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.
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I get it, Henry David Thoreau also didn’t pay taxes because his government was using them to fight a war he didn’t support. Its gonna depend on the country. If you can’t vote what the taxes pay for, they are more akin to gangster style extortion.
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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.
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.
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.
“taxation without representation is worse than loss of potential individual profits” — no it aint
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.
In a company you always have people that don’t generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
Treating IT like a cost centre instead of a revenue centre is why companies cut them to the bone and then go all SurprisedPikachu.gif when something important breaks or when hackers tear the company apart and hold them for ransom.
IT can absolutely be a revenue centre, providing value along with the rest of the company. But most leadership simply cannot think like this. They don’t have the capability. In fact, the tired joke in IT goes something like this:
Everything is working. “What do we pay you guys for?”
Everything is on fire. “What do we pay you guys for?”No, you’re thinking of the C-Suite at the top: the Parasite Class that Hoovers up the vast majority of the value created by the employees, while providing of themselves almost nothing of value to the company. Most of them can be trivially replaced by any average Joe off of the street which no material impact on the company itself. A large minority of them are so abysmally bad at their jobs that they leave behind a trail of broken or defunct companies while getting obscene “golden parachutes” with every departure that are larger than any worker’s entire lifetime earnings potential.
That’s not what Proffitt is.
I don‘t know where to start. Everything wrong :(
So how do we unlock the green part for ourselves instead of giving it all to a rich twat?
Seize. The. Means.
Force will be required.
Ask them nicely and then vote for someone who will ask them nicely surely they will give it up without a problem.
Maybe ask the Romanovs.
I also envy the average Russian’s life
Deflationary currency, where they have to give you specific demotion in pay to stay at the same purchasing power. Also housing appreciation needs to be readded to the CPI so that it raises interest rates when it gets too high.
Become self employed
You become the thing you hate. Start a business.
Edit: I just want to clarify that this is supposed to be mostly an outrageous thing to be said. I did that on purpose. I may have forgotten a “/s” to make that clear. Not everyone has the aptitude, willingness, or care to create their own business. Depending on your line of work, it may be a neat impossibility to do so, as others have articulated already.
I’m trying to make a social comment on the absurdity of our current capitalistic systems. While it’s true that you can keep 100% of what you produce as profit for yourself if you are independent, that doesn’t make the prospect any more viable as a course of action. However, having the “opportunity” to start a business and keep 100% of the profits is the excuse any capitalist would provide in this situation.
I suppose, saying “become the thing you hate” didn’t make it clear enough to everyone that this is supposed to be a mockery of capitalists.
Good luck being succesfull, everyone can start one…not everyone can pick something that works and/or make it work
Great idea. What kind of business, I wonder? Telecoms company? Bank? Train network? Carmaker? Steel refiner? Power plant? Newspaper? Mobile phone manufacturer? Television? Oh wait, all of those industries are already heavily rigged in favour of the status quo.
Or by “start a business” did you mean buy a van and hire a local school leaver to help you do some landscaping and HVAC?
Make something new, instead of trying to copy-cat?
We desperately need “copycats”. There are many industries that are moribund and are in desperate need for a shake-up, but the incumbents have worked hard over the last half a century to deny almost all new entrants in an attempt to protect the status quo. They have even worked things such that any competitive threat to these incumbents are seen as a national threat to be legislatively and legally opposed.
The American ISP landscape (Internet & communication providers) being an absolutely stellar exhibit № 1. In many places it’s illegal to create your own private or municipal ISP.
Joke’s on you, I’m just slacking off on company time.
no joke, but i had a VERY well paying job where nothing happened, so i’d just go on reddit all day
Security inspector at the local nucular power plant?
I like the cut of your jib
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. ???
Yellow vs green circle proportions are the results of class struggle
It’s so weird that Americans cling to feudal landlord mentality like a lifeline, and also call it “freedom”.
And by landlord mentality I’m not just talking about conservative thinking. It also drives the idea that it’s perfectly fine to learn skills by watching what other people do and then basing new work on it - but when software does that, it’s “stealing”. Righteous outrage! Not fair! That’s mine! Just another form of landlordism, but it’s the good kind! (as usual)
People always cry “communism bad” when anyone suggests anything having to do with any type of reform. Communism is shit and all but there’s only one thing worse than communism: feudalism. You have to be subservient on someone more successful than you because all the prices and job wages are fixed in order to force this on as many people as possible. This can be in the form of joining the armed forces just for the guaranteed housing and healthcare, continuing to go to college and racking up endless debt just because it allows you to survive for a little longer, or living on your maga cousin’s farm so you can do farm work in exchange for being allowed to live there for a price you can afford. It’s literal feudalism.
