I want to earn enough to live, and not work more than is required for that.
Management couldn’t fathom this at my first job. They’d tell us that everyone couldn’t be CEO but there were still great careers, and they didn’t understand when we asked about jobs where we wouldn’t climb the ladder necessarily, just do meaningful work.
“We care about you until you start underperforming during a global pandemic because of mental health. Then fuck you”
It’s easy to tell when a company actually is serious about caring about employees. Our executives took $0 bonuses last year so employees could have normal bonuses, and they bought everyone a free turkey for Thanksgiving. Our financials aren’t the best right now, but we still have a 401k match and all our benefits, and they’ve frozen hiring so they don’t have to do layoffs. Our CEO chats with us weekly and takes questions, and he tells us to not worry about the stock price. We do good work, and success will follow, he says.
Anecdotally, I had a serious health issue at the beginning of this year, and my boss told me to take off all the time I needed. I’m still on leave through the rest of the month, no questions asked. My previous company had people like that, but they weren’t supported by HR policies.
I’m still very wary however, because it doesn’t take long at all to get screwed over.
When you say continuous, do you mean the tax rates? I assume so, because those are discrete numbers. You’re basically saying then what whatever the last bracket is, it needs to scale from 35% (in this example) to 100% at a certain income?
I don’t dislike the idea necessarily, but I think the problem with the wealthy not paying enough in taxes isn’t the highest rate, but what is taxed and how. Selling stock for instance is taxed at a lower rate than income, so we’d need to add a stipulation that if you make more than X, it’s taxed as if it’s normal income. (You’d have to make some exceptions for retiring people but that’s easy enough)
The Inflation Reduction Act had an idea that I think is worth pursuing, or at least calculating how it would go for the rich. Companies making a certain amount of profit in a tax year have to pay some % (maybe 20?) if that’ll be higher than their taxes calculated normally. It stops the loophole that lets corporations get away with paying no taxes. If we did that for rich people, I wonder how it would go. My gut instinct is that it would actually help a lot.
Edit: I just described Alternate Minimum Tax, which is a thing already. We’d just need to close loopholes around it by not letting anyone claim a deduction on it.
There is – the income bracket isn’t what all your money is taxed at. It’s a graduated scale. I’m going to make up numbers here just for an example.
I make $125,000. The first $5000 has no tax on it. The next $20000 are taxed at 5%. The next $25,000 are 10%. The next $30,000 is taxed at 15%. The next $30000 is taxed at 20%. And the last $15,000 are taxed at 35%.
So my total tax is 20000(0.05) + 25000(0.1) + 30000(0.15) + 30000(0.2) + 15000(0.35) = $19,250. My effective tax is 15.4%, even though I’m taxed higher than that on $45000 of my $125000.
It’s a piecewise function basically. And it works really well here because you start getting into very discretionary spending when it gets high, you’re not buying the essentials. You could have a bracket that has 75% tax on everything above a million for instance, and poorer people would be completely unaffected. This is why the myth of “if I get a raise I’ll be in a higher bracket and pay more in taxes” is incorrect.
I see it as part of the contract between the government and the people. All citizens are asked to help plant trees they won’t get to enjoy the shade of.
Your point is completely moot unless they talk like this at work, and you’d be surprised how well the angriest and unhappiest employees can fake everything being okay. It’s an expectation when you’re hired after all – do whatever management says with a smile. Well, you’ll get a smile, but you aren’t going to control the thoughts behind it.
Besides, I don’t terribly like the idea of being paid to comply and fall in line like a good little drone. I value my self worth and dignity at better than a +25% raise. You should too.
Otherwise, I’ll give you +27% to apologize to everyone you’ve insulted and then put a sock in it.
I don’t think that would work for most companies. The education demands at this point make it impossible to get all the knowledge worker/white collar jobs you need from a 15 mile radius, unless you’re in the middle of a city. They’ll be able to hire exclusively local for their blue collar positions – but they already do that anyway. Companies would not pay thousands for relocation from far away states if they could fill the position easily locally.
I think the workers, at least white collar, really hold the cards here.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that they don’t have a unique skillset. You’re right that someone does need to delegate, organize, and decide, but the ability to do so isn’t special at all. You could probably put any given technical worker in that position and they’d do just fine too.
Experience of course is what really shines here, but the problem is the same as politics. They may have more experience, but the decisions they’re making aren’t for everyone’s best interest. They’re biased towards the newer, richer friends.
This experience vs corruption duality is tough. It’s also there when you have the government making policy. The experts you want to consult on how X is made and what regulations there need to be are those who are experiences in making X – but those same groups also want money and clout, and will try to get that into the regulations. I’m not sure what a good solution is.
It’s ironic, they’re the one position that I think at most companies provides no value at all. They think they’ll be the ruling class in an apocalypse, but they don’t realize that they have no marketable skills whatsoever.