Wealth Redistribution or Wealth Return?

[laughing dog]

Taxes are a cost. It's passed through to the consumer.

I'm calling it a derail because it's trying to bring up an irrelevant point while avoiding answering the actual point.

Taxes ARE the point, or one of them. Our tax structure is supposed to ensure that those who benefit the most ( the wealthy) pay the most. Tax structure is seen by some as redistributing the wealth by taxing wealthy people to provide programs and support for those who lack sufficient means to provide for themselves.

Yes, you tax wealthy people to support those who can't support themselves.

The problem here is that corporations are effectively pass-through entities. You can't tax them, you actually tax the consumers--and that's a regressive tax.

You still have presented any evidence to support your assertion and you have failed to rebut anyone.

 

[ZiprHead]

This directly addresses the question of the OP.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That only makes sense if he understood the workers couldn't build the means of production.

So, what, the CEO goes out and does the digging? Sure...

The problem is things too big for one person to build.

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy dipshit class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

You have it backwards. I'm talking about the expensive stuff built by the engineers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In my limited real world experience, it turns out that when you (we) hired someone, the cost over the first year is going to be about 1.25 x the sum of all known and calculable costs. It does come down after that but is still… i don’t know the term - nonlinear?

Maybe that's why they call it a learning "curve".

He's not talking about a worker developing over time. Rather, he's talking about the fact that a worker costs a company more than just wages.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So it was "even close". 17 is almost half of 42; 21 - 17 = 4 < sqrt(42). I.e., the discrepancy is well within the expected noise level. I.e., dice could perfectly well make a curve shaped like that. You can't expect a process with random effects to come out exactly 50-50. There's no indication that workers systematically lose ground more of the time than they gain ground.

(* You wrote "at least the minimum wage of 1979"; I take it you meant the median wage, from the chart. In 1979 the minimum wage was about $11/hr adjusting for inflation; the figures in the chart are all higher than that.)

And it's deceptive, anyway--they keep comparing hourly workers. In today's economy few hourly jobs pay well, good jobs are salaried.

Not only is that irrelevant to the issue of wages ( or salaries) keeping pace with inflation, plenty of good paying jobs in the trades pay well. Finally, it ignores the reality that poor jobs count as well.

It is very relevant because they are determining that it doesn't keep up by examining a sector that has been in a major decline. The fact that they use such cherry-picked data says that either they are idiots or that using the real data wouldn't show the result they want.

And whether jobs in the trades pay well has nothing to do with manufacturing jobs.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This directly addresses the question of the OP.

Perhaps 1% of individual investors. That ignores all the institutional investors.

 

[Elixir]

This directly addresses the question of the OP.

Perhaps 1% of individual investors. That ignores all the institutional investors.

It refers to "all stocks", 50% of which are (allegedly) owned by "1%".
If that refers to one percent of American (?) individuals, it would imply that institutional investors own some (presumably large) fraction of the 50% of all stocks not owned by the 1%.

 

[Politesse]

That only makes sense if he understood the workers couldn't build the means of production.

So, what, the CEO goes out and does the digging? Sure...

The problem is things too big for one person to build.

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy dipshit class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

You have it backwards. I'm talking about the expensive stuff built by the engineers.

Engineers are also workers.

 

[laughing dog]

So it was "even close". 17 is almost half of 42; 21 - 17 = 4 < sqrt(42). I.e., the discrepancy is well within the expected noise level. I.e., dice could perfectly well make a curve shaped like that. You can't expect a process with random effects to come out exactly 50-50. There's no indication that workers systematically lose ground more of the time than they gain ground.

(* You wrote "at least the minimum wage of 1979"; I take it you meant the median wage, from the chart. In 1979 the minimum wage was about $11/hr adjusting for inflation; the figures in the chart are all higher than that.)

And it's deceptive, anyway--they keep comparing hourly workers. In today's economy few hourly jobs pay well, good jobs are salaried.

Not only is that irrelevant to the issue of wages ( or salaries) keeping pace with inflation, plenty of good paying jobs in the trades pay well. Finally, it ignores the reality that poor jobs count as well.

