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A comment on German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal. Parent comment

Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by throwpoaster on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:24PM (#44099508)
Let's be conservative by taking GDP for only the middle year. In 2022 American GDP was 26 trillion (rounded down). Let's also gross up the stolen wages from your comment to 2.6 billion.

That's 0.01% -- one percent of one percent. That's a background noise level, or simple error rate level, or rounding error level. And because of our conservative assumptions, over those three years GDP is actually maybe 3x higher and the reported wage theft per year maybe 20% of the figure used, so it's more like approx 0.002%.

If wage theft is "just normal business in the US" it's not a very big business!

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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by ljf on Monday May 26, 2025 @02:12PM (#44100019)
Wage theft takes more money out of people's pockets than robbery, auto theft, burglary and larceny combined.

Should we not care about them as they are such a small part of gdp?

Wage theft is about $20b a year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft

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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by spookie on Monday May 26, 2025 @03:22PM (#44100707)
We all know employees generate more revenue than what they're paid. Otherwise you wouldn't have a successful business.

Comparing wages with GDP in this context doesn't prove anything.

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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by _DeadFred_ on Monday May 26, 2025 @03:53PM (#44101044)
The RECOVERED number matches retail theft recovery numbers. So it is AT LEAST on par with organized and unorganized criminal retail theft. I'd say that is significant (I would argue retail theft if much easier to catch and pursued much more often, making wage theft a larger issue) especially as it's happening within the structure of/approved by businesses.

https://hayesinternational.com/news/annual-retail-theft-surv...

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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by squigz on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:33PM (#44099597)
I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand your point? Does it being a small % of the GDP matter to those stolen from? Does it mean we shouldn't attempt to remedy it?
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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by throwpoaster on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:54PM (#44099814)
We should care about it 0.002% as much as we care about other economic problems.
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Re:German court sends VW execs to prison over Dieselgate sca... by ToValueFunfetti on Monday May 26, 2025 @03:31PM (#44100800)
Not quite- from a strictly financial perspective, it means we should care 0.002% as much as we care about an intervention that doubles the GDP or eliminates 100% it. Neither exists, so we're better off comparing to other theft- this is about 15% of numbers for retail shrink, 50% of reported personal theft, so this suggests we should care proportionally.

But I don't know about the strict financial analysis. I'm pretty sure it would tell us to have negative care about a serial killer that targets the homeless.

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