I recognize what taxes pay for and I recognize even I get something from them. I dont mind that I live in one of the most taxed countries in the world because I'm not afraid of getting mugged every day, see no trash on the streets, have access to free healthcare and schools etc. Yeah, sure, the state is not an efficient way of doing things and it could be better but I also recognize that not everything is perfect. I don't see the reason to completely gut the state, have no taxes and hope a for profit, privatized, system will be better just because the state is inefficient or theres some corruption. Not a good enough reason imo. I'd think differently if the problems were more dire, but they just arent. Not here at least.
Profit? What does that get me? Companies find ways to evade paying taxes on them, then invest into ventures that extract more money from its populace (like real-estate). I recognize profit is kind of the driving force of the economy... I mean money needs to flow to other companies in form of investments which creates jobs but this isn't strictly a necessity. More often than not, its just hoarded by the top class. More often than not, its just theft. Profit is theft.
In a company you always have people that don't generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
The green part should still be smaller. However you can seize that part by going freelance.
That's not what Proffitt is.
I don‘t know where to start. Everything wrong :(
Personally, I've been trying to reduce both the green and the red to make my yellow bigger. This is possible because in my country, I can pay myself a moderate salary and still get health insurance. Then eventually I can pay myself dividends on the last year's profit when doing the annual financial report, and I can buy some things as business expenses (which makes them cost me about 60% less of my time compared to buying them as a private individual from post-tax income).
On the green front, I'm reducing it by 1) charging quite a bit of money for an hour of my time, definitely more than I got paid as a full-time employee 2) also having some foreign contracts where I can charge even more money and as a bonus, bring more money into my country
Now since all this still leaves me SIGNIFICANTLY less well-off than a lot of people who most certainly don't work 10, 100 or 100000 times harder than I do, this has actually turned me even more against capitalism than ever before (despite the fact that I literally make more money than I ever have before). I'm doing moderate tax optimization, about as much as I can do while still considering it ethical, work 200+ hours a month, and at the end of the day, while I might retire a millionaire, I'll never make it to a hundred million. Even 10 million is only possible with lucky breaks in investments.
How does it scale to include the whole working class?
It doesn't. The rest of the working class is even more screwed. That's why being just slightly more well off at the cost of a lot more work is making me hate the economic system even more.
Without owning my own company, I had an effective tax rate of about 50% on my income before you even consider that nearly all goods and services also have 22% VAT and my income was capped by my salary as I worked full time. Now I'm paying about 30% effectively and my income potential itself is higher. But you look at the people who own companies where their source of income isn't their own labor and they pay way less tax (company lambo, completely tax-free daily allowance on "business trips", etc) while earning at least 10x more than I do... And that's before you get to the oligarch class, people earning 100000x what I do, maybe 1000000x. Luckily we don't have many billionaires in my country, maybe none? But we certainly have too many millionaires and a lot of them got wealthy off the privatization of industries in the 90s.
My father feels that it is injust to say that because
- They hired you
- You need the job
- How would they (the company) make any money if they gave the workers whatever wage they wanted
his response to people asking for better wages actively and talking about their value being stolen is 'why did you look/choose this job'
his idea of an union is essentially a single legal union, which can only strike when in agreement with the company (???)
and he is a landlord and was the factory manager, and would likely think differently if he didn't get the benefit of rent money from both the apartments and a shop downtown
his idea of an union is essentially a single legal union, which can only strike when in agreement with the company (???)
Seconded. ???
this is oversimplified and doesn't include taxes on those profits among other things.
the example is disingenuous and was made to manufacture an emotional response.
taxation without representation is worse than loss of potential individual profits and generally leads to fascist ideologies circumventing socioeconomic protections put in place by proletariat supporting leadership.
at the core, the problem isn't your lack of profits, rather the erosion of democracy and rise of fascism.
"taxation without representation is worse than loss of potential individual profits" --- no it aint
This is actually the least emotional way to put it. If you want compilcated maybe Lemmy is the wrong place to look for it? And most of all profit is profit, you don't have individual and non-individual. What is important is that we don't get how much is justified to be booked on the owners' accounts. Speaking of representaion. Profit is after wages, after social, and often not taxed. The only way to speak of profit going to labour is whe the own the means of production. Fascism doesn't get in the way of profits, hence the capitalist support for it.
For an honest answer, it's because the green circle is too abstract. The others are numbers everyone sees on their paycheck.
If you work for a publicly traded company and wish to become radicalized, you can divide the year's profits (plus money wasted on stock buybacks) by the number of employees to roughly estimate your personal green circle.
You might even add the CEO's compensation to the numerator. I hear LLMs are ready for prime time.
I wonder if that's intentional...
Its not. How would a workers actual real productivity be in terms of market value?
If I designed the graphics for some part of your website, how much did my graphic impact the profits of the company? How would you go about figuring out how the HR department brings in sales? Add up all the costs of lawsuits you imagine might have happened without them?
Between 1995 and 2021, on average, US companies spent 78 percent of their net income on paying shareholders https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-strategy-and-corporate-finance-blog/share-repurchases-still-dont-prop-up-value
Makes sense, since net income is what's leftover after costs (including wages), and taxes?
Yellow vs green circle proportions are the results of class struggle
The same reason people running the company are trying to squish the yellow circle as much as possible.
But building a good community through the funding of public services via taxation is a moral/ethical good.
Striving to reduce labor costs to enrich yourself, especially to the detriment of that labor and to an excessive degree of wealth for yourself, is a moral/ethical evil.
Taxation, when run by and for the people who generate it, is a good thing that people should strive to support. It's a misunderstanding to not view taxation in a well working system (examining individual systems, not the whole in some binary fashion) as a cost efficiency for things you already want - childcare, education, healthcare, public transportation (busses, trams/railcars, trains, bicycle infrastructure), insurance, energy, food, research, protection, charity, infrastructure, etc.
This is where the argument always gets muddy. The whole point of government and taxes is that we all chip in to pay for things that benefit everyone, and the government administers it. In the US, especially now, this system has become so perverted that the job of the government has become funneling all that money to the richest people while convincing the general population that what's happening is to their benefit.
noice 👏
When I actually looked at what was sucking up a third off my paycheck taxes was actually a fairly small portion. Most of it was paying united Healthcare to make me switch psychiatrists which I had to do twice because the first one (who I had to try first) was a telepsychiatrist who could immediately tell that I can't be managed that way. Whoever is going to claim responsibility for this clusterfuck needs to see me in person at least once a year plus a few times more I look particularly shitty. I could have told them that without having to risk somebody who doesn't know me getting me committed... twice in under a month!
