Well, in normal times, financial companies don't just sit on cash. They make money by lending it out. In the last decade, I got a bit confused about whether the investment banks are actually sitting on idle assets or whether this was just a bookkeeping illusion (moving money from a Treasury account to a Fed account which somehow makes the bank's balance sheet better.) But let's put that aside for a moment.
How much cash a company has matters less than I used to think. If a company has "cash", it's not really a huge room filled with dollar bills. There are no Scrooge McDucks. That money is being used for something. Today they've got it parked in a bank and (in normal times, see above) the bank will use that to lend to other people who do stuff with it. Tomorrow they could build a building, give it to the US Treasury, or give it to shareholders, who will turn around and also use it for something. So for the economy as a whole, that money is never idle, it's always in motion. Whether Apple, Microsoft, or Google invest it directly, give it to their shareholders, or leave it in a bank to be lent out and used by someone else kinda doesn't matter.
As a result, all we're really discussing is who gets to do the investing, not whether the investment actually happens.
Thanks for doing the research for me. Bill Gates is probably one of the few there where as far back as I can find, the ancestors appeared to be wealthy, though not super wealthy.
You're welcome.
Don't give the Koch's a pass either. Their dad was definitely really wealthy when he passed the company to his sons. The company was and is private so it's hard to get number. The little data i found indicates it was worth a few billion dollars. But even starting on third base, they seem historically unusual in that they took a huge fortune and made it humongous. My understanding is most scions don't manage a company as well as their parent. So, they definitely didn't start from nothing but they also didn't just sit on their inherited wealth.
No sarcasm. I believe you're right, we can consider entertainers enormously productive because they produce a huge amount of value in a short period of time.
The problem, in that analogy, is the vast numbers of people who were born far outside the ballpark, with no instruction on how to even get inside. These are the people who not only grew up on welfare, but they grew up in broken homes with no education on the value of hard work.
Even worse, they were born outside of the first world. I have to remind myself every day that being born in a not-so-wealthy household in Massachusetts put me head and shoulders over someone in a tin shack in Africa. Am I privileged? I was born in America, hell yes I am.
Thing is, we're getting too focused on the uber-rich. Anyone on the Fortune 400 list is truly exceptional. They won the one-in-20-million lottery. Yay for them but that's not anything anyone should count on.
Closer to home, and I only have only seen US numbers, the chances of moving up in income quintiles is really good. Vast numbers of people are born in the bottom 20% and move to the fourth quintile. Even more move from fourth to third. If you are born in the third quintile (40% to 60%), it's kind a of a crap shoot where you'll peak: it could be third, second, or first. And it turns out there's tons of churn: people in one quintile one year don't stay there, especially at the top. People at the top tend to be there because of some one-time event, like selling their family home and downsizing.
I agree, poverty is a terrible thing. I don't like to know people are living really meager lives. But I have to remember we as a species are much richer now than we've ever been, by a huge amount. Global dire poverty numbers are plummeting, both in percentages and absolute numbers. We're making progress and at the fastest rate ever. Don't let the envious, cynics, and doomsayers get you down, things truly are getting better, fast, for virtually everyone.
List me out the top 10 richest people in the world and tell me they inherited that wealth.
OK. From the Fortune 400 list of Richest Americans (I don't have a global list):
1. Bill Gates: earned (from a well-to-do but not crazy rich start.)
2. Jeff Bezos: earned.
3. Warren Buffett: earned
4. Mark Zuckerberg: earned
5. Larry Ellison: earned
6. Michael Bloomberg: earned, also from a wealthy family I believe but not multi-billionares.
7. Charles Koch: Near as I can tell, inherited a company worth a few billion, multiplied it by 10x.
8. David Koch: Ditto
9. Larry Page: earned
10. Sergey Brin: earned
11: Jim Walton: Inherited! We have a winner at #11!
We have some clear tech winners. They might have started in upper middle class families but nothing even close to what they're worth now. The Koch brothers are interesting. They got a really good start from their dad. As near as I can tell, Koch Industries was worth a few billion in 1970 when they bought out their other brothers. Since then the company has grown by something like 10x to 100x. I'd say they didn't inherit most of their wealth.
Jim Walton, at #11, seems to be the first of the stereotypical idle rich. I have no idea how he spends his time and what he does with his money. He may still be working at WalMart, I don't know. But given his net worth ($35 billion), I believe he inherited most of it from his dad, Sam Walton. Note, Sam was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth so if we go back two generations, there's not a lot of wealth there.
