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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by spanky4ever »

wow @Mr_Bramboy trolling again, are we? But then again, Trump made some good arguments during his campaign, but have yet to deliver on most of them. In USA they say; you talk the talk. but do you walk the walk :P
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Don't bother engaging with Bram, he's been a troll for years
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic Dolan says inequality is inevitable and there's nothing really wrong with it, everyone should just accept it, but then cries about a tax system being unfair (which is another way of saying unequal and unjust).

also

So yeah, I agree, good quality teaching should be rewarded, but based on a rating system, not based on the assumption that the occupation in itself is so important it needs to be paid lavishly by default.


I sincerely hope you stay as far away from education as possible.

For what other reason are we paying higher wages for some occupations and lower wages for others, if not as a form of recognition that some jobs provide more value to the economy than others? And logically, it follows that those jobs that produce the lowest value are usually taken by people of lower cognitive abilities.
that doesn't logically follow at all.

You still need people who can produce real value, tangible goods that can sell to keep a business thriving. And those people, for example, those who produce microprocessors in Intel's or AMD's fabs, are not paid peanuts.
Sure. And yet cacao farmers are almost literally paid in peanuts. Yet, they produce real value, unlike for example, the CEO of Cadbury's. Guess who's paid more? What you say is demonstrably false, as adding value, whatever that may mean, as it's just an empty concept when left undefined, isn't the only, and most likely also not the most important requirement of a well paid job. In fact, for centuries, most well paying jobs didn't directly produce anything of value that can be sold at all.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by momuuu »

fightinfrenchman wrote:Jerom loves to radicalize people

To be honest, I kinda do want people to radicalize. I stopped believing in the capitalist system. I think I even legitemately believe that eventually people will realize how shit late stage capitalism is and overthrow it. The idea that you work your ass off to buy a house/food/cars that cost much more for you than it costs to produce them, just so that the rich can get profit.. that doesnt sound right to me.

Im happy to see even Americans - generally very pro capitalism - like noel see the same things.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by momuuu »

iwillspankyou wrote:
n0el wrote:
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Definitely Marxist. I would say both. I started thinking this way once I got a new job that gave me more exposure to the business side and at the same time I started following and reading Dr. Richard Wolff.

Richard Wolff Is awesome, you should try listening to him @momuuu I think you would like his message :P

Last few years I went through some thought processes that ended up basically reaching the same conclusions as Karl Marx did. I intend to read das Kapital in the near future.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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momuuu wrote:
iwillspankyou wrote:
Show hidden quotes

Richard Wolff Is awesome, you should try listening to him @momuuu I think you would like his message :P

Last few years I went through some thought processes that ended up basically reaching the same conclusions as Karl Marx did. I intend to read das Kapital in the near future.



Lol, good luck with that. It's one of the most unreadable books I've ever read.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

umeu wrote:Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic Dolan says inequality is inevitable and there's nothing really wrong with it, everyone should just accept it, but then cries about a tax system being unfair (which is another way of saying unequal and unjust).

No, because inequality of outcome is not the same as inequality of rules. I was arguing in favour of having the same rule for taxing income for all income brackets.
Arguing that rules should be the same for everyone does not imply everyone should be in the same standing after the rules are applied.

I sincerely hope you stay as far away from education as possible.

I sincerely hope you make an argument.

that doesn't logically follow at all.

There are good reasons why plumbers have much lower income than brain surgeons or hardware engineers. Plumbers are a dime a dozen and the barrier to entry is quite low, anyone could do it with minimal training. And the services they provide can be done even by untrained people with a good set of tools. Most don't bother doing their own plumbing simply because the opportunity cost is basically negative for them, they simply generate more value at their current day job, enough to allow them to pay someone to do the plumbing for them.

Sure. And yet cacao farmers are almost literally paid in peanuts. Yet, they produce real value, unlike for example, the CEO of Cadbury's. Guess who's paid more? What you say is demonstrably false, as adding value, whatever that may mean, as it's just an empty concept when left undefined, isn't the only, and most likely also not the most important requirement of a well paid job. In fact, for centuries, most well paying jobs didn't directly produce anything of value that can be sold at all.

