- US Population 2000: 280 Million - US Population 2020: 320 Million - +15% increase in population

- Tax revenues 2000: $2.03 trillion - Tax revenues 2019: $3.50 trillion - +75% increase in tax revenue

Population grew 15% and tax revenue grew 75% and yet we still can't solve any of the real problems we had since 2000. So what is increasing taxes going to do if we already collect 75% more and can't make a dent.

Now let's say you tax the billionaires: - Jeff - $200B - Larry & Sergey - $130B - Bill Gates - $120B - Zuck - $100B - Warren Buffet - $80B - Larry Ellison - 71B - Elon Musk - $70B That's $770 Billion - let's say we double this for the remainder of billionaires to $1.5 trillion and add in a 70% tax.

$1.5 trillion in wealth = $1.05 trillion in year 1

Now what about the following year? Well you reduced their wealth substantially so now you only have $500B and that would only yield $350B in tax revenue the following year.

$350B in tax revenue year 2.

And there after it basically trickles down to nothing.

So you end up with a total of $1.5 trillion and then nothing. Well that $1.5 trillion is 42% increase over what we have today, but remember that tax revenue already increased 75% and we still couldn't get anything right.

So while it may sound good to say tax the billionaires the reality is if we couldn't figure out how to spend the additional $1.5 trillion from taxes between 2000 and 2020 a one-time 2 year increase of $1.5 trillion won't do much because the underlying system is broken.

Where do you think our tax revenue is coming from? the 12% tax bracket of someone making 20k a year in government-subsidized housing, or the 37% tax bracket from someone making $10million a year paying property taxes on their 20 million dollar house?

a serious, informed discussion starts with an honest recognition of reality. if you think taxes need to change thats fine, but acting like billionaires and successful companies pay no taxes when they represent the overwhelming majority of tax revenue, you sound like a blind ideologue rather than someone who knows what theyre talking about.

It makes zero sense. Eliminate that one thing and it would be the single largest tax increase in history. That tells me that people making $150k/year or more can live without being social security tax free every year after earning X amount

The author of this article was paid $42 million last year. Uber's top 7 executives received: "$11.4 million in salary and cash bonus, plus $71 million worth of equity awards." [0] Maybe instead of paying their CEO and executives that much, Uber should pay their workers more?

[0] https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backla...

There are a lot of people arguing that "platforms" like Uber are capturing too large a fraction of the economic surplus created by transactions on the platform.

30% for matching buy/sell orders? Do you have any idea how insane that is relative to what NYSE charges?

some responsibility should lie with the public, but to capture the diversity of benefits and needs of every single employee with a centralised program is impossible, and it would also be an unprecedented amount of power transferred to the federal government.

Not everyone requires the same benefits or same training and this is why corporations do need to have some responsibility, decentralisation of benefits is necessary.

This sort of technocratic dream of taking all responsibility away from business which then functions in pure form while all social responsibility is transferred to bureaucrats who hand out benefits (but also can cut them at any point), is volatile and essentially has one single point of failure.

Not to mention it completely ignores the messy reality that we can't simply "tax the billionaires and upper middle class" because of the complications of real world politics.

The US is already way too dependent on this logic of having an all powerful government bail out citizens and unaccountable business. It was one of the lessons of the financial crisis and right now during the pandemic it is failing again. Yes, the government can write trillion dollar checks, but it does nothing to combat the mass unemployment and dysfunction that is the result of having no responsibility or organisational capacity within firms, who ought to be the first line of defense.

But look at it from a different perspective: A bunch of jobs can theoretically be automated or otherwise designed to require no individual human to do the job. Some jobs can't be automated but aren't really necessary either; the total value add for society is quite low, and it is not necessary (defining 'necessary' as: If nobody does it, some good or service price will skyrocket and soon the wage for this job will go up considerably, possibly via a workaround, such as pressuring government to increase a budget for something).

Minimum wage (or, at least, that 'baseline quality of life and benefits' you mentioned, which includes more than just a wage, but also working conditions and safety) is society's baseline for: Below this line, automate it, and if you can't, don't.

One argument is that you should let each individual choose for themselves what job is beneath them, but it's not actually a fully free market unless you go out, find homeless people and shoot them, or, when someone breaks out their back doing low-pay menial work, that we just let them wallow in pain. Which no sane society ever would or should, which highlights that we don't treat fellow humans as cattle. If they are a drag on society and it costs society considerable resources just to support them.. society does pay that cost, or ought to.

