“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an /affordable/ pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would /still have wet feet/. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
—Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms“A friend of mine asked me recently, was I gonna go see the new Batman movie with him. It's just I don’t respect the concept of Batman because of what I understand about politics now... I’mma lay it out for you: rich dude owns a corporation. Has state of the art equipment, and he uses this to beat up on street level crime. He doesn’t mess with the industrialists, or the super capitalists, or the Murdochs, or the Trumps. He really just fuck with the person that’s just on the corner. Batman is a conservative’s wet dream. Fuck Batman.”
— Reginald D. Hunter
“To be poor in the United States today is to be always at risk, the object of scorn and shame. Without mass-based empathy for the poor, it is possible for ruling class groups to mask class terrorism and genocidal acts. Creating and maintaining social conditions where individuals of all ages daily suffer malnutrition and starvation is a form of class warfare that increasingly goes unnoticed in this society. When huge housing projects in urban cities are torn down and the folks who dwell therein are not relocated, no one raises questions or protests.”
—bell hooks
New French law to limit CEO pay to 20 times of lowest paid employee
ftalphaville.ft.comCEO’s are all over paid. So let’s limit what they can make. Sounds great, right?
Wrong.
Like most things governmental, they never bother to look at the unintended consequences of their laws.
All this law is going to do is harm the unskilled and low paying jobs. If I’m a CEO I’m going to law off people not making a lot of money, usually the unskilled, the young, and the poor. Unemployment among those groups are all going to skyrocket.
Rather than hiring 3 unskilled workers at $8/hour I’d just hire 1 skilled worker at $25/hour or $26/hour to do the job the 3 could have handled for less money. But because of governmental interference the unskilled laborer will lose their job and will never be able to get the work experience to grow.
Great job France. Continue passing laws at the expense of your poor and unskilled.
“I believe that there will be ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think it will be based on the color of the skin.”
—Malcolm X
Mother Jones: 6 Dumb Arguments Against Taxing the Rich, Explained
motherjones.com
It’s class warfare!
Yeah right. Three decades of laissez-faire economic polices have allowed the rich to double their share of the national income while paying tax rates a fifth lower than before. The result,notes Kevin Drum, was “wage stagnation for everyone else, a massive financial collapse that ravaged the middle class, an enormous deficits that they’ll be asked to pay off eventually.” If the millionaires tax is the only blowback, the wealthy should count their blessings.
It’s a tax on small business
“Don’t forget that most small businesses file taxes as individuals,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Fox News Sunday. “So when you are raising top tax rates, you are raising taxes on these job creators.” Except when you aren’t. ThinkProgress’s Pat Garofalo points out that fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s small businesses fall into either of the top two tax brackets. Plus, many of the small business filers in the upper brackets are merely investors who have nothing to do with running the business. And if small businesses don’t want to pay taxes as individuals, they can file always as corporations.
It reduces incentives to work and invest
Experience shows otherwise. As Nancy Folbre points out over at Economix, “average annual rates of growth in gross domestic product in the high tax era between 1950 and 1980 exceeded those of the last 30 years. Increases in the top tax rate under President Bill Clinton were followed by robust economic expansion.”
It’s an unstable source of revenue
A recent essay in the Wall Street Journal argued that the high volatility of upper-level income makes it impractical to rely on taxing it. But this concern is vastly overblown and can be easily dealt with by establishing rainy day funds.
It’s unfair
In the libertarian view, the rich are entitled to their gains because they worked for them. But this ignores how structural changes in the economy such as globalization, financial deregulation, and the rise of the knowledge-based economy has disproportionately rewarded the wealthy. At the same time, we’ve failed to reinvest in government programs that once leveled the playing field, such as financing for community colleges and public universities.
The rich will leave the country
Good riddance, writes Don Peck in a recent Atlantic essay on how to save the middle class: “America remains a magnet for talent, for reasons that go beyond the tax code; and by international standards, none of the tax changes recommended here would create an excessive tax burden on high earners. If a few financiers choose to decamp for some small island-state in search of the smallest possible tax bill, we should wish them good luck.”
