped on. They have the money, they have the power, and you don’t. With rare exceptions that’s how it works, and your own efforts have little to do with whether or not you get screwed.
Of course, the rich and powerful want you to believe America is some kind of meritocracy, because that makes you easier to screw. They want you to believe that hard work or skill will let you prosper, because that gives you false hope and diverts blame from them.
You can’t make someone work harder for less pay. In a true free market there will be competition over labor due to the scarcity of labor.
That’s like saying gravity isn’t the magic solution to keeping everything on the ground. These laws are not disputable.
So you are saying there is collusion among the firms that artificially lowers the price of labor? I don’t think that is realistic.
If you have the ability to produce a good more efficiently than a large firm, they will not be able to screw you with money or power.
This is a very depressing worldview. What you are describing is bordering on conspiracy theory nutjob territory. There is no cabal of evil rich men propogandizing the merits of hard work so that you are “easier to screw”.
Good points, I hadn’t necessarily thought about that. But upon reflection, I think its better not to even try to engineer proportional movements of groups in society; there will always be some groups not ‘keeping pace’ and shouting about it, and a policy of trying to keep things fair enables such shouting. In summary, I’d keep personal tax rates fixed across all incomes - no graduated tax - but provide an adequate safety net for the elderly, sick, handicapped, and temporarily out of work.
I do as well, but there ought to be limits. As a hypothetical, if someone continues to have children out of wedlock - 4, 5, 6 of them or more - and continues to receive more and more assistance as the number of children increases, at a certain point I would allow her only to continue receiving assistance for incremental children if she was sterilized. Its no different than what I would do for a friend or family member - eventually the charity runs out.
As others have said, I prefer to have the market and not the government determine value. People know how much teachers make (and how many vacations they get) before they decide to enter the field. If there is a teacher shortage, salaries will increase to attract them.
I disagree with TARP. Any bailout creates an assymetric risk profile, creates moral hazard, and incentivizes foolhardy risk taking.
No one makes anyone else do anything, at least in the western world. Employment is at-will; people can leave at any time if they think their services are undervalued.
This is defeatest attitude hogwash. America is the most upwardly-mobil friendly economy in the world. I know many who are self-made. In this country more than any other, hard work combined with intelligence produce success.
Ah, then you appear to have misunderstood the thread (which is likely, since I evidently am not being super clear) or you misunderstand the country of your birth.
The USSR didn’t do what I’m suggesting.
I’m suggesting attempting to flatten the rates of increase in incomes. Not the incomes themselves.
Once again, if the majority of the country has their incomes stagnate and not increase at all, and 1% of the country has their incomes increase by 5%. Shouldn’t the tax burden be modified so that the country as a whole increases their amount of income by say, 2%?
This doesn’t average wages. If you take two people under the above example, Joe the middle-classed and Moe the billionare. Joe made 50k and Moe made 10m. Under the numbers above Joe’s taxes would go down by 2% and Moe’s would go up by 3%. Since the society as a whole has people in Moe’s strata getting all the benefits of economic growth.
The USSR was very successful in “flattening” everything, including the rates of increase of incomes. Compared to the US, it was egalitarian heaven. The difference between top salary and bottom salary was maybe 10-15 times at most. A doctor would earn maybe double what the receptionist at the clinic was making. And since the salary rates were steady for a long time, since they were set from above, the disparity between top and bottom was not increasing. Perfect situation, isn’t it?
Only if you view taxes not as a method to fund the government to do what is absolutely necessary, but as a social engineering tool. And once you do that, the sky is the limit.
Pretty sure there’s no “right to inherent” in the Constitution. Or is it a Ninth Amendment right?
And it’s not about fairness, it’s about economic efficiency. The consensus seems to be that the economy works best when people get what they earn - the meritocratic ideal I mentioned earlier. The people who have the most are the people who’ve done the most.
So explain what somebody who inherited money did? What was their accomplishment? What societal need did they fulfill?
I’ve been reading most of your posts and they all seem to not address the basic point - what is the starting point; i.e. what are the measuring points (income pillars) and what are the acceptable levels of ratios among them from which, as you are asking, we can start balanced increase for all pillars?
We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union for the top 1 percent, do establish justice, provide for the common defense, but more for the uncommon 1 percent, promote the general welfare but for the top 1 percent, secure the blessings of liberty on ourselves, but more for the 1 percent, and the prosperity of the 1 percent, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.
It is right there in the preamble.