At a concert, 30,000 people buy tickets to see a single entertainer. It's a good show and the fans leave happy. Who is "getting screwed" when the entertainer gets 6 figures for a few hours work?
A few hours work and thousands of hours preparing. Probably tens of thousands. And a ton of natural skill, plus a dollop of really good luck.
It's tempting to look at a pop star and say "I could do that." History shows you probably can't. Even with skill and preparation, it's still an enormous risk to try to make a living as an entertainer.
I'm tempted to write "they deserve to be compensated for the risk." I don't think there's any "deserve" or "not deserve". There's nothing moral about not making money or immoral about making a lot of money. It just is. Supply and demand curves are amoral, just like mathematics is amoral.
yeah teachers are completely vital to the vitality of our society, their value is enormous, that's why we pay them so well/snark
Well, actually, we pay according to the marginal value the last teacher we hire. In a competitive market, price hits equilibrium where marginal cost equals marginal value. The first teacher is really, really valuable. By the time you have 100,000 teachers, the gain of adding one more teacher is much lower. That's the way the math works. The fortunate thing is, we are blessed with so many people who can teach and want to teach, the price gets driven quite low.
It's just like the price of goods. If planet Earth only built one car a year, it would sell for a ton of money. Since we build tens of millions, the marginal value (and hence price) of number 10,000,001 is not much more than the cost of the sheet metal and leatherette.
(I'm probably getting some of this wrong since I only read about microeconomics, I haven't ever actually read a book on it. But that's the general idea.)
And how do you do "millions of dollars worth of sales each year"? How can a single individual make so much money?
A million in sales isn't a big number. I'm pretty sure most sales rep at a big IT company (HPE, Dell, Cisco, Intel...) carries a quota much larger than that. A million in commission, salary, and bonus is something else.
I'm sure many highly-paid professionals (sales, doctors, executives, lawyers, bankers) take home that much. They don't earn it single-handedly, they're part of a team, but that's their cut. Whether they're worth it or not is not for you or me to judge. The people handing out the cash get to make that call and the person receiving it gets to decide if it's enough.
Some people are really skilled at high value occupations. If a good negotiator can swing a deal $1 billion in your favor, they're totally worth $1 million.
Uhhh, 30 million Math Boy. We have 300,000,000 citizens, more or less.
Let's check the rest of the numbers. $87e12 / 30e6 is $2.9 million per person. Assuming I'm one of the many, I'm good with that. At $12,000 per year, I could fund that for 241 years.
...then I could fund 10% of america for more than 2 years FROM JUST ONE DUDE.
From just one dude who happens to be the RICHEST DUDE IN THE COUNTRY. And that's confiscating his entire net worth, not his annual income.
Shall we try math again?
Gross income for the entire United States is something like $8.8 trillion (I just looked this up from the St. Louis Fed yesterday). That's 8.8e12. Let's go with your $1,000 a month because that's just below the US federal poverty level for 2017. I don't know if we give that to everyone or just every adult. Let's assume you get it at age 18. I think there's something like 250,000,000 people over that age in the US today. That means you need something like $3 trillion (3e12) each year or a third of all income. That is, a base income tax rate of 33% across the board.
That doesn't seem realistic. It's also not progressive so Progressives will scream. Let's let the bottom 50% of earners off the hook. They earn around 15% of all income so that leaves around $7.5 trillion to pilfer, or a rate of around 40%.
Really? You want to add a 40% tax to the top half of the earners?
OK, let's math this another way. Let's say we want to ensure every household in the country gets at least $24,000 (never mind the disincentive effects). I think that's around 30,000,000 households, the same number you were using. I think (from Wikipedia) they earn a total of around $400 billion a year. We'd like them to get to $720 billion (assuming I did the math right). So we need to raise a paltry $320 billion, about $1,000 per person. Shift that to the top half earning households (about 75 million of them) and you're at $4,300 per household.
That we could do, but I though we already did it. It's called Welfare.
I think you are overstate the case. Everyone sees it as good if an efficient profitable business provides employment for a large number of people, it's not about employing people for the sake of it
Let's think about this a bit. As the employer and as a customer, employing fewer people is better than employing lots of people, all other things being equal. Of course, all things are almost never equal: it's difficult to maintain the same run rate with fewer people. But as the employer or the customer, jobs are a cost to be reduced.
As a society, we want to use our most limited resource, people's time and energy, on things which make them happy, healthy, and fulfilled. If installing solar panels makes people happy, or gives them the means to do things which make them happy, well that's wonderful. But as long as the employee is doing the thing which (all things considered) makes them happy, I don't really care what industry that's in.