There's a logic and reason to why that happens. And that's because cacao farmers don't have any real barganing power to demand for higher pay. If they ask for too high rates of pay, the company that buys their raw, unprocessed product, could just invest in land and hiring its own farmers in that country to make sure they keep cocoa production well-supplied. They're not doing that simply because it's cheaper to pay local farmers for their raw product, rather than invest in your own production facilities there.

I agree that lots of CEOs are paid or given unconscionably high benefits for their management work, but since they run private companies, they bear the responsibility for how they choose to distribute the rewards they reap from their activity.

A good example is what happens these days with the former Nissan-Renault executive, Carlos Ghosn. He is credited with turning around a business that was in dire straits in 1996, it was in a near-bankruptcy state. He basically saved the company from bankruptcy by reorganising it and restructuring its costs of operation. On the other hand, he now is accused that he used company assets in his own interest and that he falsified accounts in order to fund his own lavish lifestyle. There are two things to notice here: his management produced real value by making Nissan-Renault viable again from an economic point of view, but he also broke internal company rules by acting as if he was royalty, as if he owned the company and the company owed him to cover all of his costs, no matter how high. It's undeniable that his management produced real market value and it's also a known fact that he incurred very high costs for his company while acting as its CEO. However, the company never claimed that those costs had a significant negative impact on its economic viability. It's just a question of someone breaking the internal rules of a company. So, what this example shows is that even when CEOs overreach their roles by incurring too high costs for their companies, that doesn't necessarily make their companies economically non-viable.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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momuuu wrote:
fightinfrenchman wrote:Jerom loves to radicalize people

To be honest, I kinda do want people to radicalize. I stopped believing in the capitalist system. I think I even legitemately believe that eventually people will realize how shit late stage capitalism is and overthrow it. The idea that you work your ass off to buy a house/food/cars that cost much more for you than it costs to produce them, just so that the rich can get profit.. that doesnt sound right to me.

Im happy to see even Americans - generally very pro capitalism - like noel see the same things.
As computers get smarter, more and more jobs are automated. I think there will eventually be no way to prevent widespread poverty without implementing a basic income because there are simply not going to be enough jobs. I think it's at that point people will start seriously questioning whether capitalism is still the way to go.

But I think the way we choose our leaders and/or how we hold them accountable needs a serious overhaul at some point, preferably before we move on from capitalism, because the current way is not working and in any non-capitalist society the state has a lot of power.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

>This thread

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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Dolan wrote:No, because inequality of outcome is not the same as inequality of rules. I was arguing in favour of having the same rule for taxing income for all income brackets.
Arguing that rules should be the same for everyone does not imply everyone should be in the same standing after the rules are applied.


It doesn't imply that. But it does imply that people in equal situations ought to be treated equally. But not everyone is in an equal situation. You say people who earn more are unfairly targeted when they're required to pay more taxes, because not everyone has to pay the same amount of taxes as they do. But not everyone earns a million dollars a year. Taxes are measured per bracket. And everyone in the same bracket, pays the same amount of taxes. There's nothing inherently unfair about this system. Following your argument, every tax targets people who pay it unfairly, as there's always people who can't pay it, or don't have to pay it, and therefore don't pay it. Take car tax. Let's assume it's fair to put a tax on people who own cars. You pay a percentage over the purchase value of the car. Obviously, if you don't have a car, you don't have to pay taxes. Can people who pay taxes over this say that the tax targets them unfairly? I find that doubtful reasoning. It's the same with income tax. If you have income, you pay tax, if you don't have an income, you don't pay tax. Progressive taxation is nothing more than this: If you have an income of 10k per month, you pay 50% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. If you have an income of 100k per month, you pay 60% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. This isn't more or less unfair than someone who doesn't have an income not having to pay tax, while those who do, do have to pay tax.

