Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
That's easy. Raise taxes on the rich and use the proceeds to do things that benefit the poor and middle class. Public schools. Health insurance. The safety net. Transit. National parks. Make it easier to unionize. Enforce the antitrust laws. Enforce consumer protection laws.
Will speak to the rest tomorrow.
|
Taxes will not get you there (an Eisenhower era rate schedule would only dent entitlements). It’s a start, true, but also, most importantly, taxes do not create jobs. And they cause businesses and people to leave.
Public schools are a good idea generally, true. More jobs, higher pay for good educators. Agreed.
Transit is a great idea for environmental reasons, but whatever # of jobs it creates it eliminates elsewhere.
Unionization is a good idea all around. Agreed. Creates jobs, and higher paying ones than non-union.
The safety net? That’s a humane goal, and it has a multiplier, but not much of one.
National parks don’t create many jobs.
Agreed on enforcing antitrust... and readjusting priorities away from merely benefit to consumers.
I’m leery on consumer protection. Too much of it can make it difficult to lend to consumers, which harms them. But things like payday lending should be more vigorously policed.
But still, we come to this issue... To truly tackle inequality, we need to create a whole lot of decent paying jobs for lower skilled workers and workers being rendered obsolete. I hear some of that in what you advocate, but I think you’d only dent that problem.
Henry Blodget offered a good idea: Redefine corporations as having a duty not only to shareholders and customers, but also to workers. Rather than run everything by MBA, focusing on efficiency and labor cost avoidance/reduction, once more start viewing workers as stakeholders, as armies of little purchasers each with unique little multiplier impacts.
I know, pie in the sky. But that thinking really does need to occur. Our current efficiency fixation, viewing labor as a lamentable cost, is a race to the bottom.