Of course, that "all things considered" covers a lot of ground. It's a value judgement. I enjoy writing software. My wife valued raising our kids. Hipsters enjoy ordering deconstructed avocado toast for brunch and only work to support their habit. Solar installers probably get a kick out of knowing they're trying to improve the environment. It takes all types and that's a good thing.
That's how law has worked for years. The biggest stress point was where you'd intern while in law school because that largely determined where you'd get a job. Once you have an offer for an internship, you were on easy street. High tech is just now catching up.
I agree. In the "Why it matters" paragraph, the point is there is income inequality. I think it matters much more that there are good, high-paying jobs available in new, growing industries. That's fabulous news. And the jobs aren't all in the Bay Area, they're scattered around the country. So if you're stuck in a low-paying dead end job, get some software training and get an internship. That's a really plausible way to advance.
OK, if you're a 55-year-old machinist in Detroit and the plant just closed, that isn't a plausible plan. But for your kids, this is a great opportunity for them. IMHO, that's the real problem we're facing now. Jobs and industries are changing really fast, much faster than they used to. It used to be the economy changed slow enough you could move from job to job to job and adjust to the changes during your lifetime. Now your industry can collapse and you have to make a really big change to get in on the new opportunities. Once you get past your mid-fourties, you just don't have enough time or energy to begin retraining from the beginning. Generationally thing will work out. Your kids will get jobs in the new fields. But you may be left behind and that's hard.
San Francisco is expensive because people want to live there. Period. Democratic controlled governments have nothing to do with it other than either
Absolutely. I've lived in the south Bay Area for half my life. Most people I've talked to moved here or stay here for the weather, jobs, culture, and the like. I'm sure some people move here because they want to hang with other Progressives/Statists/Poor-At-Accounting. But that doesn't seem like a dominant reason.
Personally, I've always viewed the Democratic domination as a minus. Maybe that's just me. Having grown up in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, I didn't really notice much difference.
Remember - CA is a net contributor to the US economy, it takes out less from the tax pool than it puts in.
A nit but "the economy" is not the same as "the federal government."
(Yet.)
Every state contributes to the economy. I'm pretty sure it's mathematically impossible for every state to receive more federal outlays than they contribute, even using Political Fuzzy Math.
...then we should pay for it through publicly raised taxes and published budgets. Then at least it's visible and transparent.
Subsidizing schools by setting price ceilings only obscures the issue and transfers the cost on the ISP's shareholders, employees, and other customers. I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.
Others have commented about shrinking school budgets. We're paying something north of 2.5x as much per student today versus 1970 (adjusted for inflation, e.g. here). I don't know where the money is going but it doesn't seem to be flowing down to the classroom. That's a good issue to get irate about but it has nothing to do with ISP pricing.
Fer crying out loud, will people please stop getting in the middle of transactions between willing customers and willing sellers?
I know why the limo lobby wants to do this. They want to make tipping customary so Uber doesn't have a price advantage. But forcing Uber to include a tipping option in their app? No, that's not justified. Uber can put that in if they want, drivers can choose to drive for Uber or not. It's none of the city council's business how the deal goes down.
... is that the so-called "gender pay gap" is actually due to life decisions, not rampant sexism?
I'd say it's much more likely it's due to life decisions, priorities, and preferences instead of rampant, systematic, and explicit sexism.
Mark Perry writes about this often at the AEI blog. Let's take the 20% number at face value. That means that if you pick two identical employees (same job, same tenure, same experience, same skills, same performance ranking), and one is male and one is female. The 20% story says the man, on average, gets 20% more income than the woman. In some cases the gap will be zero, in other cases it would be much higher.
For this to be true for the entire country, it must be rampant. Cases like that must be all around us. Name one. Seriously, name one. Do you know of any actual cases with actual people at your place of work? I don't because I don't know how much people get paid, so I can't confirm or deny this. I do know one of my previous employers did have explicit pay scales and ranking system. I knew how everyone was ranked and I knew the pay scale. The company made it very transparent what your raise ought to be based on your current pay and ranking. There's no way women were getting smaller raises than men. It is certainly unbelievable there were separate rate ranges for men and women. And I saw the ranking distribution. I don't believe it was grossly unfair to the women.
Now, I didn't study the results. It's entirely possible there was subtle sexism in the process. Maybe we as a group tended to rank women lower than men. I don't know and I can't rule it out. But I'd be really surprised if something like a 20% lower ranking (and it would have had to be much more than that) wouldn't stand out.