Fuck all the idiots that have been brainwashed into fighting to “conserve” how awful and broken everything is. I have skills. I have a college education. I haven’t ever been employed in anything besides fast food or retail. Corporations are too busy running the entire economy into the ground because it makes the stock go up to care about saving the economy or human rights.
If I could start over I would’ve spent all the money I spent on college instead buying a plot of land to legally be “homeless” on and maybe bought an rv. Unlike owning a home or living in apartment, it may be possible to keep costs of living low enough this way to be sustainable. Seems to be the last method of living they haven’t colluded and price fixed to the point where no matter what, the costs of living are higher than jobs that are possible to actually get and keep, for now at least. Just wait until the “right” of land ownership is tied to proof of religion, neurotypical status or a thc drug test, I’m sure no one will even bother to fight back.
but there’s only one thing worse than communism: feudalism.
I grew up in the DDR, that’s what it was like.
The party decided what and how you live your life, how much equality you deserve. You had to scratch their backs to get their scraps. The only way to improve your living conditions was to be completely subservient, in private and public life.
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.
Profits? Or do you mean income. It would probably be smaller otherwise
I mean profit = revenue - expenses. I cheekily suggested unsubtracting some expenses, e.g. excessive CEO pay, before computing profit per employee.
I assume you’re also not including existing salaries in expenses then.
It was more of a “think about it” kind of comment than an algorithm. Glad you’re thinking about it.
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?
Yeah sure, but the labour always earns way more money then the employees actually get. I think that part is quite simple. It’s just abstract to people, because forcing workers to sell their time and health is so normalised.
An overly simplified calculation to show the rough scale of this is to take the reported annual net profit and divide that by the number of employees. This neglects many workers that work for subcontractors and capital reinvestment and so many things but let’s take Microsoft for an example in 2024. 92.75B / 228,000 workers = $406,798 per worker.
An overly simplified calculation
What is the purpose of bringing this up if it’s unusable for our needs?
let’s take Microsoft for an example in 2024. 92.75B / 228,000 workers = $406,798 per worker.
The original goal was to value a worker based on the value they actually produce, separate from the other workers.
If you are trying to force the top lawyers, sales people, and engineers to share the same salary as the average of everyone else around them you’ve done the exact opposite of what you set out to do.
i mean… trying to calculate an individual’s labor output is pointless.
nobody produces anything in a vacuum.
you can’t separate the office excel wizards economic output from the janitor’s, or the maintenance crew’s, or the accountant’s, or the sales person’s, and so on, and so forth.
labor, especially modern labor, is built entirely upon cooperative, mutually beneficial structures.
the part that isn’t working and parasitizes the worker’s economic accomplishments, that’s really 90% of the issue we have right now.
so the original calculation, which takes the entire profit of the company + CEO income - CEO salary (or the reasonable amount they should be getting) dividend by the number of employees does give you a reasonable baseline of compensation for all employees.
it doesn’t make much sense that one “class” of employee would make more than any other, when all of them rely on each other…
You could compare that 400k to the median salary, calculate how far that’s off, then apply that ratio to the individual salaries. It’s still just a ballpark number, but it isn’t a terrible way of looking at things
I mean I think it’s intentional that there’s not data on that sort of thing that is collected or made available. There are methods one could use to get a rough estimate; someone elsewhere in the comments suggested taking the reported yearly profit for the company and dividing it by the number of workers. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we’ve got right now which is just a big ol ‘shrug’.
But there is likely someone doing the math, even if they’'re just ballparking it and not making it public, because that’s how they justify paying everyone’s salary. It would not surprise me at all to learn that giant corporations have a pretty accurate accounting of the value created by each employee.
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?
noice 👏
Who says we arent mad about both, but we are more complicit with the green bit, thats what makes our cars, phones, and all the things “they” need us to have to be efficient workers.
The green bit is the bit that goes into Jeff Bezos’s pocket, it’s not used to make cars and phones.
Who gave him that money though? Pretty sure it was whoever buys stuff from Amazon?
All 3 circles come from people buying stuff from amazon.
Roads and hospitals come from amazon?
You’re confusing the issue. My point is that we are no more complicit in the taxes we pay than the amount we pay Jeff Bezos for the privilege of working at amazon.
Well thats demonstrably not true, I dont get punished if i dont shop with amazon.
You don’t get punished if you give up your citizenship and move to another country, and then stop paying taxes to America. You don’t get punished if you decide to be homeless instead of paying your landlord 2K/mo to exist.
But realistically, you don’t have a meaningful amount of choice when it comes to the bourgeoisie/government due to the difference in power.
Literally no one who doesn’t already agree with this is ever going to even try to understand it