It is very relevant because they are determining that it doesn't keep up by examining a sector that has been in a major decline. The fact that they use such cherry-picked data says that either they are idiots or that using the real data wouldn't show the result they want.

And whether jobs in the trades pay well has nothing to do with manufacturing jobs.

Why do you assume that the median wage data is only for manufacturing jobs?

As usual, you have provided no evidence to support your beliefs. As usual, you make cherry-picked assumptions to criticize any idea which conflicts with your unsupported assumptions about the world.

 

[southernhybrid]

I know this thread is all over the place, but since CEOs were mentioned earlier, let's talk about one in particular, as an example of how over paid they are. The CEO of 3 M, Mike Roman, took the job in 2018, after a long career with the company. I think his initial salary was about 18 million. It's gone up and down, probably based on the stock value over the past few years. I think it was around 9 million recently. Last week, the stock price was at a 10 year low and the company is being sued for using dangerous chemicals that never break down. As far as I know, Roman is still the CEO, and I'm going to predict, if he's fired, he will probably get a nice package. Nice job Mike Roman. Don't tell me that CEOs are so great. Fuck. A nurse would be fired and probably lose her license for making one mistake that significantly hurt a patient, and based on my 42 years of experience as an RN, I'm sure that a good RN, especially those willing to work in hospitals are worth every cent most CEOs make, metaphorically speaking. Nobody is worth what a CEO makes.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/...eal-to-settle-lawsuits-over-forever-chemicals

A federal judge on Monday granted a motion to delay the start of a civil trial in which a Florida city is seeking damages from Maplewood-based 3M over the use of firefighting foam containing PFAS — so-called “forever chemicals.”

The move comes as the two sides reportedly are close to reaching a settlement agreement. The case — in which the city of Stuart, Fla., is suing 3M — is considered to be a bellwether case for thousands of similar lawsuits filed across the country.

Those lawsuits stem from environmental and health concerns about PFAS, which don’t break down in the environment. The chemicals have been linked to serious health issues, including cancer.

Judge Richard Gergel’s order granting the continuance on Monday noted that attorneys for the two sides “have been in serious settlement discussions to reach a global resolution of the claims of the water district plaintiffs pending against 3M.”

3M stopped making firefighting foam years ago — and announced last December it would stop making all PFAS, which have been used in other applications. But experts have said the company could still face significant financial liabilities. Three other companies announced Friday they had reached a more than $1 billion deal to resolve complaints about polluting drinking water systems with PFAS.

Nice going Roman and probably former CEOs of 3 M. Worse yet, I'm going to guess this company will probably get off with a much smaller penalty than it deserves. After all, we can't hurt the stock holders, not even the one in my family who thought 3 M was a great stock to own long before it tanked. It does make one wonder how much more environmental damage is happening by companies like this. We all know that 3 M did a lot of good things during COVID and 3 M made a lot of needed products, but who honestly believes the company didn't know how much damage PFAS was doing? It's much worse than the one article I linked. I wouldn't trust a CEO as far as I could thrown them, primarily him, since the vast majority are males.

And, btw, did you know that drug company Merck is suing the government over the policy that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices? Just sayin'. Profit and greed is way out of control on so many levels.....Not just in the US. It's universal. You don't have to be religious to see that greed is one of the 7 deadly sins.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So it was "even close". 17 is almost half of 42; 21 - 17 = 4 < sqrt(42). I.e., the discrepancy is well within the expected noise level. I.e., dice could perfectly well make a curve shaped like that. You can't expect a process with random effects to come out exactly 50-50. There's no indication that workers systematically lose ground more of the time than they gain ground.

(* You wrote "at least the minimum wage of 1979"; I take it you meant the median wage, from the chart. In 1979 the minimum wage was about $11/hr adjusting for inflation; the figures in the chart are all higher than that.)

And it's deceptive, anyway--they keep comparing hourly workers. In today's economy few hourly jobs pay well, good jobs are salaried.

Not only is that irrelevant to the issue of wages ( or salaries) keeping pace with inflation, plenty of good paying jobs in the trades pay well. Finally, it ignores the reality that poor jobs count as well.

It is very relevant because they are determining that it doesn't keep up by examining a sector that has been in a major decline. The fact that they use such cherry-picked data says that either they are idiots or that using the real data wouldn't show the result they want.

