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Nah. ...Well, don't get me wrong, the rich absolutely should be taxed, sure, but that's a different debate.
We don't have a nationally mandated minimum wage in Finland. Because the unions set their own minimum wages (which they adjust frequently to market conditions) and the unions also have actual legitimate power.
Maybe they should try this stuff in America too. It's fucking awesome.
Americans have been convinced that is socialism and therefore the greatest evil.
If there's a minimum wage, there should also be a maximum wage, but I may be a communist, idk.
Maximum wage used to be a thing. It's how we got insurance tied to employment.
Obviously, those people worked for their money. All the teenagers with minimum wage did was have a job, like some sort of peasant.
Make them pay people more.
The US minimum wage hasn't changed in TEN YEARS?! You guys need to revolt, that is awful.
To be fair, many states and cities have their own minimum wages higher than the federal minimum. I'll let you guess which states don't.
The ones where the people are most afraid of communism and think minimum wage is socialism?
10 years... how refreshingly optimistic...
In 2007, Congress passed the increase to 7.25 to take effect in 2009. The minimum wage change 15 years ago was passed 17 years ago.
Minimum wage shouldn’t ever be a specific amount, it should be a percentage tied to some other economic metric, so that as inflation or cost of living rises, wages increase with it as well. This BS of having to wait for out-of-touch millionaire Congress members to approve of minimum wage increases is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Congress has raised their own pay multiple times since they raised the minimum wage back in 2009.
Actually, looking into it, it seems that they gave themselves an automatic annual pay raise back in the ethics reforms act of 1989! Fucking assholes.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/97-615.html
"The automatic annual adjustment for Members of Congress is determined by a formula using a component of the Employment Cost Index (ECI),......"
".....This adjustment formula was established by the Ethics Reform Act of 1989."
In Europe we call this wage indexation, you should try it!
Don't worry, we won't.
How about we just make minimum wage a percentage of the highest income in the country? Take whoever made the most money in a given year, divide that by 52 weeks, and then divide that by 40 hours. Then divide whatever the result of that is by 1000. This should be very reasonable basis. It still allows for a huge wealth gap, but asserts that nobody should make over 1000 times more than anyone else. You still get rich and poor people, so this is in no way a leftist policy. It's a very moderate middle of the road one.
Anyway, looking at 2023. Not even examining his true income and how much he blew doing who knows what, Elon Musk had $95.4 billion net gain in wealth that year. Divide that by 52 weeks, 40 hours, and 1000 - we should make minimum wage $45865.38 per hour. And if that's not reasonable or feasible, it just means he makes too much for the good of the economy.
If you see these numbers and still think tax is the solution, you're not paying enough attention.
A system is what it does. Our system created this disparity, and will continue to allow it to grow as long as it exists. Any solutions within the acceptable limits said system has set out will never stop it, only placate the masses enough to stop us from tearing it down.
You don't have to go that far back to find a time when the rich were heavily taxed and income disparity was much smaller. Keep going back and you can find other times when the disparity was greater and the rich were taxed less.
The best outcome may require the system to be torn down, but it's clearly also possible to tax the rich significantly more even with the system already in place.
Exactly. Post WWII the tax on the richest was 90%, it stayed there until the mid 60s when it was lowered to 70% and then in the early 80s Reagan and that congress lowered it to 50%, then briefly to even below 30%.
It probably wouldn't have happened without the combined effect of the Great Depression rolling directly into WWII. With those two events, it was possible to raise taxes that high, and the rich actually (to a large extent) paid them.
Even though the "Again" part of MAGA is very ill-defined, I think a lot of MAGA supporters would point to the post WWII era as a time that America was great. A greater shared prosperity was probably a significant reason why things felt so great then. Unions were strong, rich people were heavily taxed, and everyone was better off.
Kamala Harris promises to tax the top 1%
Donald Trump promises to tax the bottom 50%
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Don't you know,
Life is a Bitch!
Eat the Rich,
Eat the Rich,
Out of the palace,
And into the ditch!
Better yet, end all taxes on individuals. Instead, all taxes should be levied against corporations, and they should cover the entire bill for a functioning society... And society should democratically decide what that entails. Tax the corporations so much that their stock prices fall back to realistic numbers. Then we won't have any of these fake billionaires who's "wealth is tied up in stocks", but also they can get loans against them. It should be very easy to get "rich" by working yourself, it should be very hard to get rich "letting your money work for you"
Maybe a hot take, but I actually think individual progressive taxes are great. Have a generous tax free threshold, but individual taxes stops excessive wealth hoarding and (in the case of inheritance tax) dynasties
They have so much wealth it's hard to visualise how much they have.
Eh, buying a president as your personal bitch and jumping around on stage with him in an undersized t-shirt with your belly sticking out like a brain damaged orangatan is a pretty good visualization of how disgusting this much money is.
At this rate, we're going to have our first trillionaire by the end of the decade. How much is enough? How big does that pile of money need to be?
And yet most forums will ban you even say the word "guillotine".
Eat*