Before we had a flat tax, we simply had a lump sum or poll tax, where everyone had to pay the same fixed price, regardless of how much they had or earned. Everyone had to pay 1 cow, no matter if you have 1 cow, or 1000 cows. You should be advocating for this, if you find progressive tax unfair. After that, we had flat tax. If you can't see that 20% on 1 dollar per day isn't the same as 20% on 10000 dollars per day, then I'm not sure what your definition of fair is. It's clear to me which of the 3 is fairer. It's clear to me too, which of the 3 have produced more stable and just societies.

With progressive tax, the rules are simply still the same for everyone, but the conditions aren't. There's no inequality of rules, this would imply that some people who earn 100k a month would have to pay tax, while others, who earn the same or more, don't have to. This isn't the case.

Also, progressive tax isn't the result of populist politicians handing out candy to a dumb electorate, it's the result of the elite recognizing the harm rampant and extreme poverty does to the stability of a nation. The basis for progressive tax was laid out before we even had universal suffrage.


I sincerely hope you make an argument.

I sincerely hope you would bother to inform yourself about the field of the topic you're debating about.


There are good reasons why plumbers have much lower income than brain surgeons or hardware engineers. Plumbers are a dime a dozen and the barrier to entry is quite low, anyone could do it with minimal training. And the services they provide can be done even by untrained people with a good set of tools. Most don't bother doing their own plumbing simply because the opportunity cost is basically negative for them, they simply generate more value at their current day job, enough to allow them to pay someone to do the plumbing for them.

And yet, plumbers make more money than elementary teachers, more money than high school teachers as well, even though both of them require more education, and are typically associated with a "higher cognitive ability". Underwater welders or miners make more than associate college professors. There's no reason to assume why the manager of the restaurant is cognitively more advanced than his kitchen staff, yet, he's paid more. There's no reason to assume that a basketball player is cognitively superior than a baker, or a lacrosse player, yet he's paid more. I'm not disputing that there aren't valid reasons for this, although not all causes that lead to this situation are valid reasons, in my opinion. I'm merely objecting vs your unsubstantiated claim that this is due to cognitive inferiority.

You're right about the fact that the more people are possibly capable of doing the job, increases the level of the salary, but it's also about how many people are required to do the job. We will simply never need as many brain surgeons as we will need plumbers, this has little to do with how hard the job is cognitively.


There's a logic and reason to why that happens. And that's because cacao farmers don't have any real barganing power to demand for higher pay. If they ask for too high rates of pay, the company that buys their raw, unprocessed product, could just invest in land and hiring its own farmers in that country to make sure they keep cocoa production well-supplied. They're not doing that simply because it's cheaper to pay local farmers for their raw product, rather than invest in your own production facilities there.

I'm not disputing that there's a reason for it, I'm merely disputing that producing real value for a company always results in high pay. And the latter simply isn't true. Good luck trying to grow cacao on a large, intensive scale in the northern hemisphere.


I agree that lots of CEOs are paid or given unconscionably high benefits for their management work, but since they run private companies, they bear the responsibility for how they choose to distribute the rewards they reap from their activity.

A good example is what happens these days with the former Nissan-Renault executive, Carlos Ghosn. He is credited with turning around a business that was in dire straits in 1996, it was in a near-bankruptcy state. He basically saved the company from bankruptcy by reorganising it and restructuring its costs of operation. On the other hand, he now is accused that he used company assets in his own interest and that he falsified accounts in order to fund his own lavish lifestyle. There are two things to notice here: his management produced real value by making Nissan-Renault viable again from an economic point of view, but he also broke internal company rules by acting as if he was royalty, as if he owned the company and the company owed him to cover all of his costs, no matter how high. It's undeniable that his management produced real market value and it's also a known fact that he incurred very high costs for his company while acting as its CEO. However, the company never claimed that those costs had a significant negative impact on its economic viability. It's just a question of someone breaking the internal rules of a company. So, what this example shows is that even when CEOs overreach their roles by incurring too high costs for their companies, that doesn't necessarily make their companies economically non-viable.