There are lots of other examples which make it hard to believe the 20% story. Government workers have strict civil service procedures to grade and pay people. That's millions of people. The process is so bureaucratic it's very hard to believe there's a secret bias as big as 20%. Again, it would have to creep in by not giving women raises or good performance reviews, which could happen. But you're not going to solve that by just declaring women must get equal pay, you have to dig deeper.
That's evidence for a lack of bias. Evidence to explain the wage gap isn't too subtle. You can look at job categories with lots of men versus lots of women. For example, take health care. Nursing tends to attract women while surgical specialties attract men. Nurses also tends to get paid less than heart surgeons. Why people make these choices is beyond me. It could be sexism, women being told they can't be surgeons or some such. I could totally believe that exists. But again, you're not going to solve that by declaring that all heart surgeons get paid the same. And you're not going to close the wage cap by mandating all heart surgeons get paid the same.
So, I believe there is a substantial wage gap. It seems much more plausible to me that most of it can be accounted for by life choices. I am willing to believe that sexism and social pressure influences people on some of those life choices. I believe the problem is too deep to be solved by just declaring all people in a certain job category must be paid the same.
Jane is assigned to a 16 month project. She announces that she is pregnant...
The other way a manager could look at it is I'm hoping to have Jane around for 5-10 years. This one project may be a hassle but it's only for 16 months. For a project that short, everyone is coming up to speed for the duration of the project. A year from now there will be another project and Jane can be just as effective as anyone else. If I want to hire and develop for the long term, I'll ignore this short term hiccup just like I'd deal if someone who has to take a few months off for a back issue or sabbatical.
In other words, taking two-four months off is largely noise and should barely have a measurable effect. Yes, in theory it's there but it will be swamped by confounding factors.
I don't find this entirely convincing. When the companies I've worked at hire people, we assume it's for years, hopefully decades. I work in software engineering where typical job stints are 3-10 years at any one company. Taking a few months off for childbirth is lost in the noise. If a person decides to take a few years or decades off to raise children, that's a different story. But I suggest you need to look at the time off as a proportion of one's entire career length of 40-50 years.
The jig is up on the "gig" economy. I can't wait for it to completely collapse. I hope the short-term rental economy goes next.
I think people miss the point of the gig economy. The big win isn't that you're hiring contractors with unconventional hours. The win is you don't have to raise capital to start your business. The gig employees bring their own capital with them. Uber doesn't have to invest in a fleet of cars, Airbnb doesn't have to buy a lot of real estate, and so forth. It makes it much, much cheaper to run the company because your capital outlay is so much lower. You can also grow much faster than a traditionally financed company.
It kind of reminds me of the revolution which came with franchising. Prior to that, the company had to raise capital to build each outlet. Enter franchises and now each franchise owner brings their own cash. You get access to a much larger pool of cash. It's why franchised businesses are everywhere.
It doesn't matter who was saying what, the manufacturing jobs didn't leave because people refused to work in it, it left because of regulations and taxes.
More nuanced is manufacturing left because they found people in developing countries who are willing to do the job for less than people in rich countries. People in rich countries refused to work for very low wages, people in poorer countries were willing to work for very low wages. Why they were willing is another issue entirely (the low wages beat their other alternatives, e.g. subsistence farming).
Taxes and regulations also figure in. It's a pain to work across continents and countries but if it's a ton cheaper, companies will do it.
I know, that's what makes this a remarkable achievement. Many times in the past people have tried to do this but it took much longer than they anticipated. In the mean time, Intel, AMD, nVidia, ATI, or whoever managed to catch up and surpass the ASIC. It turned out the performance win from ASICs had a shorter shelf life than people realized.
It seems times have changed. Google has a very specific workload which appears to be different from what the mainstream processors have optimized for. The easy (easier?) part of Moore's Law (crank cycle times and add ALUs/FPUs) seems over. As a result, Google has a great win, yay for them. If this turns out to be a large market, I'll be surprised if neural net circuits don't show up in mainstream CPUs and GPUs in the next few generations. Then it becomes a race to see who can optimize the fab process fastest.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in normal times, financial companies don't just sit on cash. They make money by lending it out. In the last decade, I got a bit confused about whether the investment banks are actually sitting on idle assets or whether this was just a bookkeeping illusion (moving money from a Treasury account to a Fed account which somehow makes the bank's balance sheet better.) But let's put that aside for a moment.
