… and for those who are completely missing my point:
I am not advocating that we go out and shoot all business owners. I am not a Bolshevik. I understand they have their role in a capitalist system, and that capitalism is the least bad system we have.
What pisses me off to no end is this retarded philosophy that they are MORE important than workers and they actually are worth the orders of magnitude more that they earn in comparison to the people that work for them.
I read conservatives complaining about all the lazy people who live on Social Security, and can only but laugh at the hypocrisy.
About 90% of my net income comes from capital gains and dividends. What did I do to make so much money? I take calculated risks. I was fortunate enough to be able to go to college, get educated, and learn how the market works. I was also fortunate enough to find and marry a beautiful, intelligent lady who also went to college and helps me with statistical models and allows us to have hugely favorable risk-reward ratios.
That 90% of my income uses up about 1 hour of my day. I pay 15% tax on the gross.
I could just sit back, work 5 hours a week, and retain 90% of my net income – again, paying only 15% of tax.
It is my LIBERAL conscience that prevents me from doing so. It is my liberal conscience that makes me want to help others and takes me out of bed each morning, and work 10 to 12 hours a day on creating classes, delivering them, doing research and writing papers.
… and pay twice as much tax on that work.
Anyone else see a problem with that?
Do you really think that the time I spend playing in the stock, options and futures market is worth 100x more (per hour) than my work as a professor, and that in fact should be taxed less?
The conservative rationale is that reducing taxes gives people an incentive to invest more.
That is a profoundly retarded rationale.
The only thing that reducing taxes does long term is to drive up inflation Nothing more, nothing less. My capital gains income almost doubled after Bush reduced taxes the first time. Did I increase my investments because of that? No. I just sat back and got a “bonus” anyway, without changing anything. I didn?t have to.
If I had made the mistake of increasing my investments, that would help drive up inflation further – if you don’t understand why, try using your brain and think what happens a while after a bunch of money suddenly shows up in the economy without an increase in (worker) productivity. That’s right: inflation.
Clearly, Bush slept through Econ-101, but apparently so did everybody that voted for him.
The only safe way to grow an economy, without fear of inflation, is to increase productivity. Productivity depends, mostly, on worker output. And how do you increase worker output in a developed country? You keep the best and brightest around. You treat them well. You keep them happy. You give them benefits, flexible work hours, and all kinds of lifestyle improvements – they will respond back with commitment and a sense of duty to the company, which translates into increased productivity.
Because if you don’t, they will move elsewhere – and moving to other companies costs everybody a boatload of money. On high-expertise jobs (the ones that allow us to compete with the likes of China), having a worker change companies costs a lot of wasted time (ramping up a replacement in the old company, and ramping up the new hire in the new company), and, hence, productivity. So employee retention is critical for the health of our economy.
This is not China, where you can keep people working 14 hours a week under the promise of a new TV for the family.
We need to treat our working force with ALL the respect they deserve.
That’s my point.