We seem to have a different definition of production and value. In any case, it doesn't really go against anything I said, nor does it say anything about his cognitive ability in contrast to other jobs. All it shows is that, as you say, those in power usually do whatever it takes to benefit those in power and keep them in power, and thus you should already see that you can't just make a direct link between reward, ability and value.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by momuuu »

Goodspeed wrote:
momuuu wrote:
fightinfrenchman wrote:Jerom loves to radicalize people

To be honest, I kinda do want people to radicalize. I stopped believing in the capitalist system. I think I even legitemately believe that eventually people will realize how shit late stage capitalism is and overthrow it. The idea that you work your ass off to buy a house/food/cars that cost much more for you than it costs to produce them, just so that the rich can get profit.. that doesnt sound right to me.

Im happy to see even Americans - generally very pro capitalism - like noel see the same things.
As computers get smarter, more and more jobs are automated. I think there will eventually be no way to prevent widespread poverty without implementing a basic income because there are simply not going to be enough jobs. I think it's at that point people will start seriously questioning whether capitalism is still the way to go.

But I think the way we choose our leaders and/or how we hold them accountable needs a serious overhaul at some point, preferably before we move on from capitalism, because the current way is not working and in any non-capitalist society the state has a lot of power.

If by 'overhaul' you mean 'revolution'. As I'm growing up I'm starting to lose my understanding of the world. Why do so many people waste so much life on working when, if we actually distributed wealth more equally, we'd all be fine while working half as much.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by n0el »

Wow. Jerom out here dropping knowledge.
mad cuz bad
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by fightinfrenchman »

momuuu wrote:
fightinfrenchman wrote:Jerom loves to radicalize people

To be honest, I kinda do want people to radicalize. I stopped believing in the capitalist system.


Jerom is the founder of the Communist Party
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by Dolan »

umeu wrote:It doesn't imply that. But it does imply that people in equal situations ought to be treated equally.

My argument was nothing of the sort. I never discussed whether people in equal situations ought to be treated equally. I argued that income should be taxed equally, using the same rule. There's a difference in emphasis there. I don't think there's anything special about the "people in equal situations" case, the same rule should apply in all cases. "Equal situations" is too abstract a case to even examine anyway.

But not everyone is in an equal situation. You say people who earn more are unfairly targeted when they're required to pay more taxes, because not everyone has to pay the same amount of taxes as they do. But not everyone earns a million dollars a year. Taxes are measured per bracket. And everyone in the same bracket, pays the same amount of taxes. There's nothing inherently unfair about this system. Following your argument, every tax targets people who pay it unfairly, as there's always people who can't pay it, or don't have to pay it, and therefore don't pay it. Take car tax. Let's assume it's fair to put a tax on people who own cars. You pay a percentage over the purchase value of the car. Obviously, if you don't have a car, you don't have to pay taxes. Can people who pay taxes over this say that the tax targets them unfairly? I find that doubtful reasoning. It's the same with income tax. If you have income, you pay tax, if you don't have an income, you don't pay tax. Progressive taxation is nothing more than this: If you have an income of 10k per month, you pay 50% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. If you have an income of 100k per month, you pay 60% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. This isn't more or less unfair than someone who doesn't have an income not having to pay tax, while those who do, do have to pay tax.

Income tax is not really comparable to taxes levied on other things, like property or capital gains. It's a mostly universal measure of someone's financial worth, because very few people can afford not to live on a steady income. So, no, I don't see how you can use the car tax example to somehow relativise things to the point that the whole argument about applying the same rule to all levels of income would be diluted. I think you're building a strawman here, I never focused on or argued for the principle that fair taxation means the same rule should apply to people of similar levels of income. What I argued for is that everyone should pay the same proportion of income tax.