How much cash a company has matters less than I used to think. If a company has "cash", it's not really a huge room filled with dollar bills. There are no Scrooge McDucks. That money is being used for something. Today they've got it parked in a bank and (in normal times, see above) the bank will use that to lend to other people who do stuff with it. Tomorrow they could build a building, give it to the US Treasury, or give it to shareholders, who will turn around and also use it for something. So for the economy as a whole, that money is never idle, it's always in motion. Whether Apple, Microsoft, or Google invest it directly, give it to their shareholders, or leave it in a bank to be lent out and used by someone else kinda doesn't matter.
As a result, all we're really discussing is who gets to do the investing, not whether the investment actually happens.
Thanks for doing the research for me. Bill Gates is probably one of the few there where as far back as I can find, the ancestors appeared to be wealthy, though not super wealthy.
You're welcome.
Don't give the Koch's a pass either. Their dad was definitely really wealthy when he passed the company to his sons. The company was and is private so it's hard to get number. The little data i found indicates it was worth a few billion dollars. But even starting on third base, they seem historically unusual in that they took a huge fortune and made it humongous. My understanding is most scions don't manage a company as well as their parent. So, they definitely didn't start from nothing but they also didn't just sit on their inherited wealth.
No sarcasm. I believe you're right, we can consider entertainers enormously productive because they produce a huge amount of value in a short period of time.
Sports stars and entertainers are therefore among the most economically productive people in the history of the world.
Ah. Yes, of course. My bad for not recognizing it as productivity. Thank you for clarifying.
The problem, in that analogy, is the vast numbers of people who were born far outside the ballpark, with no instruction on how to even get inside. These are the people who not only grew up on welfare, but they grew up in broken homes with no education on the value of hard work.
Even worse, they were born outside of the first world. I have to remind myself every day that being born in a not-so-wealthy household in Massachusetts put me head and shoulders over someone in a tin shack in Africa. Am I privileged? I was born in America, hell yes I am.
Thing is, we're getting too focused on the uber-rich. Anyone on the Fortune 400 list is truly exceptional. They won the one-in-20-million lottery. Yay for them but that's not anything anyone should count on.
Closer to home, and I only have only seen US numbers, the chances of moving up in income quintiles is really good. Vast numbers of people are born in the bottom 20% and move to the fourth quintile. Even more move from fourth to third. If you are born in the third quintile (40% to 60%), it's kind a of a crap shoot where you'll peak: it could be third, second, or first. And it turns out there's tons of churn: people in one quintile one year don't stay there, especially at the top. People at the top tend to be there because of some one-time event, like selling their family home and downsizing.
I agree, poverty is a terrible thing. I don't like to know people are living really meager lives. But I have to remember we as a species are much richer now than we've ever been, by a huge amount. Global dire poverty numbers are plummeting, both in percentages and absolute numbers. We're making progress and at the fastest rate ever. Don't let the envious, cynics, and doomsayers get you down, things truly are getting better, fast, for virtually everyone.
List me out the top 10 richest people in the world and tell me they inherited that wealth.
OK. From the Fortune 400 list of Richest Americans (I don't have a global list):
1. Bill Gates: earned (from a well-to-do but not crazy rich start.)
2. Jeff Bezos: earned.
3. Warren Buffett: earned
4. Mark Zuckerberg: earned
5. Larry Ellison: earned
6. Michael Bloomberg: earned, also from a wealthy family I believe but not multi-billionares.
7. Charles Koch: Near as I can tell, inherited a company worth a few billion, multiplied it by 10x.
8. David Koch: Ditto
9. Larry Page: earned
10. Sergey Brin: earned
11: Jim Walton: Inherited! We have a winner at #11!
We have some clear tech winners. They might have started in upper middle class families but nothing even close to what they're worth now. The Koch brothers are interesting. They got a really good start from their dad. As near as I can tell, Koch Industries was worth a few billion in 1970 when they bought out their other brothers. Since then the company has grown by something like 10x to 100x. I'd say they didn't inherit most of their wealth.
Jim Walton, at #11, seems to be the first of the stereotypical idle rich. I have no idea how he spends his time and what he does with his money. He may still be working at WalMart, I don't know. But given his net worth ($35 billion), I believe he inherited most of it from his dad, Sam Walton. Note, Sam was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth so if we go back two generations, there's not a lot of wealth there.
At a concert, 30,000 people buy tickets to see a single entertainer. It's a good show and the fans leave happy. Who is "getting screwed" when the entertainer gets 6 figures for a few hours work?
