Yes, the owners of large corporations should be concerned for the welfare of their workers, if for no other reason than a sick or unhappy worker is not going to be as productive as a healthy and happy worker. The trick is to figure out what your workers want, and how to align their interests with yours.
Yes, but the underlying motive remains the same: More work for less pay. This is hardly the altruistic viewpoint that Evil Captor seems to be calling for. Does the average worker give a shit if the CEO isn’t as healthy and productive or whatever?
My dad has some sort of wierd pride thing in that he never took a sick day off, in 20 years or so of being CEO.
“So…you went in and got everyone else sick, and stayed sick longer, working at half productivity…? This is good?” :dubious:
Ah well.
That’s one good definition. I think the definition needs to fit the discussion and this one is a little vague. When I think in terms of rich and poor I think about the skill-sets and circumstance that create such people. Poor people lack both the skill and the environment to nurture that skill. Children of wealthy parents have the opportunity to learn the skill-sets needed to generate a desired income. I was taught to get an education in a vocation that I can rely on. I was never exposed to the 70 hr workweek mindset (of the wealthy)so I really don’t feel inclined to climb the corporate ladder beyond a 40 or 50 hr workweek.
Obviously I’m not talking about the silver spoon crowd. I’m referring to people who generate their own wealth.
My wife’s parents are multi-millionaires several times over but they are dwarfed by their two closest sets friends who have over $100,000,000 a piece. The weird thing is that their closest friends were lower middle-class when they met them 40 years ago and it was just the potentially rich personas that drew them together. I spend more time with them than I do with just about anyone else. They seem to have more energy and effective determination than just about everyone else. They also can handle money extremely well.
One of the ultra-rich ones has taken it upon herself to make our property spectacular and we have spent many weekends this year digging up stones and plants and moving the, to a better location. I have basically turned over our landscaping to her and I get terrified when I get a call on Saturday morning and she has the whole day planned for hard labor. I would tell her to screw but she gives me beautiful plants from her 5+ million Cambridge home and works right alongside me. Her husband still works all the time.
The other one is a 70 year old man that lives outside of Paris. He is like an adopted grandfather and lets us go to his vacation homes all over the world for free but he will never retire and rarely makes time for vacations himself.
The thing about all of them is that they work all the time and they are very effective at it. Whether it is a venture in New Hampshire or Uruguay, they are always trying to start something and make it successful. Money is really just a side-effect of the whole thing and, although it is nice, that is not at the core of what they are trying to accomplish. Getting rich is a skill rather than just luck and some people are better at it than others. Most people really suck at it.
The rich as a class have different financial interests than the rest of us. How nice they are as individuals is beside the point. It is in their interest not to care about the average working guy, or even the average middle-manager, and they don’t. It’s really that simple.
That’s just the Cult of Celebrity applied to the wealthy. I’m sure a lot of people think Britney Spears vibrates on a different plane than the rest of us, too. I personally don’t buy it. There might be a few incredibly gift rich people, but most of them are just The Rest of Us with a different set of economic priorities.
Sounds like a lot of class-envy to me. I’ve never met a wealthy person who wasn’t involved in the community and didn’t work twice as hard at everything they do. You have stereotyped people in a very simplistic way.
I dated a gal whose uncle had designed and patented some intrusion system hardware and started a company to manufacture the stuff. He then sold the company w/ a sweet deal to stay on for a few years as a consultant. He and his wife had no children and were very fond of my girlfiend. I visited ther home a few times. He was a real nice guy, but his wife was kind of stuck up.
I was invited to their anniversary party where he gave her dinner ring w/ a large stone. I made the mistake of asking her if it was an amethyst. She looked down her nose at me and informed me that it was a ruby, looked like an amethyst to me.
He had recently purchased a fifty some foot motor yacht. I’ve had a little experience w/ boats, so he and I were chatting about that. He invited me aboard for a day trip, but I broke up w/ his niece a short time after, so it never happened.
Alrighty.
If what you say is true, the Pubbies and the Bush Administration pushed through a huge tax break for the rich despite the fact that the rich are utterly indifferent to it. This just doesn’t make sense to me. I lean more toward the more commonsense belief that those who are most interested in money are the ones who are most likely to collect lots of it, and once they obtain it, will do everything they can to preserve it from the taxman, including manipulating their wealth to make most of it legally untaxable. Check out the book “Perfectly Legal” if you really think the wealthy don’t care about taxes.
Y’know, most wealth is inherited. Most wealthy people start life in the upper class. Some build from there, some just mooch along, a few fall out of wealth. A lot of them just have the right DNA. Frankly, I don’t see that even the lucky DNA crew need to be punished for it. Neither do I see that they deserve any special deference that we don’t also extend to the middle class and lower class as well. I guess that makes me a democrat.
Some do, some probably just have others manage their money.
Wrong-oh. It IS a big fucking lie. Here’s proof.