Before we had a flat tax, we simply had a lump sum or poll tax, where everyone had to pay the same fixed price, regardless of how much they had or earned. Everyone had to pay 1 cow, no matter if you have 1 cow, or 1000 cows. You should be advocating for this, if you find progressive tax unfair. After that, we had flat tax. If you can't see that 20% on 1 dollar per day isn't the same as 20% on 10000 dollars per day, then I'm not sure what your definition of fair is. It's clear to me which of the 3 is fairer. It's clear to me too, which of the 3 have produced more stable and just societies.

With progressive tax, the rules are simply still the same for everyone, but the conditions aren't. There's no inequality of rules, this would imply that some people who earn 100k a month would have to pay tax, while others, who earn the same or more, don't have to. This isn't the case.

Also, progressive tax isn't the result of populist politicians handing out candy to a dumb electorate, it's the result of the elite recognizing the harm rampant and extreme poverty does to the stability of a nation. The basis for progressive tax was laid out before we even had universal suffrage.

Those are post-factum rationalisations, there was no actual assesment done by public authorities to see which tax system leads to stabler societies.
Actually flax taxes have been a staple of fiscal systems since time immemorial. Romans levied a flat tax on wealth, at least up until the empire expanded enough that it was no longer necessary. Though it's debatable how comparable pre-modern taxes on wealth were to modern income taxes. As I emphasised before, I only touched on one single component of the fiscal system (direct, income tax), there's a whole lot of more types of taxes, both direct and indirect, and those could continue to be set at different levels, depending on the nature of economic activity and the opportunity to levy those taxes.
Americans used to have a flat tax system until Lincoln passed the Revenue Act of 1862, that was supposed to provide enough revenue to fund the civil war. The reason why they introduced a progressive system is simply because they saw an opportunity to tax more where they could tax more. It was based on someone's "ability to pay". It was pure state-sanctioned greed. If they could get away with it, they thought, why not. Let's just take more money from those that can pay more, simply because our state needs more money. They didn't even need to check with voters if they supported this, because as a monopoly of force, the state could simply do that, to little opposition.

I sincerely hope you would bother to inform yourself about the field of the topic you're debating about.

It's a huge subject and I'm sure that neither your personal experience nor my anecdotal evidence can cover the whole topic with enough statistical significance.

And yet, plumbers make more money than elementary teachers, more money than high school teachers as well, even though both of them require more education, and are typically associated with a "higher cognitive ability". Underwater welders or miners make more than associate college professors. There's no reason to assume why the manager of the restaurant is cognitively more advanced than his kitchen staff, yet, he's paid more. There's no reason to assume that a basketball player is cognitively superior than a baker, or a lacrosse player, yet he's paid more. I'm not disputing that there aren't valid reasons for this, although not all causes that lead to this situation are valid reasons, in my opinion. I'm merely objecting vs your unsubstantiated claim that this is due to cognitive inferiority.

Uhm, I would ask for evidence to support this statement that plumbers have higher incomes than teachers. Of course, "teacher" is a very broad term that could be applied to anything from primary school substitute staff to fully-tenured university teacher. But even so, I think even in Eastern Europe, on average, teachers earn more than plumbers. Simply because teachers have one of the strongest trade unions in the country and they can and they did paralyse the country more than once, in order to get pay rises, even when the economy could ill afford it. On the other hand, plumbers lack any trade union protection and most of the time get paid on a per-project basis, unless they are employed by a firm.