A few hours work and thousands of hours preparing. Probably tens of thousands. And a ton of natural skill, plus a dollop of really good luck.
It's tempting to look at a pop star and say "I could do that." History shows you probably can't. Even with skill and preparation, it's still an enormous risk to try to make a living as an entertainer.
I'm tempted to write "they deserve to be compensated for the risk." I don't think there's any "deserve" or "not deserve". There's nothing moral about not making money or immoral about making a lot of money. It just is. Supply and demand curves are amoral, just like mathematics is amoral.
It pays each according to their value to itself.
yeah teachers are completely vital to the vitality of our society, their value is enormous, that's why we pay them so well /snark
Well, actually, we pay according to the marginal value the last teacher we hire. In a competitive market, price hits equilibrium where marginal cost equals marginal value. The first teacher is really, really valuable. By the time you have 100,000 teachers, the gain of adding one more teacher is much lower. That's the way the math works. The fortunate thing is, we are blessed with so many people who can teach and want to teach, the price gets driven quite low.
It's just like the price of goods. If planet Earth only built one car a year, it would sell for a ton of money. Since we build tens of millions, the marginal value (and hence price) of number 10,000,001 is not much more than the cost of the sheet metal and leatherette.
(I'm probably getting some of this wrong since I only read about microeconomics, I haven't ever actually read a book on it. But that's the general idea.)
And how do you do "millions of dollars worth of sales each year"? How can a single individual make so much money?
A million in sales isn't a big number. I'm pretty sure most sales rep at a big IT company (HPE, Dell, Cisco, Intel...) carries a quota much larger than that. A million in commission, salary, and bonus is something else.
I'm sure many highly-paid professionals (sales, doctors, executives, lawyers, bankers) take home that much. They don't earn it single-handedly, they're part of a team, but that's their cut. Whether they're worth it or not is not for you or me to judge. The people handing out the cash get to make that call and the person receiving it gets to decide if it's enough.
Some people are really skilled at high value occupations. If a good negotiator can swing a deal $1 billion in your favor, they're totally worth $1 million.
10% of Americans is roughly 3 million people,
Uhhh, 30 million Math Boy. We have 300,000,000 citizens, more or less.
Let's check the rest of the numbers. $87e12 / 30e6 is $2.9 million per person. Assuming I'm one of the many, I'm good with that. At $12,000 per year, I could fund that for 241 years.
...then I could fund 10% of america for more than 2 years FROM JUST ONE DUDE.
From just one dude who happens to be the RICHEST DUDE IN THE COUNTRY. And that's confiscating his entire net worth, not his annual income.
Shall we try math again?
Gross income for the entire United States is something like $8.8 trillion (I just looked this up from the St. Louis Fed yesterday). That's 8.8e12. Let's go with your $1,000 a month because that's just below the US federal poverty level for 2017. I don't know if we give that to everyone or just every adult. Let's assume you get it at age 18. I think there's something like 250,000,000 people over that age in the US today. That means you need something like $3 trillion (3e12) each year or a third of all income. That is, a base income tax rate of 33% across the board.
That doesn't seem realistic. It's also not progressive so Progressives will scream. Let's let the bottom 50% of earners off the hook. They earn around 15% of all income so that leaves around $7.5 trillion to pilfer, or a rate of around 40%.
Really? You want to add a 40% tax to the top half of the earners?
OK, let's math this another way. Let's say we want to ensure every household in the country gets at least $24,000 (never mind the disincentive effects). I think that's around 30,000,000 households, the same number you were using. I think (from Wikipedia) they earn a total of around $400 billion a year. We'd like them to get to $720 billion (assuming I did the math right). So we need to raise a paltry $320 billion, about $1,000 per person. Shift that to the top half earning households (about 75 million of them) and you're at $4,300 per household.
That we could do, but I though we already did it. It's called Welfare.
I think you are overstate the case. Everyone sees it as good if an efficient profitable business provides employment for a large number of people, it's not about employing people for the sake of it
Let's think about this a bit. As the employer and as a customer, employing fewer people is better than employing lots of people, all other things being equal. Of course, all things are almost never equal: it's difficult to maintain the same run rate with fewer people. But as the employer or the customer, jobs are a cost to be reduced.
As a society, we want to use our most limited resource, people's time and energy, on things which make them happy, healthy, and fulfilled. If installing solar panels makes people happy, or gives them the means to do things which make them happy, well that's wonderful. But as long as the employee is doing the thing which (all things considered) makes them happy, I don't really care what industry that's in.
