I’d take it a step further if possible and make companies pay for all the impacts of their business model. McDonald’s really is such a shitty company lol. They make money by paying people substantially less than a living wage (which is often made up for by public funds resulting in a situation where their labor costs are effectively subsidized by the taxpayer) producing cheap terrible-for-you food that they sell in vast quantities to the public helping to fuel a public health crisis… which they aren’t helping to pay for at all because their employees are way too poor to pay income taxes.
Basically a McDonalds pays sales tax on the food they sell, property tax on the land they use (often not much!), and pay income tax on what the owner makes from owning the franchise and whatever McDonalds corporate pays out in cap gains + corporate income tax. But all of that is kept pretty low because the whole thing operates on super low margins that are only profitable because they barely pay their labor.
One of the reasons why I’ve got zero issue with a VAT tax is that it would make places like McDonald’s substantially more expensive because they simply don’t have the margin to take the hit. I’m sorry but prices at McDonalds going up 10-15% would be wonderful for society. That would lower demand for something that’s a big negative for healthcare costs, raise government revenue, and with any luck make the whole business model not work. Good fucking riddance.
Some business models are incredibly toxic and it would be great public policy to make them nonviable. Fast food joints are such a thing.
It’s fair to ask that in this context. I make around $175k/year. My average employee makes about $100k/ year. My highest paid makes $160k/year and my lowest paid makes $70k/ year.
I realize I created a bit of a strawman in my op. I don’t see people attacking guys like me who make what I make. But in Canada I’m literally in the top 3%.
I know most of the anti-rich comments are directed at billionaires, and in many cases rightfully so.
I guess I don’t see as much inherent difference between me in the 3% and someone in the 1%. We both are privileged in the power imbalance.
This is the most important point in this argument imo. If your business plan can only succeed if employees are compensated poorly, your business plan is bad and you are a bad businessman, regardless of how much money your business or you yourself make. It doesn’t mean business and businessmen are inherently bad, but this is something seen so often in business that it’s incredibly easy to generalize.
Yeah your business is like mine. Freight brokerage as an investment is kind of shitty. Maybe 15% of the gross profits make it through to the owners of the business if you chisel the shit out of your employees and only pay them 30%. This is in a business with gross profit margins around 15% so if you generate a hundred bucks in revenue the owner of the company sees 2.25 in ebit… and that’s if your front line people aren’t taking more… which they frequently are, since they actually have a ton of leverage. It’s very common for it to be sub 1$ in ebit with real risk of losses in a bad year.
That being said freight brokerage is a great business when you’re the brokerage talent AND you own the business lol. You’re keeping more like 45% of the gross profit
Also the median freight brokerage employee makes >50k so I feel exactly zero guilt about being an employer when I am one.
You’re doing the thing skydiver does when she claims that she, as a $200 Pete donor, is what the left complains about when they talk about money in politics.
You’re not the problem, and the difference between you and someone who makes 10x what you make is, well, a factor of 10. I’m not upset at someone in your position because you provide a good living to your employees and you don’t make so much money that you no longer have a utility for it. With that said if you took the position that, for example, a law requiring you to provide additional benefits to your employees that would reduce your take home from 175k to 150k was harmful to business and shouldn’t be implemented, well that would suck. But it seems clear that’s not where you’re coming from.
These things are complicated. It is not easy to draw a line at which it’s clear someone has too much money. That is why people always point out billionaires because that is an easy line. The difficult politics comes when you are forced to look at the less clear example.
Ok but like this conversation might be relevant if society agreed to start confiscating wealth from Billionaires or half-Billionaires and now we were talking about how much further to go. As it is, the rich (actual rich, not modest small business owner rich) are not demonized nearly enough.
clovis, I’m starting to wonder if maybe this thread is actually an insecure bougie humble brag. Like you’re not really worried that I’ll come up there and poke you in the butt with a pitchfork, rather you’re worried that nobody would bother.
I often find myself running afoul of others on left around the same general theme. I worry a lot about the boundary conditions. The edges. Where do we put the bumpers?
I can understand why this might seem misguided to those thinking “the system is so fucked. Let’s explode it and worry about the bumpers later”.
I’m self-reflective enough to realize this tendency likely comes from my privilege.
I do however, honestly find the difficult and grey area discussions more interesting so I tend to focus on them.
This probably does lead me to tolerate the current system more than I maybe should.
We are all culpable. It’s easy to yell about billionaires and ignore that every person on this forum is hugely privileged and doing better than the vast majority of humanity.
The difficult question is where to draw the line.
Cat made a good point that maybe we focus on the obvious issue, billionaires first, and worry about the edge cases later.
Fair enough which is why I asked the question. This thread assumes capitalism is the economic structure. Debates about the value of capitalism are interesting but maybe for a different thread.
I’m arguing everyone on this forum is doing far better than the average person on earth right now. To be fair, maybe I’m wrong and someone here is doing worse but I doubt it.
I also assume we were all lucky enough to be born into a generally free democratic country with access to healthcare, clean water etc.