Cognitive ability is not the only criterion in the whole income equation, of course. It's good enough to use for most economic sectors, but it's obviously not useful when you compare occupations like entertainment, sports, high-risk occupations with regular office jobs. There is a reason why there's a broad agreement among psychologists and other professions that IQ levels are predictive of socio-economic status. The reason is that people of higher IQ tend, on average, to do well in school and eventually get higher-paid jobs. That's why there's such an emphasis on education, in the first place. Because people believe education can help improve socio-economic outcomes. At least, this has been the mantra until now, because we're seeing somewhat different trends lately, especially in countries like the USA where education is so expensive that some people have decided to scrap it altogether and try their chances either with cheaper education and self-study or simply without formal education. I know, for example, of one guy who is like 19-20 years old now, who never finished high school, never got any diploma, and he's now working at Discord as a front-end developer, getting paid somewhere around 10000 bucks per month, after taxes (I think). Which is actually not that much, considering he has to live in San Francisco, but, oh boy, how far did he get without any formal professional education at just the age of 18, simply by learning by himself. Still, even in this case, we're still talking about someone who managed to get a well-paid job based on higher cognitive abilities.

There's no reason to assume why the manager of the restaurant is cognitively more advanced than his kitchen staff, yet, he's paid more.

Are you implying that Mitoe is not smarter than his McDonald's waiters? :ohmy: Reported.

Ok, well, that's possible, though it's usually assumed that people who are appointed as managers have some qualities that qualify them to oversee other people. And that usually, again, implies higher cognitive abilites. Sure, in real life, things don't happen according to abstract principles or to reasonable expectations, though, and very often some people are appointed as managers simply because the boss trusts them more or they inspire more authority. In that case, the firm and the boss take responsibility for such a decision to trust someone to be a manager, even though they may not be the best fit for the position. And they may eventually pay a price for sub-optimal decisions.

You're right about the fact that the more people are possibly capable of doing the job, increases the level of the salary, but it's also about how many people are required to do the job. We will simply never need as many brain surgeons as we will need plumbers, this has little to do with how hard the job is cognitively.

Not sure if anyone really assesed how many brain surgeons do we really need. There are places, countries, where judging by the hectic schedule of their brain surgeons and the long waiting lists for getting an operation, the system would surely not suffer if it had more of them. But the thing is they are very hard to train and bring to that level of experience that they are capable of saving lives doing one of the most complex types of operations. So the scarcity of brain surgeons might not have much to do with low demand for such jobs, but more with the sheer difficulty of finding even enough people willing and capable enough to go through all the stages of training required for such a job. So, I think brain surgeons would still be paid high wages, even if there were more of them. I don't think their high pay is only explained by their scarcity, compared to the sheer availability of plumbers.
If plumbers came in short supply, their hourly rate might increase significantly, but still not get anywhere close to that of a brain surgeon. At some point, some jobs that involve very critical outcomes, like saving lives, demand higher cognitive abilities and are accordingly valued and paid more. It's not just a question of scarcity of supply, it's also a question of how valuable someone's services are and how much of a difference they can make in what people value most (usually, their lives).

I'm not disputing that there's a reason for it, I'm merely disputing that producing real value for a company always results in high pay. And the latter simply isn't true. Good luck trying to grow cacao on a large, intensive scale in the northern hemisphere.

Well, as I implied in one of the arguments I made above, the market is not always efficient, neither at a macroeconomic level nor at a microeconomic level. There are plenty of examples of CEOs that brought their companies to their knees with a slew of stupid management decisions. And there are plenty of examples of bright people who never managed to get to top jobs, for different reasons (power relations in the administrative board, their difficult personalities, different contexts that prevented them from getting there). That still doesn't imply that those that end up occupying high-paid jobs are not, on average, more valuable than those of lower pay. In a well-run company, there usually is a hierarchy of pay that is based on how much value their employees can bring. So, no, I wouldn't say that "producing real value for a company always results in high pay", because you can rarely find situations in which something always happens in human relations. There's a myriad of factors at play and outcomes are not always efficient. However, on average, if they didn't bring more value, nobody could even justify or think they're worth paying that much. You can employ your relatives in a company and you can get away with other inefficient decisions to some extent, but if you build a company only based on that, eventually you go belly up. The accumulation of bad decisions, lack of adaption to market conditions and so on will eventually punish you and run you into the ground. If you don't have capable people who can deliver and can justify their pay, eventually there will be others in other companies doing that and getting better results.