The flipside of that is the existence of jobs which are 'net negative' value for society: The cost of supporting the human that does it will, in the long run, cost more than the job gives society. However, because more or less by design there are externalities involved in caring for our fellow humans, the job may seem net-positive to an employer even if it is not. Society is nevertheless attempting to make sure these jobs do not exist.

Minimum wage is, perhaps, a very blunt instrument to make this happen. One can imagine a completely 'safe' job (both mentally and physically) that pays half of minimum wage, and that would be better to allow that if you combine it with a social safety net _and_ the job unemployment rate is sufficient that the only real alternative is no job at all. But I don't think it is feasible to legislate a complicated 'chart' matching working conditions against allowed minimal salaries.

On a macro level I think that's a good thing. We create more value with less labour. And eventually yes we'd have to address that and figure out how to move to true post-scarcity society.

But it's not a 100% either or. You can recognise the need for a better social security net while also wanting to regulate corporations into giving labour their fair share of the output.

- We collectively have created an economy that has generated spectacular amounts of wealth.

- A small group of people is hoarding the majority of that wealth.

- This is harmful to our society and needs to change.

- Arguments that we can't reduce inequality without destroying that wealth are factually and historically incorrect.

One example is when people pushed for a ban on industries using child labor in SEA without first ensuring there was some fall back safety net that would help those children. The end result was children ending up working far worse jobs than the ones that the western industries were providing. Overall, there seems to be a judgment that any employment of a child is to be judged in isolation and not relative to what other options they have. Society has deemed it is ethically better for me to do nothing despite a child experiencing the ravages of extreme poverty than to intervene in a way that is better for the child but not good enough to meet our expected levels of treatment of children.

Another, more IT centric example, is that it is better to not fix any bugs in a known broken part of the system than to touch it and fix one bug, because you assume responsibility for all the bugs you don't fix. Not every place has this mentality, but I've seen enough which do.

So telling me that society deems it more ethical to offer a worker no option than to offer them a below satisfactory offer doesn't not surprise me at all, despite the outcome of such behavior being too painfully obvious.

Though if we were to invert this, I wonder the outcome because the world over there are enough people experiencing extremely harmful situations where even being offered what we would consider a nightmare is better than leaving them in their current situation. Consider if I wanted someone to be a 24/7 live in maid/butler(cook/cleaner/gardener/etc.) and their pay was $5 a day along with a room, food, basic clothing needed for the job, and access to a computer with internet when they have free time. There are people in situations where this would be a significant improvement in their quality of life, yet I'm not sure any one reading this would approve of me having such a live in maid/butler regardless of what sort of situation they were in before I made the offer.

We need more people paying taxes, not fewer people paying more taxes. The other thing is that if we have a “strong” social safety net, that will then incentivize more low wage jobs that don’t pay enough to actually support the person (sort of how Walmart paid low wages, but many of its employees were on food stamps.)

Government should be less involved. Having food stamps available for low wage workers means they can accept a job for lower pay than they would have been able to accept otherwise. (I am not saying to get rid of food stamps, only to illustrate how “safety nets” actually perpetuate the very problems they are ostensibly attempting to solve.) Why should I be subsidizing Walmart workers? If we lowered costs to businesses by reducing taxes but also simultaneously reducing “safety nets,” the market would then require higher wages for a given job or the job wouldn’t get done. Right now it’s sort of some Keynesian system were I pay low prices at Walmart, but those low prices are subsidized by my tax dollars that pay safety nets that then allow Walmart to pay lower wages. So my “low prices” are really the result of a government subsidy that I pay for in taxes.

You also see this in agriculture: we pay lower prices for vegetables, but due to the number of illegal alien employees who are paid less than minimum wage. The costs of a vegetable should reflect the actual cost of picking it, not a cost subsidized by illegal/below cost workers. (Just to be clear, I don’t care about the documentation of a worker, what I care about is businesses leveraging below market labor as a cost savings that really just passes the societal costs of that labor to taxpayers.)

So I don’t agree that business should be taxed more, but that we eliminate the perverse incentives to pay workers less than a truly free market would support.

