Forum Post: Set the Tax Rate to the Unemployment Rate
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 20, 2011, 9:03 a.m. EST by doc555
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Many to most Millionaires get paid in the form of larges bonuses, one way to get their attention is to give them an employment bonus. Tax them at a rate of 90% and decrease that rate by 7.5% for each percentage point unemployment is below 12%. So if Unemployment averaged 8% from September 2012 to August of 2013 the tax rate on Millionaires would be 60% for Tax Year 2013. If Unemployment averaged 4% the tax would be 30%
Once the unemployment rate hits 40%, no ones paying taxes
this wouldn't work because actual unemployment numbers aren't measured anymore they are only measured in the number of people applying for unemployment benefits
How are millionaires responsibly for unemployment? Failed plan.
Singling out every millionare is not fair, but the wealthy who run large corporations do in fact create artificial shortages through price manipulation all in the name of profit. If a corporation can set prices slightly higher and lay off off thousand workers to make even a minimal profit, they will do so. That is why unemployment is partially the fault of wealthy business owners. Even if they were only making an additional $1 profit, moral hazard does not factor into their business model. People's labor is only a commodity. We live in a technologically advanced society where we have an over abundance to meet everyone's needs. Things can be produced much cheaper and with less labor than ever before and, in the future, labor will continually be less needed. If we can produce more with less, why can't we spread this abundance to as many people as possible. After all, every person in the world has contributed to these labor saving technologies in one way or another. Why does one person have the sole right to profit from what took billions of people to develop? Why are people so far removed from the fact that everything we have in this world is due to the mental and physical labor of billions of minds throughout history? You might own a business that creates something of value, but did you create that? Do you think any ofthese CEO's actually participate in what their companies are producing? I can assure you that banking CEO's don't make one trade, CEO's in the automotive industry don't participate in making one car. They have people and machines do it for them. How the hell are they entitled to the majority of the profits. this movement is less about attacking these people, but more about being aware of these injustices and questioning everything you thought you knew about the world.
You have a movement calling them the "job creators" so... where then, are the jobs?
I have no movement, I asked, how are they responsible for unemployment?
Flawed economic theory, mostly. No one can really "win" in capitalism.
Well you are entitled to your opinion, but the wealthy are not responsible to anyone but themselves.
Then you're perfectly happy with what they've done with our economy? I figured somebody would be. I'm not, though.
LOL ! For some FACTS collected from 2011 Census, see my post at http://occupywallst.org/forum/inconvenient-truths-america/
Not true. Please reevaluate.
Hmm... no details? I'm going to have to say NO.
More people win under capitalism than any other system.
More people seem to lose under capitalism than any other system too...
You've never lived in a socialist country
The deregulation that the 1% has worked for, donated for, propagandized for has blown up the economy. That is how they are responsible for unemployment.
Now, not every millionaire was part of this, but so many of them have networked and hung together to bring it about, that the shorthand of grouping them is reasonable.
That is washington, perhaps your time is better spent talking to your representatives and being involved in the political process.
Am on it.
However, both the super-rich and the executives who can use companies' money for political influence mean that it is an uphill battle to have a healthy balance of regulation and enterprise.
That would be why it may be best for all of us to put pressure on our representatives, the laws that govern need to be introduced as bills eithee from the president or one or more of the representatives, in order for legislation for reform to pass it needs a wide base of support, you or i can write to, call on the phone or meet in person with our rrpresentatives, if a PAC is formed it can reach a lot farther, just my opinion but from watching how business gets done in washington this has been my observation, the more people meeting with reps the more action you get
Yes.
Reasonable to a foolish mind. Why would deregulation blow up an economy? How does a disconcentration of power make it easier for the 1% to dominate?
Deregulation allowed massive numbers of mortgages that were (1) not properly underwritten, which means they could not be paid back, and would not have been made if earlier legal standards had been in place, (2) those mortgages were then bundled into CDO's that were falsely rated as AAA when they were carrying levels of risk so high that few would buy them if properly rated, (3) then derivatives, which were entirely unregulated, were used to apply financial leverage and increase the money at risk.
That is the mortgage crisis, which blew up our economy, unless you think this recession and unemployment are just minor blips.
Deregulation allowed these things or too much regulation? A central planned economy takes a wrong turn and suddenly we have not enough central control?
Deregulation. The Glass-Steagall law had protected banks from getting into too much risk for decades, but it was done away with. This allowed CDO's and derivatives and selling mortgages in bundles rather than keeping them, which encouraged banks to ignore underwriting standards. Those standards had required that loans should only be given to people who could repay the loan.