We seem to have a different definition of production and value. In any case, it doesn't really go against anything I said, nor does it say anything about his cognitive ability in contrast to other jobs. All it shows is that, as you say, those in power usually do whatever it takes to benefit those in power and keep them in power, and thus you should already see that you can't just make a direct link between reward, ability and value.

That example was meant to show that managerial positions can make and do make a big contribution, sometimes they even save a company from complete failure. So their high pay is very often justified. CEOs are often very smart people with unusual capabilities. However, they're not immune to the effects of power corruption. I think what most people complain about when they talk about such cases is how big the discrepancy between CEOs and average workers can be in terms of pay. Even though, it's up to each company to decide how much they want to reward a CEO for his/her services, it's really none of your business if you're not a shareholder, tbh. You don't have any skin in the game to have a right to criticise them for how they handle their own private money.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

Post by deleted_user0 »

Dolan wrote:
umeu wrote:It doesn't imply that. But it does imply that people in equal situations ought to be treated equally.

My argument was nothing of the sort. I never discussed whether people in equal situations ought to be treated equally. I argued that income should be taxed equally, using the same rule. There's a difference in emphasis there. I don't think there's anything special about the "people in equal situations" case, the same rule should apply in all cases. "Equal situations" is too abstract a case to even examine anyway.

But not everyone is in an equal situation. You say people who earn more are unfairly targeted when they're required to pay more taxes, because not everyone has to pay the same amount of taxes as they do. But not everyone earns a million dollars a year. Taxes are measured per bracket. And everyone in the same bracket, pays the same amount of taxes. There's nothing inherently unfair about this system. Following your argument, every tax targets people who pay it unfairly, as there's always people who can't pay it, or don't have to pay it, and therefore don't pay it. Take car tax. Let's assume it's fair to put a tax on people who own cars. You pay a percentage over the purchase value of the car. Obviously, if you don't have a car, you don't have to pay taxes. Can people who pay taxes over this say that the tax targets them unfairly? I find that doubtful reasoning. It's the same with income tax. If you have income, you pay tax, if you don't have an income, you don't pay tax. Progressive taxation is nothing more than this: If you have an income of 10k per month, you pay 50% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. If you have an income of 100k per month, you pay 60% tax, if you don't, you don't pay tax. This isn't more or less unfair than someone who doesn't have an income not having to pay tax, while those who do, do have to pay tax.

Income tax is not really comparable to taxes levied on other things, like property or capital gains. It's a mostly universal measure of someone's financial worth, because very few people can afford not to live on a steady income. So, no, I don't see how you can use the car tax example to somehow relativise things to the point that the whole argument about applying the same rule to all levels of income would be diluted. I think you're building a strawman here, I never focused on or argued for the principle that fair taxation means the same rule should apply to people of similar levels of income. What I argued for is that everyone should pay the same proportion of income tax.

Before we had a flat tax, we simply had a lump sum or poll tax, where everyone had to pay the same fixed price, regardless of how much they had or earned. Everyone had to pay 1 cow, no matter if you have 1 cow, or 1000 cows. You should be advocating for this, if you find progressive tax unfair. After that, we had flat tax. If you can't see that 20% on 1 dollar per day isn't the same as 20% on 10000 dollars per day, then I'm not sure what your definition of fair is. It's clear to me which of the 3 is fairer. It's clear to me too, which of the 3 have produced more stable and just societies.

With progressive tax, the rules are simply still the same for everyone, but the conditions aren't. There's no inequality of rules, this would imply that some people who earn 100k a month would have to pay tax, while others, who earn the same or more, don't have to. This isn't the case.

Also, progressive tax isn't the result of populist politicians handing out candy to a dumb electorate, it's the result of the elite recognizing the harm rampant and extreme poverty does to the stability of a nation. The basis for progressive tax was laid out before we even had universal suffrage.

