[quote=no_such_reality]CAR, if you haven’t seen any ideas from the capital side, you haven’t been reading.
There aren’t any easy solutions. As people have commented previously, the solutions range everywhere from tightening the safety net to restrict it to real need to structuring it to push people back into employment, to cracking down on employers and shutting the abused pipelines of illegal labor and H1B indentured servitude. Frankly, IMHO, the company in the original story with the 100s of illegal labor a few years ago SHOULD have had C-level executives wearing orange jumpsuits and spending time in prison.
Education is a major issue. I think we need more trade schools and apprenticeship programs. Our education is geared to pushing people into college and nothing else, it’s failing a large portion of the students.
I like the idea of a living wage, not because the worker is doing something that earns it, but because the citizens deserve not to have companies employing people that need government aid for the basics.
I also favor far more radical solutions such as changing the employment law so that if you make under $150K OR you do not have more than 3 direct report employees that you have hire/fire over you cannot be a salaried employee.
Similarly, I favor a change to the over time rules, overtime is 3x for companies employing more than 5 people. If a company provides health care to any employee, they need to provide it to all employees regardless if they work 1 hour or 40+.
Finally, I favor removal of the income tax and a replacement with a Federal Asset Tax and Sales Tax of 3%. The asset tax would apply to all financial instruments and holdings and real property on a quarterly basis. The sales tax would be on all retail/wholesale sold items.[/quote]
I agree with most of your points, and would argue that your suggestions are even more pro-labor than mine. We disagree on the following two points:
1. the asset tax
2. the desire to tighten up the safety net and push more people into employment
…
As for the asset tax, if we tax capital gains and all types of income at the same (or higher???) progressive rates as earned income, it would not only be fairer, but it would help prevent the massive build-up of capital/assets in too few hands in the first place. The reason capital concentrates so much is because taxes for capital are so low, and once you control a certain amount of money/power, it’s much easier to game the system and attain more money/power. My family has earned income, but we’ve also had investment income and inherited wealth. I can assure you that there is NOTHING fair or right or “productive” about our current tax laws, and I’m speaking from direct experience. Some of the tax laws are truly jaw-dropping as far as how inequitable they are. Joe Sixpack, the worker, doesn’t stand a chance.
Regarding the desire to tighten up the safety net, or push people into employment, that’s exactly the problem. We suffer from an over-capacity of workers, not a lack of them. We have too many people and too few jobs, which is why wages/benefits are going down for most workers in developed nations.
So, the questions remain: What do we do with all of the people who have been displaced by Third World workers and machines? How do we allocate resources and control over capital in a world where we only need a few people to oversee the machines and cheap overseas labor? These are the questions that the capital side has not answered (and no, saying that the masses will have to “adapt or die” is not a realistic answer…the masses will not simply lie down and die just because their masters prefer it that way).
