Many of the problems with democratic government are in fact caused by the power of the billionaire class to shape society to their whims. I remember reading a paper that compared people's policy preferences to actual implemented policy. They found no correlation. Instead what they found is that the policy preferences of the wealthy were quite well represented.
> America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions.
This makes no sense. Both political parties are in fact propped up by their wealthy and corporate donors. If you look at the establishment of both parties, you will find that they are indeed quite cozy with your beloved billionaire class. Paul Graham has given hundreds of thousands for example: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=paul+g..., and he is a fairly mild example.
> All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime.
Why shouldn't ordinary workers have retirement benefits? It used to be part of the deal: you devote your life to the company, and get to have a decent, comfortable retirement. In the private sector, unions are so weak/nonexistent that these benefits are gone, but why is that a good thing to you? Similarly, if you refuse to pay politicians a good salary, then only the wealthy will become politicians. I guess to you, that would be a good thing, but most of us would prefer having more ordinary people in power, not fewer.
it's not an enormous power, it's economical power to create new things. It's a productive force, unless there's a bad incentive to influence politics. No billionare is capable of dictating you how you should live your life. Politicians are. Separate government from economics and make lobbying and interference into economics illegal and punishable, and you will never see these two groups of people seeking favours from each other.
Like how the waltons use their great creative power to extract taxpayer money in the form of underpaid workers on assistance? (1) Like how bezos' amazon exploits the generation forced out of retirement by the 2008 crash as an underclass of temporary seasonal workers (2)
Billionaires got there by exploiting loopholes and viscous cycles that drain money from many people, to consolidate it in the hands of a few. There is an inherent problem with any society that allows the existence of billionaires, while some of their citizens starve as a result.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
(2) https://www.wired.com/story/meet-camperforce-amazons-nomadic...
That's mostly returning, not extracting, taxpayer money, since employment by WalMart reduces those workers’ eligibility for means-tested, and where it doesn't (e.g., moving up EITC eligibility) the recipient of additional taxpayer money is the worker, not WalMart. Calling this extracting taxpayer money by WalMart, the Walton family, etc., is ludicrous in the extreme.
Are the Waltons’ under taxed, sure. But if they were taxed more to provide broader aid, that would increase the share of their employers receiving some kind of public benefits. Which is a good thing, not a problem.
Thereby reducing the scope of jobs for which they can hire to ones that return sufficient value for that, sure.
Of course, that will add to the public welfare burden, not reduce it, since it will reduce employment.
There's a very good argument for some minimum wage in the absence of better of minimum support policies like UBI (that is, while it may not be the ideal minimum support mechanism, there's plenty of evidencie that, to a point, minimum wage is a net gain compared to not having it.)
There's also probable a decent argument for “living wage” (sufficient for independent support) as a floor for certain kinds of labor in government contracting, etc.
There's not really a good argument for living wage as the minimum wage floor; making everyone whose most valuable labor is not sufficient valuable to support them independently unemployable rather than employable at a level from which they can gain experience and advance is good for neither the unskilled nor the broader society.
> to solve THAT one, just make them pay a living wage. Nobody working full time should be below the poverty line, nobody working half-time should require food stamps - otherwise it is exploitation not employment.
This argument is equivalent to: “No one whose full time labor returns less value to the employer than would merit pay above the poverty line should be employed at all; nor should anyone whose half-time pay would leave them eligible for food stamps.”
Making the relatively unskilled completely unemployable isn't helping anyone. (Also, food stamp eligibility limit is generally 130% of the poverty line, so aside from the general outline being bad, the specific details you've chosen would set a minimum hourly wage for half-time work at 2.6× the minimum for full-time work.)
It's much better to tax capital income and increase the minimum support floor independent of employment than place increasing demands on employers, which just promotes automation and reduction in employment. You want to improve conditions for workers, especially at the low end? Tax capital income equal to labor income—both the basic income tax and the payroll/self-employment tax employed to labor income (this also includes uncapping the social security portion of payroll taxes.) Use the added income tax equivalent revenue to fund broad, unconditional minimum support (it won't be anywhere close to a mature UBI initially, but that's okay.) Use the added payroll tax equivalent revenue to (1) provide SS and Medicare eligiblity based on qualifying income that isn't labor based, but with (for SS) additional high income “bend points” beyond those in the current formula so that the marginal additional benefit for additional income continues to drop with income, (2) provide additional security for payroll tax funded programs, (3) beyond what is actuarially needed for long-term program security, transfer the excess to fund additional broad, unconditional minimum support. After indexing minimum wages to inflation, reduce the by $0.01/hr for every $40/yr of the minimum unconditional support (that is, full-time minimum wage would be reduced by half the unconditional benefit.)