And whether jobs in the trades pay well has nothing to do with manufacturing jobs.

Why do you assume that the median wage data is only for manufacturing jobs?

As usual, you have provided no evidence to support your beliefs. As usual, you make cherry-picked assumptions to criticize any idea which conflicts with your unsupported assumptions about the world.

Because occasionally that evidence is presented by people with a little bit of honesty and spell out what the conditions are. It then gets repeated with the qualifications removed. When you see the same data with and without the qualifications it's pretty obvious what actually happened.

 

[laughing dog]

So it was "even close". 17 is almost half of 42; 21 - 17 = 4 < sqrt(42). I.e., the discrepancy is well within the expected noise level. I.e., dice could perfectly well make a curve shaped like that. You can't expect a process with random effects to come out exactly 50-50. There's no indication that workers systematically lose ground more of the time than they gain ground.

(* You wrote "at least the minimum wage of 1979"; I take it you meant the median wage, from the chart. In 1979 the minimum wage was about $11/hr adjusting for inflation; the figures in the chart are all higher than that.)

And it's deceptive, anyway--they keep comparing hourly workers. In today's economy few hourly jobs pay well, good jobs are salaried.

Not only is that irrelevant to the issue of wages ( or salaries) keeping pace with inflation, plenty of good paying jobs in the trades pay well. Finally, it ignores the reality that poor jobs count as well.

It is very relevant because they are determining that it doesn't keep up by examining a sector that has been in a major decline. The fact that they use such cherry-picked data says that either they are idiots or that using the real data wouldn't show the result they want.

And whether jobs in the trades pay well has nothing to do with manufacturing jobs.

Why do you assume that the median wage data is only for manufacturing jobs?

As usual, you have provided no evidence to support your beliefs. As usual, you make cherry-picked assumptions to criticize any idea which conflicts with your unsupported assumptions about the world.

Because occasionally that evidence is presented by people with a little bit of honesty and spell out what the conditions are. It then gets repeated with the qualifications removed. When you see the same data with and without the qualifications it's pretty obvious what actually happened.

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

 

[Bomb#20]

...So people engaging in this sort of rhetoric typically use total output per hour of labor as a proxy for productivity. But it should be painfully obvious that adopting this computational procedure amounts to giving labor 100% of the credit for production. I.e., it's just another way to repeat the Labor Theory of Value's metaphysical premise that the source of all value is labor. A partisan can pick any input he pleases, declare it solely responsible for production, and thereby "prove" the providers of that input are exploited.

Marx even recognized that his system can't produce capital--because he said societies should wait for industrialization before going communist. That only makes sense if he understood the workers couldn't build the means of production.

So, what, the CEO goes out and does the digging? Sure...

The problem is things too big for one person to build.

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy [hated by Politesse] class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?

A creationist is a person who believes the steps in the species origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen. A socialist is a person who believes the steps in the goods and services origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen.

 

[ZiprHead]

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?

A creationist is a person who believes the steps in the species origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen. A socialist is a person who believes the steps in the goods and services origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen.

What makes you think the working class doesn't understand the manufacturing process? Seems kind of bigoted to me.

 

[bilby]

It strikes me that even if we assume that CEOs have a rare and valuable skill that most people can't match, there remains something to explain about their remuneration levels.

There's a big gulf between "We need someone to organise this huge and complex business", and "We need someone to organise this huge and complex business and we must pay him enough to buy a private jet and a super-yacht and a number of large houses with big staffs of servants and ...".

We need people to do brain surgery, and because that skill is rare, we need to pay neurosurgeons enough for them to become millionaires. But we don't need to pay them enough to become billionaires; Is running a corporation really a thousand times more difficult?

Or are we assuming that if someone generates new wealth in a technological society with an existing and complex infrastructure, they are entitled to keep most of that new wealth, rather than share most of it with the society that enabled them to create it?

If the latter, then what is the basis for that assumption of desert?