Of course, that "all things considered" covers a lot of ground. It's a value judgement. I enjoy writing software. My wife valued raising our kids. Hipsters enjoy ordering deconstructed avocado toast for brunch and only work to support their habit. Solar installers probably get a kick out of knowing they're trying to improve the environment. It takes all types and that's a good thing.
Who said I plan to remain stagnant? I just don't think I'm likely to start a new career as, oh I don't know, a musician or doctor at this point.
That's how law has worked for years. The biggest stress point was where you'd intern while in law school because that largely determined where you'd get a job. Once you have an offer for an internship, you were on easy street. High tech is just now catching up.
I agree. In the "Why it matters" paragraph, the point is there is income inequality. I think it matters much more that there are good, high-paying jobs available in new, growing industries. That's fabulous news. And the jobs aren't all in the Bay Area, they're scattered around the country. So if you're stuck in a low-paying dead end job, get some software training and get an internship. That's a really plausible way to advance.
OK, if you're a 55-year-old machinist in Detroit and the plant just closed, that isn't a plausible plan. But for your kids, this is a great opportunity for them. IMHO, that's the real problem we're facing now. Jobs and industries are changing really fast, much faster than they used to. It used to be the economy changed slow enough you could move from job to job to job and adjust to the changes during your lifetime. Now your industry can collapse and you have to make a really big change to get in on the new opportunities. Once you get past your mid-fourties, you just don't have enough time or energy to begin retraining from the beginning. Generationally thing will work out. Your kids will get jobs in the new fields. But you may be left behind and that's hard.
San Francisco is expensive because people want to live there. Period. Democratic controlled governments have nothing to do with it other than either
Absolutely. I've lived in the south Bay Area for half my life. Most people I've talked to moved here or stay here for the weather, jobs, culture, and the like. I'm sure some people move here because they want to hang with other Progressives/Statists/Poor-At-Accounting. But that doesn't seem like a dominant reason.
Personally, I've always viewed the Democratic domination as a minus. Maybe that's just me. Having grown up in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, I didn't really notice much difference.
Remember - CA is a net contributor to the US economy, it takes out less from the tax pool than it puts in.
A nit but "the economy" is not the same as "the federal government."
(Yet.)
Every state contributes to the economy. I'm pretty sure it's mathematically impossible for every state to receive more federal outlays than they contribute, even using Political Fuzzy Math.
So none of those people had, have, or even will have kids?
Of course they do. And they pay their normal taxes just like everyone else. Why would you think it's in any way fair for them to pay extra?
...then we should pay for it through publicly raised taxes and published budgets. Then at least it's visible and transparent.
Subsidizing schools by setting price ceilings only obscures the issue and transfers the cost on the ISP's shareholders, employees, and other customers. I don't see why any of them should pay extra to support schools.
Others have commented about shrinking school budgets. We're paying something north of 2.5x as much per student today versus 1970 (adjusted for inflation, e.g. here). I don't know where the money is going but it doesn't seem to be flowing down to the classroom. That's a good issue to get irate about but it has nothing to do with ISP pricing.
Fer crying out loud, will people please stop getting in the middle of transactions between willing customers and willing sellers?
I know why the limo lobby wants to do this. They want to make tipping customary so Uber doesn't have a price advantage. But forcing Uber to include a tipping option in their app? No, that's not justified. Uber can put that in if they want, drivers can choose to drive for Uber or not. It's none of the city council's business how the deal goes down.
... is that the so-called "gender pay gap" is actually due to life decisions, not rampant sexism?
I'd say it's much more likely it's due to life decisions, priorities, and preferences instead of rampant, systematic, and explicit sexism.
Mark Perry writes about this often at the AEI blog. Let's take the 20% number at face value. That means that if you pick two identical employees (same job, same tenure, same experience, same skills, same performance ranking), and one is male and one is female. The 20% story says the man, on average, gets 20% more income than the woman. In some cases the gap will be zero, in other cases it would be much higher.
For this to be true for the entire country, it must be rampant. Cases like that must be all around us. Name one. Seriously, name one. Do you know of any actual cases with actual people at your place of work? I don't because I don't know how much people get paid, so I can't confirm or deny this. I do know one of my previous employers did have explicit pay scales and ranking system. I knew how everyone was ranked and I knew the pay scale. The company made it very transparent what your raise ought to be based on your current pay and ranking. There's no way women were getting smaller raises than men. It is certainly unbelievable there were separate rate ranges for men and women. And I saw the ranking distribution. I don't believe it was grossly unfair to the women.
