Tax breaks meant to make jobs? New report finds that they're destroyed

problem to that is that there's a very simple workaround that is still used: "Bonuses." If the proper bill included a provision to include all income from the company including stock derivatives and bonuses awarded by the board of directors.

Of course, there's still a workaround via making a second company, "buying" things from it, and then using that to give massive bonuses to the CEO.

Bonuses would be included in my scheme. Companies would also be forbidden from playing "who buys what from whom" games to hide real compensation.

edited 11th Oct '11 7:29:36 PM by Fighteer

It would probably end up being a very complex, easily-circumvented, and difficult-to-enforce law, but I guess it's better than just leaving the mess alone...

Don't go after how much money a CEO makes, go after that icnome with tax and spend it in education and infrastrcture.

If they're spending less on the fools in upper management, they have money to spend on other things, since corporations don't sit on money if they can help it, they invest it in things.

At the very least, it's an incentive to raise low-level wages.

It seems a little forced to me. Especailly that even with $10 minimum wage the CEO of a company, if it's at 10.000% more then he can only make $100,000, which I think is crazy small considering his position.

I love how I can sound very different politically depending on who I'm talking to.

Well, if they want to pay people at the bottom $10 an hour, good for them, that's what they think that job is worth. They just can't pay their top guys a shitton, then.

So, they can pay the guy at the bottom more, or pay the people at the top less. Either/or.

Teens are paid minimum wage. Unless you sincerely believe that they should make $15 an hour the first day of the job, then the fixed salary rule sort of betrays the goal.

I could accept making an exception for teens and limiting underaged labor so they don't cicumvent it that way.

Teens don't need a living wage.

When, then, do you draw the line, if you make that exception. Do you then say that adults who still live with their parents 'don't need a living wage' because they're not on their own? Do you say that people in multiple-income households 'don't need a living wage' because together, they earn a 'living wage'?

I'm not disagreeing, but I fee it necessary to play devil's advocate so we can at least address this concern.

I wouldn't object to expanding the range for certain very specific criteria. However, our overall objective should be to make sure that working an FTE (full-time equivalent) job that is not in a "teen job" or "retirement job" should pay a living wage.

Unfortunately, I do think that adjusting everything to crate a "living wage" would raise consume rprices as companies realize they can charge more.

Dependents don't need a living wage. How does that work?

A multiple-income house should be middle class, ideally, so each independent earner should have an individual living wage.

I like the idea of raising minimum wage a lot and lowering hour allowances by a comparable (but not quite equal) amount...

Anyone working any sort of minimum wage job is and should not be middle class.

edited 11th Oct '11 8:20:19 PM by Erock

I suppose that employers could apply for minimum wage exemptions on the basis of hiring a substantial number of transient high school or college-age employees, but they should be prepared to back that up with records.

Conversely, if their business model relies on such employees, then maybe they shouldn't be dumping millions on their executives.

edited 11th Oct '11 8:26:28 PM by Fighteer

And then deseperate adults lose their jobs every summer.

If we're playing that game, then employers who dump adult wage positions in favor of "teen labor" would get their exemptions rejected and/or fines levied.

The real challenge isn't the details of the legislation but a Congress with the balls to enact and enforce it.

Incidentally, if you outsource your jobs to a Chinese factory who pays their employees $1/hour, then your execs can't make more than $20/hour or you pay a tax penalty. That would definitely put a crimp on offshoring.

edited 11th Oct '11 8:29:59 PM by Fighteer

Then how the hell do you differentiate? And how do you prevent lobbyists from screwing with those exemtions?

edited 11th Oct '11 8:29:35 PM by Erock

I'm not entirely sure that it's necessary to differentiate, but assuming that it is, businesses could demonstrate that certain positions are "unskilled" — that is, not requiring even a high school equivalent education. Those positions would be allowed to, say, double the wage gap. We can get a lawyer to figure out the exact terminology, which I am not.

Is this sort of thng already done in tax filings?

Thread Hop

Tax cuts theoretically work when capital is low, as noted before. What is happening with the failure of tax cuts isn't as much as the theory is bunk than it is employing the theory incorrectly. Knowing that tax cuts only work with low capital entities, politicians then give tax cuts to entities with high capital... weird.

Corporations are simply machines that respond to incentives. The problem isn't that they are evil, the problem is that the government keeps giving them incentives to be irresponsible. Artificially low credit rates created by the Federal Reserve incentivised toxic CD Os and in general, selling investments like crazy, a major contributor to the recent crisis. The bailouts encouraged corporations to take idiotically insane gambles. And so forth.

When you think about it, as much of an evil greed is, it has marked the upward spiral of mankind. Ford revolutionized the automobile industry because he wanted to increase profits. Alexander Graham Bell created the light bulb to patent it and profit from it. What got the US into this mess is exactly the same thing that pushed it to become a superpower.

In reality, the best way to counter the corporate threat is to make the people their best interest. How to do that, I'm not particularly sure. Of course, you can always ban corporations entirely and replace them with limited liability partnerships, a sort of hybrid of general partnerships and corporations.

This issue isn't simple. You can't completely take the corporation's side, and you can't completely take the opposing side either. If all the largest corporations move out of the US, it will spark a recession, and people will starve. What the US needs is a complete separation between Economy and State (sort of like the separation between church and state), replace the Federal reserve with a Friedmanite fixed growth system so that neither State nor Corporations can irresponsibly print money, set a flat tax (Estonia has a flat tax but so far, no wide gulf between the rich and middle class yet, at least compared to the US), and make any changes impossible. Having the government and the private sector mind their own business is the best policy, at least in my opinion.

Tax the hell out of capital gains and relax taxes on dividends. Put the emphasis on long term stability over short term growth.

Excuse me for sounding darwinist, but the minimum wage law is entirely stupid.

If a job requires skills only worth $5 an hour, why the hell should the worker be paid $20 an hour? the $15 dollars extra paid is nothing more than forced charity. If the profit margins of a business is less than 25% with worker working for $5 an hour, how the hell is said business going to survive paying their workers $20 an hour? The minimum wage law encourages corporations to offshore their workers, and it practically destroys any chance the uneducated impoverished is supposed to earn a wage.

Let's say I own a business employing people for $5 an hour to run on treadmills and generate electricity (let's ignore the fact that running on the treadmill will consume more energy than it generates electricity), and I have a profit margin of 25%. Suddenly, I have to quadruple my employees' salary, what will happen to my business? There are already thousands of small businesses desperately trying to stay afloat and paying their workers slightly above minimum wage, and now you're gonna double the damn minimum wage? That will practically eliminate all competition for corporations and larger businesses, since they usually pay their employees far above minimum wage anyway.

Low-paying jobs are worthless, and sweatshops must be destroyed at all costs. If the small businesses everybody loves for some reason can only sustain themselves through paying crap wages, they deserve to become extinct.

edited 12th Oct '11 4:14:55 AM by SavageHeathen

You might want to ask your money back from whoever taught you economics and darwinism. Minimum wage means higher standard of living. Higher standard of living means more demand for luxury goods. More demand for luxury goods means more money for whoever produces such goods.

You will be paying your employees more, yes. But most of that money will be spend on your products anyway.

edited 12th Oct '11 4:23:44 AM by Kayeka