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- Hacker News
- Large part of the reason is stock compensation and pass thru
https://everywheremillionaire.substack.com/p/why-the-labor-s...
https://everywheremillionaire.substack.com/p/another-reason-...
by sershe - Automation can’t be taxed. Servers consuming electricity in data centers to generate what the next ad someone will click isn’t the same as paying employee salary. It’s not taxed.
So Trump cuts tax on the rich, and the rich cut out human workers or depress their pay.
The debt will have to be reckoned with if the govt ain’t getting their share to build infrastructure.
On the other hand US has the highest participation of people who own stock.
Unlike China, where the median Chinese doesn’t benefit from growth of state run companies.
by nojvek - It can change if we create another currency that you have to do labor to get, but that necessitates restrictions on currency trade, which is communism, so it won't happen (and that's good because if communism did happen it would kill 100 million)by inigyou
- > Automation can’t be taxed.
Sure it can. Take shares in companies. Put them into a sovereign wealth fund.
by triceratops - The participation rate in the stock market may be high, but the ownership rate is effectively the top 10% own the entire market.by conception
- > Automation can’t be taxed
Of course it can. Like, for AI, put a surtax on wattage consumed and use it to extend and expand unemployment insurance.
- Corporate taxes can tax corporate revenue or profits. Stock buybacks and dividends can be regulated or outlawed. If we don't want to force corporations to pay with more equality across ranks, we can take larger portions of revenue or profit and then fund social safety nets and welfare that are targeted at those that corporations choose not to give raises to.
There are plenty of systems answers, power just doesn't care, and neither do voter bases.
by chradams - Are corporate profits actually at a peak, or just their percentage share of national profit (per the article)? Not in denial about the wealth gap, just wondering where profit growth is coming from.by kerblang
- Corporate profits are an exact mirror image of the US deficit and household debt: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-content/uploads/comment/mc25...
- free w/ signup, but here's the archive anyhow: https://archive.is/wU0s9
Pretty impressive long-term charts, and dramatic surge in the last years. Of course there are lot of other relevant details (e.g. more people own capital, and this is pre-tax numbers). But overall this seems pretty consistent with the story Piketty tells in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
by marojejian - Looking at the relative sizes of the dotcom crash, '08 financial crisis and covid is interesting...by raffraffraff
- For us banned from archive.is: https://unwall.app/www.ft.com/content/6f3ada65-c56c-499c-8eb...by jampekka