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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
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.
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Dude! You said I don't have an answer to inequality. I do! If inequality is really important, maybe you have to surrender something else you care about to solve it. It is true that I don't have a Magical Unicorn that will solve the country's problems without making anyone unhappy.
If rich businesses and people leave, won't that help address inequality? (And where are they going to go? Free-market bastions like Singapore and Somalia?)
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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.
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It's odd how quickly you went from saying that inequality is a problem to falling into the conservative trap of complaining that the government doesn't do things well. If you want to address inequality, make the rich pay for things that benefit other people. If you increase taxes on the rich and use that money to expand SSDI, or hire teachers, or build transit that everyone uses, you have addressed inequality.
