As shown by the covid payments. $900 a year is a lot of money to a lot of folks.

Heck annual social security average is 24k a year, so you are talking about nearly 4% more money for just those people alone.

Fair, lets then count income tax which makes it more like $500 assuming net taxes around 40%. I'm ignoring salary increase due to stock valuation going up because it complicates things and there is equal force from both sides of the argument.

So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year.

Edit: its not just a CEO but the C suite. 20,000 running without a C suite.

Shouldn't it be distributed to just the employees of those companies? Why are we including every citizen. That seems to dilute that overall picture.

Multiply it by 4 then. Around $2000 per worker.

I don't think tax is that high for that income bracket but your point still stands for the rules of the current system. I agree with your sentiment there are way better ways to redistribute wealth.

Just dont discount what several hundred bucks means to way too many people in such a prosperous country.

This is the tax bracket for CEO's.

>Just dont discount what several hundred bucks means to way too many people in such a prosperous country.

Sure.. but the real disposable income has increased by a decent amount over the years. Just in the last 10 years (including covid) the real disposable income has increased by over 20%.

> So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year

In these contrived scenarios people will always choose the anti-CEO scenario.

You could restructure your hypothetical scenario such that the money was lit on fire instead of being paid to executives and you’d still find support from people who are just angry at executives getting paid a lot.

I agree but funnily enough - lighting it on fire will have the same consequence as every citizen being paid $500 (assuming similar spending patterns of CEO's and workers which is an exaggeration).

You might be interested in https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-money-helped-... which talks about the studies showing low effects for just giving money to Americans. It seems like just giving people money is still unproven to have impacts to make people healthier, happier (beyond the year they start giving money), get them better jobs, or improve their children’s intellectual development. There's still hope for targeted programs, but it changed my view on blanket payments.

Thats 3600 for a family of four. 5% of median household income in a country where most have zero savings.

The impact of the whole C suite of top 20,000 companies in USA would be much reduced incentives. These are the same companies that are making products that workers purchase from. Sure 5% extra money per family.

Do you really think 5% increase in income would change the savings scenario? The median real disposable income increased by more than 20% over the years. I don't think savings have changed.

I think we could do with some different incentives.

A lot of the readers here have worked at mega corps and seen what the incentives are in the real world, its not Ayn Rand superman doing the best thing for the company because their interests are aligned.

Beginning of game:

CEO = 0$ value Employee = 0$ value

---

Round 1 Year

CEO = $20M Employee = $0.5M (generous)

--

Round 5 Years

CEO = $100M (if pay remained the same, and they did not create new companies, which I'm sure they will).

Employee = $3M (let's give them promo) etc. Cost of living is increasing with employee's wage, nothing for a CEO.

----

Tell me who is more secure, who has the flexibility to take risks, and create new value.

It's not about the 900$ every human being gets. It's how much differentiation 5 years makes, which is 1/4 of value generation timespan of adults.

Do it again but factor in the 90% start-up failure rate.

Another way to look at it is every single person, including children, are paying $75 a month for executives of 5000 public companies. Or $190 per month per household. That is significantly more than the average electricity bill ($130/month). Downplaying that shows you are out of touch with the average American.

> Another way to look at it is every single person, including children, are paying $75 a month for executives of 5000 public companies.

No they are not. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where the only way an executive can get paid is by taking money from a household.

Executive compensation is largely equity based. The mostly equity is new value created in the economy.

Using zero-sum thinking for economic topics like this is very misleading.

Is distributing it to individuals the best option? My suggestion would be to first identify the best option, eg improving education usually has a fairly high ROI. That's how taxes are supposed to work.

> “Every dollar we put into high-quality early childhood education we get $7 back in reduced teen pregnancy, improved graduation rates, improved performance in school, reduced incarceration rates. The society as a whole does better.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...

I'm not convinced that diluting it this far is a fully effective thought experiment. If you took half of that $900 and distributed it amongst 500,000 instead of 300 million, then it'd be a more formidable amount. I'm not sure why it needs to be equally distributed. Just putting it back into the economy otherwise is good enough.

I agree with you. I prefer it more centrally allocated - with the CEO's as the market intended.

Now do this exercise only for the workwers of each of those companies. If they're generating billions value, they should get a fairer share of the profits.

Around $2000 per year.

That means those companies employ almost half the US population. Amazing.

Similarly if you seized 100% of the wealth of the top 400 Americans[0] and liquidated all of their assets to cash, then you'd have ~$5.4T (assuming you didn't completely destroy the economy in the process, which you would but for the sake of the argument assume you wouldn't), which is around 15% of the US Public Debt OR about 3 years worth of the U.S. Budget Deficit.

It's the unfairness which bothers people.

>Even if you give $500 to every citizen, that does not mean affordability will increase because inflation can increase proportionally. This is because even with increased money, each citizen is buying goods amongst the same quantity of goods as before.

I know. I thought those covid payments proved it. Everyone got a temporary financial boost, which was great, but they ended up paying for it threefold with rising inflation. As far as i can tell the only people that did really well from it were the banks. The whole policy was well intentioned and completely misguided.

$900 doesn't go a long way if you're buying cocaine or yacht time, but it goes pretty far at the grocery store. How about not eradicating it entirely, but taking enough to give $500 to everyone?

You're only looking at salary, and not equity based compensation?

It accounts for equity based compensation.

Here's the problem. Companies need workers. And society needs it's people to be bought into society. So you can't really say to the majority of your people 'you are sucker loser idiots for working these jobs, you should really do something else'. Long term, that isn't going to work for society.

Look at China. The people were fine with whatever, as long as incomes were going up. America was the same. Give people the American dream, and you can do what you want at the top. Take it away and at the same time say 'yeah, of course your life is going to suck, you are a dumb worker who deserves nothing, have you tried not being that?' isn't a winning tagline for a company/a society.