Now, I didn't study the results. It's entirely possible there was subtle sexism in the process. Maybe we as a group tended to rank women lower than men. I don't know and I can't rule it out. But I'd be really surprised if something like a 20% lower ranking (and it would have had to be much more than that) wouldn't stand out.
There are lots of other examples which make it hard to believe the 20% story. Government workers have strict civil service procedures to grade and pay people. That's millions of people. The process is so bureaucratic it's very hard to believe there's a secret bias as big as 20%. Again, it would have to creep in by not giving women raises or good performance reviews, which could happen. But you're not going to solve that by just declaring women must get equal pay, you have to dig deeper.
That's evidence for a lack of bias. Evidence to explain the wage gap isn't too subtle. You can look at job categories with lots of men versus lots of women. For example, take health care. Nursing tends to attract women while surgical specialties attract men. Nurses also tends to get paid less than heart surgeons. Why people make these choices is beyond me. It could be sexism, women being told they can't be surgeons or some such. I could totally believe that exists. But again, you're not going to solve that by declaring that all heart surgeons get paid the same. And you're not going to close the wage cap by mandating all heart surgeons get paid the same.
So, I believe there is a substantial wage gap. It seems much more plausible to me that most of it can be accounted for by life choices. I am willing to believe that sexism and social pressure influences people on some of those life choices. I believe the problem is too deep to be solved by just declaring all people in a certain job category must be paid the same.
Jane is assigned to a 16 month project. She announces that she is pregnant...
The other way a manager could look at it is I'm hoping to have Jane around for 5-10 years. This one project may be a hassle but it's only for 16 months. For a project that short, everyone is coming up to speed for the duration of the project. A year from now there will be another project and Jane can be just as effective as anyone else. If I want to hire and develop for the long term, I'll ignore this short term hiccup just like I'd deal if someone who has to take a few months off for a back issue or sabbatical.
In other words, taking two-four months off is largely noise and should barely have a measurable effect. Yes, in theory it's there but it will be swamped by confounding factors.
I don't find this entirely convincing. When the companies I've worked at hire people, we assume it's for years, hopefully decades. I work in software engineering where typical job stints are 3-10 years at any one company. Taking a few months off for childbirth is lost in the noise. If a person decides to take a few years or decades off to raise children, that's a different story. But I suggest you need to look at the time off as a proportion of one's entire career length of 40-50 years.
The jig is up on the "gig" economy. I can't wait for it to completely collapse. I hope the short-term rental economy goes next.
I think people miss the point of the gig economy. The big win isn't that you're hiring contractors with unconventional hours. The win is you don't have to raise capital to start your business. The gig employees bring their own capital with them. Uber doesn't have to invest in a fleet of cars, Airbnb doesn't have to buy a lot of real estate, and so forth. It makes it much, much cheaper to run the company because your capital outlay is so much lower. You can also grow much faster than a traditionally financed company.
It kind of reminds me of the revolution which came with franchising. Prior to that, the company had to raise capital to build each outlet. Enter franchises and now each franchise owner brings their own cash. You get access to a much larger pool of cash. It's why franchised businesses are everywhere.
It doesn't matter who was saying what, the manufacturing jobs didn't leave because people refused to work in it, it left because of regulations and taxes.
More nuanced is manufacturing left because they found people in developing countries who are willing to do the job for less than people in rich countries. People in rich countries refused to work for very low wages, people in poorer countries were willing to work for very low wages. Why they were willing is another issue entirely (the low wages beat their other alternatives, e.g. subsistence farming).
Taxes and regulations also figure in. It's a pain to work across continents and countries but if it's a ton cheaper, companies will do it.
I know, that's what makes this a remarkable achievement. Many times in the past people have tried to do this but it took much longer than they anticipated. In the mean time, Intel, AMD, nVidia, ATI, or whoever managed to catch up and surpass the ASIC. It turned out the performance win from ASICs had a shorter shelf life than people realized.
It seems times have changed. Google has a very specific workload which appears to be different from what the mainstream processors have optimized for. The easy (easier?) part of Moore's Law (crank cycle times and add ALUs/FPUs) seems over. As a result, Google has a great win, yay for them. If this turns out to be a large market, I'll be surprised if neural net circuits don't show up in mainstream CPUs and GPUs in the next few generations. Then it becomes a race to see who can optimize the fab process fastest.