this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
280 points (99.3% liked)

A Boring Dystopia

9688 readers
796 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
280
Amazon Workers Say They Struggle to Afford Food and Rent (time.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

In the before times, when corporate and marginal income tax rates were high and stock buybacks were illegal, a business could do two things with its profit:

  • Reinvest it into the business, as employee compensation, equipment or facilities, and/or
  • Pay taxes.

In the 1980s, we gave them a third option:

  • Keep the money

...which for some reason was supposed to not encourage the rich to hoard money and/or engage in non-productive financialization.

The rich, of course, hoarded and engaged in financial engineering pretty much immediately, and everyone else, which meant employees, suffered for it.

Think about how stupid of an idea this is: giving the rich the ability to hoard money and then against all reason, somehow expecting that they won't do the thing you're incentivizing them to do. Even George Bush called it "voodoo economics".

If you look at wages-vs-productivity curves you can see society "break" in the 1980s, with the rich running away with their wealth and everyone else getting stuck in a quagmire of low wages and starved public services.

So that's why high progressive taxation helps employee: it forces the rich to either invest in their businesses or fund the nation.