The claim that there was too much control is nonsense. Derivatives were totally unregulated - entirely "free" market. They brought down AIG and created immense losses, because they were making money as long as housing values kept rising, but when values fell, the derivatives became losses instead of gains. In the billions....
And didn't regulation force the losses to be put onto you and me? I think we are in agreement, but I think stopping the problem at the root would be better than trying to close the gate after the horse has bolted?
No, because the regulation prevented immense loses before the regulation was repealed. That was exactly the point. It did stop the problem at the root.
Banks sometimes failed anyway but the FDIC is insurance that the banks have to pay for, so taxpayers were protected.
I've been here since October 8 trying to get somebody interested in entry-level software jobs. Where are the applicants?
Advertising here is self-fulfilling propaganda. No one is going to take you seriously, nor give personal information to someone so suspicious, so you pretend you're justified in standing on your soapbox and claiming "no one wants jobs!"
You might want to consider the proper outlets, like craigslist, monster, and so on.
Actually, he DOES have a point, albeit colored with some disdain.
I am on senior staff at a large engineering company. We, our competitors, and the Nation at large are suffering from a critical shortage of people in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines. We are graduating insufficient people in the technical fields and far more than we need in the non-technical and "soft science" fields. The US Government is aware of the shortage and the NSF recently started funding STEM scholarships to help address the shortage.
I know from personal experience (my own children as well as those of my relatives), that many in college avoid the STEM majors because they're so hard. Some of my relatives kids literally changed majors from STEM to others saying "all my friends are out partying while I'm stuck here studying." I can't project this attitude onto all college students, but of those I know, this seems to be a common refrain.
One of my children DID stay the course in STEM and graduated as an Engineer. He's been out of school only 3 years and is earning over $90,000 a year. He decided to change jobs about 3 months ago and had 6 offers on the table. The one he accepted gave him a 15% raise and paid for all his relocation costs.
Some say it's the "Haves vs. Have-Nots" but I suspect it's more the "Knows vs. Know-Nots." We have a huge number of people with poorly differentiated skills working in services and a few working in the advanced fields that CREATE all the gadgets the masses want to buy (how many iPhones did Apple sell in the last 3 weeks?). Those that know how to DESIGN what the masses buy will remain in high demand while those that offer services will continue to suffer depressed wages.
Hmm... grand scheme, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. If you don't have the masses, you don't have a market. The 'all chiefs and no indians' mentality doesn't exactly lend itself to a strong social structure, or a sustainable economic model.
However, I do agree we need more people in STEM regardless of competition from countries like India, but for different reasons.
You're ignoring the point that we're making: work is shifting toward information work. You're pretending that the only economy is the economy based around the sale of physical widgets. The new economy is based around the production, processing, management, storage, dissemination, etc of information. It's not about physically building widgets any more, and just because the number of widget-assembly jobs is shrinking doesn't mean that the overall number of jobs is shrinking. The jobs are just becoming more high-skill, and more knowledge-oriented. This trend started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and it started to accelerate at the beginning of the Information Revolution. The masses, in the future, will be information workers. Robots will do the manual labor. The masses need to shift from manual skills toward information skills.
I've worked in the IT and IS fields for a while; wages have plummeted as the markets have grown, outsourcing has run rampant, and so on. Ironically, in IT particularly the natural monopoly is more at home than in the world of widgets. Nobody is going to sell on the auction site with no customers. Nobody wants to be on the social network site with no friends.
However, if we are looking to IT, the model is there as to why the capitalism/socialism hybrid has been successful, yet we're running away from it more and more. Something like the App Store may be a natural monopoly, but developers selling on the App Store are relatively even. Quality CAN stand out, from a large firm or a small firm, or an individual developer.
Still, though, in the long run technology begets more technology, and you can remove the human influence more and more. Look at Watson or Siri or lord knows what else. How long do you perpetuate this whole work = value mentality when all that's really left to put in is creative input?
The fact that wages are dropping for a person with fixed skills in IT is exactly what I'm talking about. It's not good enough to just be in a high-demand industry. You also have to be constantly learning. Learning = Work.
Not really, demand has plummeted as complex tasks have become simpler and simpler and there's more people who can do them capably. You're a web design guy, right? Web design once upon a time required much, much more in terms of coding skills, over time it has become more and more designer oriented.
I do really like the idea that learning = work, and I believe in embracing that, however practically speaking that isn't the case.