 

[Politesse]

...So people engaging in this sort of rhetoric typically use total output per hour of labor as a proxy for productivity. But it should be painfully obvious that adopting this computational procedure amounts to giving labor 100% of the credit for production. I.e., it's just another way to repeat the Labor Theory of Value's metaphysical premise that the source of all value is labor. A partisan can pick any input he pleases, declare it solely responsible for production, and thereby "prove" the providers of that input are exploited.

Marx even recognized that his system can't produce capital--because he said societies should wait for industrialization before going communist. That only makes sense if he understood the workers couldn't build the means of production.

So, what, the CEO goes out and does the digging? Sure...

The problem is things too big for one person to build.

Which is why we have....

a working class.

That produces all the things the wealthy [hated by Politesse] class has neither the capacity nor the knowledge to produce.

And you have evidence that a working class has the capacity and the knowledge to produce all those things, do you?

.

Obviously, or we wouldn't have them.

And I don't "hate the wealthy", by the way; I am the wealthy, by any rational metric. I have a home, a pension plan, I want for nothing. What I do object to is a kleptocratic class generating unnecessary poverty by manipulating market forces to expand their personal wealth, while those who produce the actual value of the products that keep the whole market afloat struggle to get by. Wanting others to share in the comforts I possess does not require hating myself or anyone else. I don't even hate the orchestrators of all of this, most of whom are dead in any case. Being mad at Alex Hamilton or Milton Friedman or whoever would be quite the exercise in futility at this juncture.

But, this system that keeps the super-wealthy classes fat and happy beyond any reasonable definition of need must be redesigned if our nation-state is going to have any hope of keeping up with the other advanced polities and corporations of the world.

A socialist is a person who believes the steps in the goods and services origin process he doesn't understand happen by magic without any mechanism causing them to happen.

What "steps" are you referring to? Buying up stocks because your money manager says they're hot today?

 

[Rhea]

And I don't "hate the wealthy", by the way; I am the wealthy, by any rational metric. I have a home, a pension plan, I want for nothing. What I do object to is a kleptocratic class generating unnecessary poverty by manipulating market forces to expand their personal wealth, while those who produce the actual value of the products that keep the whole market afloat struggle to get by. Wanting others to share in the comforts I possess does not require hating myself or anyone else. I don't even hate the orchestrators of all of this, most of whom are dead in any case. Being mad at Alex Hamilton or Milton Friedman or whoever would be quite the exercise in futility at this juncture.

But, this system that keeps the super-wealthy classes fat and happy beyond any reasonable definition of need must be redesigned if our nation-state is going to have any hope of keeping up with the other advanced polities and corporations of the world.

All this. This first accusation to fly is that those of us complaining “hate the wealthy.” Except, like Politesse, I am the wealthy by any rational measure. ANd, like Politesse, I am also one who just hates a system that makes being a kleptocrat legal - that enables the obscenely wealthy to take from those who labor.

The second accusation to fly is that I want to “take the means of production” by which they mean the things that were purchased by amassing money off of someone else’s physical labor, and which are then artifically protected … essentially, “once I bully or coerce someone to give it to me, it’s now my honorable sweat that I claim as my own.” But I’ve never said that I wanted means of production collectivized - only fairly valued.

Then there’s the “but ideas are worth something! You stupid laborers don’t understand!” Except I’m a patent-holder myself.


I am someone who objects to a system that protects bullies and kleptocrats.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

 

[laughing dog]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

Another response that confuses your unfounded beliefs with fact.

More importantly, your argument that manufacturing wages don’t count when showing that wages do not (or do, for that matter) keep with inflation is illogical, because they are wages.

Provide the factual evidence that wages have kept up with inflation to support your view instead of making up bogus criticisms.

 

[Toni]

That is completely non-responsive. You confuse your unfounded beliefs with evidence.

We've been over this before. I've shown the problem, you stick your fingers in your ears and jump on the next graph that gets it wrong.

What did you do? Watch a YouTube or something? To fill in the gaps inadvertently left in Atlas Shrugged?

I admire and respect your expertise in IT issues and in your expertise in safe practices when hiking in the mountains in your area. I respect your opinion on many subjects even if I disagree. I am not at all bothered by the fact that you are not an expert in a lot of other areas. Most of us are not. But some of us recognize the limitations of our knowledge and understanding.