We should, of course, have safety nets for the truly destitute, but they shouldn’t be a replacement for actual wages.. and that’s what we see in places like Walmart. Safety nets shouldn’t be generational. They should provide temporary help, not as a perpetual subsidy to businesses.

The issue is that the US government is unable to effectively do anything, really, as far as public welfare is concerned. We spend a ton already - our public Healthcare spend, for instance is in line with European public health but we don't get nearly as much for it. Our programs are, dollar per citizen, expensive.

We then task employers with something impossible. No one, therefore, wants to be in the position of employing low skilled workers.

I don't know where the real solution lies but expecting the federal government to spend effectively seems out of the question.

Quality of life is subjective. The US constitution guarantees the freedom to make of life what you will but not that it will be subjectively 'good'.

That's not what Amazon is getting shamed for - as you are perfectly aware.

We can and do have laws and ethics about what is not permitted to do to people. That’s fantastic and I support that.

For children, I would say they aren’t yet potentially self sufficient, so as a society we should all share the responsibility that they have what they need to grow and develop healthily.

But no, I don’t ‘deserve’ the things you mentioned. I’m an adult human who needs to go try to manifest those things for myself. Including basics like food and water.

But many would see that as morally repugnant. Not everyone, but a majority, and especially a politically powerful plurality. That is what you will need to deal with to make a change.

Its not fair we have Walmart employees on welfare for example.

The contradiction (higher productivity = fewer jobs) has been an issues since the industrial revolution at least, but we’ve seem to have gotten by so far with creating new kinds of jobs coupled with a increasing social safety net. The next step might be some kind of UBI, but we should avoid the other routes (de-focusing on higher productivity, or directly paying people more without higher productivity) as unsustainable in the long term. Some mechanisms, like a rising minimum wage, imply higher productivity with each increase, so those work out as well (though increase the need for social safety nets as some people are forced out of the work force).

What you are hinting at has a name, and it's called socialism.

Some people in those European countries do complain about high taxes. But in general, as a country, most are happy with our "social safety net" which includes universal healthcare, "almost free" education system (including University), reasonable minimal wages and "liveable" unemployment benefits.

Socialism seem like a dirty word in the US. It isn't one where I'm from (Belgium).

They (and dito Walmart and other such employers) are not paying middle class wages though. Usually it should be possible to feed a family upon a single worker's wage to call it "middle class"... but the harsh reality is that many of the workers, especially those working for subcontractors in fulfillment, are nowhere close to such wages - or to working conditions that are usually associated with "middle class", like being allowed to go on a real toilet and not piss in bottles.

Big companies don't want to be shamed? Then they should not let their employees work in shameful conditions!

So they take their only logical move, they pump out a bunch of ethics marketing statements they don't believe in, but also importantly that they know the public doesn't believe that they believe in, but that give them plausible deniability and keep them out of the spot light for wrong speak and out of the news cycle.

Meanwhile, they do exactly what they are incentivezed to do which is to keep head count low and make sure almost everybody is a contractor.

Whenever I read this I translate it to "I don't want poor people to live near me." That's fine, but let's not feign nobility about it. The global median income is $10k/yr. Nearly half the planet lives on less than $5/day. 1/3 of people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water. What, exactly, do you mean when you say it's incumbent upon you to provide a baseline quality of life and benefits? And are you really willing to bring yourself down to that baseline so that others can be brought up to it? These Amazon warehouse workers you're so concerned about are quite rich by global standards.

That is what we do but it doesn't reduce the mess. We have a safety net and a minimum wage, and still you see the "gig economy" type loopholes trying to get labor for even less than that.

I disagree.

This gigantic exaggeration is the crux of your point, around which all else crumbles. Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it. There are other companies that are well regarded for employing low to no skill workers en masse, like Lidl, which nobody is complaining about.

Most people also do not believe it's corporations who are responsible for this living baseline, but the state, so yet another either outright lie or exaggeration around which all of those points crumble.

Overall, it's disheartening to see such a flawed comment at the top here in hn.

Think about what you're actually saying here. You're saying we should shift the "quality of life" compensation burden of THEIR EMPLOYEES away from businesses (who are making boatloads of money), and attempt to spread it out across a few subsets of the population. Taxing corporations or billionaires never works out as planned[1][2][3]....so how does it many any sense that the upper-middle-class gets stuck paying this bill? This is exactly why the middle class is disappearing....which is good for no one.

[1] - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-... [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.... [3] - https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/