P@triot
Diamond Member
- Thread starter
- #101
The bottom use to make higher wages/benefits - and they use to pay a lot more taxes.
But starting in 1980 - in response to the stagflation of the late 70s - our politicians decided that the owners of Capital required lower labor costs in order to jumpstart investment and resurrect the economic growth of the postwar years. So we aggressively shrank unionization and liberalized trade so that our capitalists could take advantage of cheap foreign labor. After 30 years or lowering labor costs, the average wage at the bottom went from over 20$/hr to less than $10.
The GM Job model - with high wages, great benefits and a substantial tax burden - has been replaced by the Walmart job model where workers make less than 20K/yr and have little to zero benefits, and no surplus to tax. Meanwhile, pay at the top has exploded, with the owners of Capital realizing all the gains from cutting labor costs. So now you have the Walton's making 8 billion, while their workers barely make enough to pay rent.
In other words, if you're going to give your working class sub-poverty wages and make them compete with sweatshop-nations for jobs, than those very same workers are not going to be a revenue source. You can't squeeze water from a stone.
Meaning: if you make all the surplus, than you will pay most of the taxes.
Or so we thought, right? Reagan lowered taxes on the wealthy while at the same time passing labor and trade policies which vastly increased their share of the pie. This lead to our ever increasing structural deficits, which are used as a justification to further cut services to the working poor, thus making it even harder for them to pay taxes. But it gets worse. With the reduction of capital gains taxes to far less than the tax on income, many wealthy folks end up paying a lower rate than the non-wealthy.
Your tax chart is exactly what you'd expect to see if we lived in a world of such vast wealth disparity, protected by government policy, molded by lobbying pressure. Reagan's dream of cheap labor for corporations has produced a class of American serfs who can't survive without government assistance. And now you want these people to pay taxes with money they don't have so you can further lower the rates of folks who make all the money?
Why not give the worker more skin in the game? Maybe we should restore livable wages by preventing our capitalists form accessing sweatshop labor in freedom-hating nations. Why should Walmart's greatest partner be Communist China? The government is always intervening in the market for the capitalist, not only with patent protection but with a whole range of anti-competitive policies. For instance, we have regulations that prevent consumers from buying ultra cheap foreign drugs (which gives our pharmaceuticals a virtual domestic monopoly and allows them to rape consumers). Why not restore some balance and have government serve all Americans rather than just the corporations and wealthy individuals who fund their elections?
The wealthy have turned Washington into a subsidy and bailout machine. Washington is where business goes to purchase monopoly control over the domestic economy. Study the 2003 Republican Drug Bill to see who owns Washington, and who Washington serves.
The trend toward ever cheaper labor has brought great wealth to our capitalists, but it vastly undercuts the ability of our newly created class of wage serfs to become a revenue source.
You mean the same job model which caused GM to go bankrupt...
![lmao :lmao: :lmao:](/styles/smilies/lmao.gif)