Workers are, in net, better off. Those unable to find work are better off because of the unconditional benefit. Taxes paid are fair, income is income. There's less incentive to reduce employment, and indeed more people can be employed.
The fact that they are BILLIONAIRES seems to indicate there is a decent amount of headroom to their business model.
> This argument is equivalent to: “No one whose full time labor returns less value to the employer than would merit pay above the poverty line should be employed at all; nor should anyone whose half-time pay would leave them eligible for food stamps.”
No. My argument is: if your business model can't sustain people at a living wage, then YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD NOT EXIST. Remember that walmart put a lot of small shops out of businesses - many of those shops paid their employees enough to live without needing food stamps. They sucked up all the air, if they can't sustain their workers, they need to stop sucking up the air and make room for businesses that can.
edit: for details. the article I linked suggested that walmart employees receive $6.2 billion in gov assistance (2014) - wikipedia suggests that walmart made $14.8 billion (2020). Seems like they DEFINITELY have the headroom to pay their employees that difference. Why are we even arguing about this? Walmart would have made $8.6 billion and government would have at least 6.2 billion more for schools, PPE, covid relief, etc. nobody needs to lose their job, NOBODY EVEN NEEDS TO STOP BEING A BILLIONAIRE to at LEAST get people off food stamps.
Does it? If you multiply a small per-labor-hour surplus by 1000+ hours per worker per year and lots of workers, you can accumulate lots of money per year and become a billionaire, but that doesn't mean you have lots of headroom, just lots of scale.
> No. My argument is: if your business model can't sustain people at a living wage, then YOUR BUSINESS SHOULD NOT EXIST.
Sure, and when you kill all the businesses that can't pay every entry level employee enough for a comfortable independent life, who is going to pay the additional public benefit costs to give even minimum poverty support to the much wider pool of unemployed and unemployable? Your plan is lose (for the people who would be employed but now won't)-lose (for the people unemployed in either case for whom there is now less revenue to provide support)-lose (for the capital owners who are now prohibited from employing people whom they otherwise could, mutually profitably). Taxing capital gains fairly and using the proceeds to provide better universal support while reducing employment friction is win-win-mixed for the same groups.
> the article I linked suggested that walmart employees receive $6.2 billion in gov assistance (2014) - wikipedia suggests that walmart made $14.8 billion (2020). Seems like they DEFINITELY have the headroom to pay their employees that difference.
Their 2020 net income was more than double their 2019 net income, of $6.67 billion. Tax net capital income more, and you don't ever switch a profitable business into a losing one by your policy, increase employment costs and you make profitable decisions to employ people into unprofitable ones.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in...
Again, by describing the choice as bad job (walmart) or no job, you are ignoring the fact that walmart did not CREATE jobs - they merely consolidated jobs from many small businesses.
It’s not a choice between walmart or nothing. It’s a choice between an exploitive business model, or non-exploitive business models.
Driving up the minimum cost of labor isn’t going to bring back smaller, less-efficient businesses, it will make them less viable, too. Higher minimum wage actually reinforces the advantages of scale, since smaller acheivable average returns means the importance of being able to internally diversify (e.g., against regional problems) becomes more important to survival.
> It’s a choice between an exploitive business model, or non-exploitive business models.
It's a choice between a government model that chooses to actively harm the employed, the unemployed, and employers irrespective of business model to express moral outrage at certain business models and one that wants to use the power of taxation and spending to reduce the power of business models to be oppressive.
Perhaps that would be reasonable if everyone were paid enough income to handle all their expenses and save for retirement. Of course, that's not the case for probably 30-40% of the population. As things stand now, it's just cruel to lecture those people that they "should have done a better job of saving" (and I hear that a lot these days).
Billionaires are in effect about the only means to challenge the political machine that runs each country. They only occur in countries that protected property rights to the point people could amass sufficient wealth so as not be subject to all the pettiness of the political class.
Their power is their mobility but only if they have staged their wealth in such a way it cannot merely be confiscated with a single action. Billionaires who come into effect outside of those created by the armed forces of countries being used to enrich their leadership are signs of wildly successful economies that others want to be part of. Yes there is disparity between them and the bottom rungs of the society they are part of but those bottom rungs are usually as far apart from those in nations with no respect for property rights.
America isn't suffering from a lack of tax on the wealthy, their wealth or income. America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions.
When we talk wealth we need to understand how the political class is fleecing America. All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime.
The real money issue is the theft by the political class. However they have the best marketing and are adept at playing people against each other.