Well, if Bill had to do all the work himself, I’m sure he’d slack off a lot by now. But he’s got this whole Microsoft Corp. to do the dollar-squeezin’ for him, and they’re pretty fucking ruthless about it. Perhaps you recall the Microsoft scandal of the 90s when they were discovered to have hired people as temps and kept them on as temps for YEARS because they didn’t want to have to pay them benefits? I recall it quite vividly. Bill Gates didn’t have to do that personally, he had a whole company to do it for them. It’s not about the individual you see … it’s about the adversary relationship between Bill Gates and his top managers, and those poor Microserfs at the bottom.
All true. But the middle class and the poor should realize that corporations do not have their interest at heart and take that into account when dealing with them.
It does not matter how nice individual CEOs are. As a class they have an interest in screwing their workers. So they do. In any event, it’s hard to square you sickly-sweet version of caring CEOs with the guys who are paying themselves unprecedented wages and frequently breaking the law via backdated stock options to pump up their wealth even more. I hope you will not be offended if I do not buy into your vision wholesale.
According Reuters the backdating stock options scandal now affects 140 major companies and could affect hundreds more very soon. And then there’s the whole CEO compensation scandal. And the IPO scandal on Wall Street. I’d say 50 percent might be closer to the truth, where large corporation are concerned. And the real point is – I don’t care about how much CEOs make all that much. What I care about is that for the last six years or so, the economy has grown but wages have remained flat, while the wealthy have vastly increased the percentage of American wealth. The top 5 percent, own just under 70 percent of financial wealth and more than 80 percent of unincorporated business assets. Here’s an article about the huge income disparity between the wealthy and ordinary people in the US. It’s just fucking ridiculous to say there’s not a problem here, and that the wealthy are not somehow involved in it.
Those lazy poor people. Back atcha, my man.
Never said that. Must be how you feel.
They don’t have to be lazy. All it takes is to be ineffective. Someone can work their ass off, and, if they are just spinning their wheels and making poor decisions, they won’t ever get anywhere. To view it otherwise assumes that people should be paid based on some type of meter based on the raw effort they put in. A would-be pineapple farmer in Minnesota may work himself to death but won’t get anywhere. There aren’t many “A’s for effort” in the game of life. Other poor people are lazy, dumb, drug addicted, etc. Personal wealth isn’t a measure of personal worth overall and a lot of people seem to have a problem with that concept. They are are simply better at the economic aspects of life. Other people are good at getting people to sleep with them for example. We don’t often hear someone suggest that a Don Juan donate some of his lovers to someone that can’t pick up a chick to save their life. It may sound stupid but it is really the same thing. Different people have different talents and they get what they get based on those.
Indeed.
Read Cecil’s article on the flat tax though. Most tax is being paid by people with over $100,000 a year. That’s a lot larger percentage of the population than the “rich.” Most of that’s going to lawyers, doctors, and upper middle class.
Commonsense is that you look at the horizon, obviously the world is flat.
But I don’t see why I would need to look at a book? I’m a primary source. So if you don’t want to believe me, then certainly that’s you’re prerogative. But you’re going to find it rather hard to convert someone who’s talking based on first hand reference.
Regardless of whether they’re pointing it somewhere or hiring someone to point it for them, that money has no choice but to go into promoting commerce. There’s just nothing else you can meaningfully do with a few billion dollars.
The big lie is that taxation adds or subtracts from trickle down. People get paid enough so that they receive enough money to be willing to continue doing that job (obviously, constrained by the worth of the position.) Money that is taxed, isn’t received. Raising taxes or lower taxes, in the short term, will harm or benefit people’s income, but over the long haul people’s salary will be adjusted to take the tax rate into account.
Raising taxes is entirely just a way for the government to give itself more money. And the only place that money can come from, is from the economy. Fighting taxes is about not having to raise prices on products. Once you get up to being “rich”, seeing all that money piped through you to look like the government is looking out for the little guy, would indeed be annoying. And when you’re used to dealing with budgetary issues like an international corporation, seeing the government funnel money off from the economy, potentially to go to war, or whatever, raising or lowering taxes as they see fit, would certainly be annoying.
How taxation is split across the economy is, to a very large extent just a public relations issue. If you wanted a flat tax, it’s easy. You just give everyone poor a salary high enough that minus the new “higher” tax rate on them, they have the same salary as before, and the government gets the same amount of money as before.
So lowering taxes isn’t a “giving money to the rich” prospect. It’s always going to be either:
- A PR thing trying to get the vote of the upper middle class.
- A bid to curb government spending. I.e. smaller government.
Ain’t no one ever said Bill Gates wasn’t one of the a-holes among the rich.
But not knowing the case, I have no idea how fair or unfair that might have been. Quite obviously, the people in those temp jobs were happy the have the employment. Would you rather them to have been on the street?
They do and don’t. A corporation does have the interest of it’s employees (though not the employees of other companies, perhaps) as a high priority. However, at the same time, it has to be profitable and to get the most productivity out of the fewest people possible.
But one thing is, getting the most productivity out of the fewest people possible means that the company can keep the most people employed. The cheaper they can keep an individual employee relative to his productivity, the more employees they can hire. If you ran a company with a thousand employees, would you choose to pay your people 10% more than needed to keep them from quitting? Or would you choose to use that money to hire 100 more people?