Demand for web software development continues to increase proportionally with the demand for web sites, which will continue to increase. What's changing is that developers are able to do more with less because we're making the software more powerful and higher-level. There will always be work for the people who can continuously move up the skill curve. As more and more graphic designers become increasingly dependent on higher-level web frameworks like Rails, they become increasingly dependent on the software developers who can create Rails-compatible software modules for keeping current with the ever-changing ecosystem that web sites live in. People who can create authentication modules that support Google Plus, or who can build features that allow web sites to share things through whatever social network will come along after Google Plus. Every time some new innovation comes along, just take Facebook as a simple example, it creates a wave of job opportunities for people who can learn the new technologies and use them to their advantage. If you try to get your head around the ever-expanding complexity of the Internet and all of the computers and mobile devices that make it up, then it's not hard to see how every new day brings new opportunities, for the people with the right skills. For the people with the ability to learn new skills every single day. That is what "work" means in a knowledge-based economy. Learning = Work.
The top of the skill curve is developing Rails itself... but wait, that's open source... no money in that.
You have a point, but it isn't an endless growth market. Nothing is.
When it comes to buying gadgets, the STEM folks are PART of the masses. You should SEE all the gadgets I own ! I'm a real technology geek, and most technical people are. There is nothing that prevents us from having an economy in which a large number of people DESIGN things they also CONSUME.
So... eventually, you effectively shrink the size of your potential market infinitesimally to however big you can make that PART. It isn't sustainable.
It is definitely the Knows vs. Know-Nots, and that's why I've been repeating that high-paying, high-skill jobs are available in many high-growth industries, for people willing to learn new, marketable skills. The dystopia that Vonnegut presented in Player Piano is our reality now, where the people automating other people out of jobs will always have jobs. Innovation is a recession-proof industry. The demand for innovation actually increases during hard times, when businesses are pressured to do more with fewer people.
Bingo!
In my own field, I have seen Microsoft Word reduce the secretary to engineer ratio by over 10:1 while Power Point completely eliminated our old "tech pubs" department. The drafters have been replaced using CAD, and many of the less complex tasks in design have been automated. On a broader scale, we've replaced operators with computers that answer our phones, toll booth operators with automated "toll passes," grocery check-out clerks with "self-check" stations, and retail store sales clerks with on-line shopping.
On the cutting edge, IBM didn't spend millions making the Jeopardy winning Watson technology to win games. They're marketing it to all the Technical Support companies in India and as a diagnostic aid for doctors. Foxconn, the world's largest manufacturer (who makes all the Apple products), recently announced they plan to automate their manufacturing with robotics. Thus, even the people in India and China who took many of OUR jobs are about to start loosing THEIRS.
All these machines and robots represent "slave labor" to the Capitalists who are becoming remarkably wealthy as a result. Look at the last chart on productivity at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/a_graph_im_trying_to_understan.html and note that wages and productivity started separating right at the time computers and robots entered the "work force." ALso take a look at the chart titled "Average Household Income" at http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph and you'll see the rich are not TAKING wealth from the average household, they are simply getting wealthy WITHOUT them thanks IN PART to their investments in "slave labor" !
These trends do not bode well for labor unless they can elevate their skill levels. Those that lack skills will work in the "service" economy, and thanks to their numbers, they will forever be a COMMODITY traded at lowest cost.
Yes, like it or not, that is absolutely the reality that we live in. Don't hate the player, baby, hate the game. And this is a game that you can't change. Even the 'resource-based communism' Zeitgeist people fantasize about a world where machines do everything, so that people don't have to work. That fantasy is also a dystopia for anybody other than the technologists, just like in Player Piano.
You're actually embracing dystopian life?
Player Piano is only "dystopian" from the point of view of a low-skilled worker. From the point of view of a high-skilled worker who can constantly learn and adapt, it's a little more on the utopian side. This doesn't mean that I don't support "the workers". Part of "work" in an information-based economy is to constantly learn new skills.
Read my comment to Rico above. It isn't sustainable, simply put, because the end result is to evaporate the market you're trying to sell to.
My recruiting tactics are my business. This is a group of over-educated, under-employed people with Macs, iPads, and iPhones. I'm looking for smart and inquisitive people who are motivated to be continuously learning. There is a very good chance that I could find somebody who could be very valuable, who could have an opportunity to participate in the technology boom that they wouldn't have otherwise without the guidance and the co-workers willing to train them. Don't tell me that looking here is hopeless because that doesn't say good things about the people here.
See my post just above yours.
I didn't say it was hopeless, I said it was illegitimate. You know what they say, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Try separating your message, which seems to be "you don't want jobs!!" from your pitch.
Oh, wait, that might disprove or discount your message. We can't have that now, can we?
While you're protesting unemployment, somebody else has contacted me who is working on training themselves for the job that I'm offering. I'm pretty excited about it.