I’ve never said that they’re aren’t thiefs and a-holes among the rich. All I’ve said is that they aren’t any more prevalent than they are among other income ranges. But the asshole who embezzles from the cash register at the candy store he works at doesn’t get his name in the news, while as the one who rips off a few billion does.
I’ll be rather interested to find the cite where you show that the crime rate rises as people’s income increases.
140 companies, out of how many? How many of them are actually guilty versus simply being slow?
Now, I will agree that it seems to be that as a company gets older, it seems to get more liable to develop corruption. But I think a large part of that would be that there is no equivalent inside a corporation to police officers. Essentially, everyone just has to assume that everyone else is being honest. But overtime as routine kicks in and the push to continue growth starts to get in conflict with the rut, people start acting stupid and cutting corners because they’re afraid to tell their boss that something just can’t happen.
And over time that builds up.
So as said, I certainly think that modern day capitalism and the absolute need for corporations to expand is something that is an issue. But at the moment the only solution to that is for CEOs to start shutting down their companies when they’ve run they’re course.
If Jim Davis can’t do it with Garfield, I don’t know why you would think most CEOs would know when to off their own company, or be willing to do it.
Income stratification is rather superfluous if everyone is employed, eating every meal, owns an SUV, and drives their kids to play soccer after school.
But if Bush cut taxes, then it’s no particular miracle that wealthy people would suddenly get a bunch more money. If the money isn’t going into the government, it’s going to go to the people who were having the most taken by the government. And if you keep the tax rate at where it is, then over time, the rich’s salary is going to shrink as compared with inflation.
There’s no use giving people more money than needed to keep them doing the job. And of course, there’s no point giving yourself another billion to your net worth.
How many people there are at any level between dirt poor and filthy rich is only ever going to be a question of how easy it is to climb or fall down the ladder. The easier it is, then the more where you end up is going to be related to your ability. The harder it is, and the less where you end up is going to have to do with your ability. Raising or lowering taxes only produces an effect for a (relatively) small period of time.
Have to jump in here…I am a successfully retired person who worked for 40 years starting as a young teenager. When I had enough assets, I retired. I could sit around, or play golf, or travel to where ever the winds blew me.
But it is not about being capricious. I do enjoy my freedom; I have a part time job doing what is for the most part manual labor (which demands a bit of specialized expertise to perform), volunteering for worthy causes, and so forth.
My sons were well prepared to go out into the world and make their own and greater successes without using any family funds (other than the investments in their education and ethical growth)…their successes will be their own, not because of any financial legacy. I expect many of you owe your successes to your own efforts too.
But sitting around spending lots of money are not for me. I am still acutely aware of the money that I spend, and the time I spend. It seems to me that I should still operate by the same lifelong ethics and standards that got me to where I am now.
I’m sorry to have sounded so preachy and superior…what I’m saying is really quite the opposite. Live as you are; be what you can.
You are correct. When you run a company, you have different concerns from the regular 9-5 worker bees. What is important is the survival of the business as a going concern.
Rich folk are just like regular folk in that they are just as succeptable to greed or incompetant financial decisions. The difference is that when you run a company, other people are affected by those decisions.
Well, investigating those companies has made me and the firm I work for quite a bit of cashola. Circle of life.
You don’t see too many rich or even moderately successful people with Evil Captor’s attitude. Successful people don’t focus on what other people have or what advantages they are lacking. They focus on achieving their goals with an almost singleminded purpose. No one likes a malcontent.
PJ O’Rourke said the rich are different from the rest of us…because they have little tails sticking out at the bases of their spines.
The rich are the same in that most of us, were we to become rich, would behave in the same ways. They are different in that most of us don’t have the history, inclination, and/or to become rich, all of which conditions produce distinct qualities.
And/or ability, that should say.
You are free to base your opinions on your personal experience, I tend to do the same myself. However, there is a reason that anecdote is not a generally accepted form of argument on the Dope.
No, the big lie is that trickle down helps the middle class and/or the poor. That is the essence of trickle-down, and it’s been demonstrated to be wrong. Give rich people more money, and they will absorb it all for themselves, they are in fact good at that.
I’ve no problem with the rich not liking to be taxed, I just don’t buy the notion that not taxing them works to the advantage of anyone but them.
C’mon, Microsoft has been raking it in by the billionful for decades. Don’t tell me they can’t afford to hire full time staffers when they need to. I’d rather full-time employees be treated as such.
Funny how this argument never comes up when it comes to CEO salaries.
A few? I named three different kinds of ripoff that have been perpetrated in the last few years, just one of them involving hundreds of corporations. Maybe a lot more than a few, eh?
Given that the wealthy typically have much more influence in how the laws are written, I’d be amazed if I could do that, too. Or as has already been said elsewhere, “The law in its majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and beg in the streets.”
Of course, that’s not the case, is it?
According to my analysis the middle class is the key. If they are doing well, everyone else is. If they are doing badly, everyone else eventually does badly, except for the very, very wealthy, who are pretty much immune unless they fuck up badly.
Sounds like an argumentum ad hominem to me. When come back, bring argument.