Those are post-factum rationalisations, there was no actual assesment done by public authorities to see which tax system leads to stabler societies.
Actually flax taxes have been a staple of fiscal systems since time immemorial. Romans levied a flat tax on wealth, at least up until the empire expanded enough that it was no longer necessary. Though it's debatable how comparable pre-modern taxes on wealth were to modern income taxes. As I emphasised before, I only touched on one single component of the fiscal system (direct, income tax), there's a whole lot of more types of taxes, both direct and indirect, and those could continue to be set at different levels, depending on the nature of economic activity and the opportunity to levy those taxes.
Americans used to have a flat tax system until Lincoln passed the Revenue Act of 1862, that was supposed to provide enough revenue to fund the civil war. The reason why they introduced a progressive system is simply because they saw an opportunity to tax more where they could tax more. It was based on someone's "ability to pay". It was pure state-sanctioned greed. If they could get away with it, they thought, why not. Let's just take more money from those that can pay more, simply because our state needs more money. They didn't even need to check with voters if they supported this, because as a monopoly of force, the state could simply do that, to little opposition.

I sincerely hope you would bother to inform yourself about the field of the topic you're debating about.

It's a huge subject and I'm sure that neither your personal experience nor my anecdotal evidence can cover the whole topic with enough statistical significance.

And yet, plumbers make more money than elementary teachers, more money than high school teachers as well, even though both of them require more education, and are typically associated with a "higher cognitive ability". Underwater welders or miners make more than associate college professors. There's no reason to assume why the manager of the restaurant is cognitively more advanced than his kitchen staff, yet, he's paid more. There's no reason to assume that a basketball player is cognitively superior than a baker, or a lacrosse player, yet he's paid more. I'm not disputing that there aren't valid reasons for this, although not all causes that lead to this situation are valid reasons, in my opinion. I'm merely objecting vs your unsubstantiated claim that this is due to cognitive inferiority.

Uhm, I would ask for evidence to support this statement that plumbers have higher incomes than teachers. Of course, "teacher" is a very broad term that could be applied to anything from primary school substitute staff to fully-tenured university teacher. But even so, I think even in Eastern Europe, on average, teachers earn more than plumbers. Simply because teachers have one of the strongest trade unions in the country and they can and they did paralyse the country more than once, in order to get pay rises, even when the economy could ill afford it. On the other hand, plumbers lack any trade union protection and most of the time get paid on a per-project basis, unless they are employed by a firm.

Cognitive ability is not the only criterion in the whole income equation, of course. It's good enough to use for most economic sectors, but it's obviously not useful when you compare occupations like entertainment, sports, high-risk occupations with regular office jobs. There is a reason why there's a broad agreement among psychologists and other professions that IQ levels are predictive of socio-economic status. The reason is that people of higher IQ tend, on average, to do well in school and eventually get higher-paid jobs. That's why there's such an emphasis on education, in the first place. Because people believe education can help improve socio-economic outcomes. At least, this has been the mantra until now, because we're seeing somewhat different trends lately, especially in countries like the USA where education is so expensive that some people have decided to scrap it altogether and try their chances either with cheaper education and self-study or simply without formal education. I know, for example, of one guy who is like 19-20 years old now, who never finished high school, never got any diploma, and he's now working at Discord as a front-end developer, getting paid somewhere around 10000 bucks per month, after taxes (I think). Which is actually not that much, considering he has to live in San Francisco, but, oh boy, how far did he get without any formal professional education at just the age of 18, simply by learning by himself. Still, even in this case, we're still talking about someone who managed to get a well-paid job based on higher cognitive abilities.

There's no reason to assume why the manager of the restaurant is cognitively more advanced than his kitchen staff, yet, he's paid more.

Are you implying that Mitoe is not smarter than his McDonald's waiters? :ohmy: Reported.

Ok, well, that's possible, though it's usually assumed that people who are appointed as managers have some qualities that qualify them to oversee other people. And that usually, again, implies higher cognitive abilites. Sure, in real life, things don't happen according to abstract principles or to reasonable expectations, though, and very often some people are appointed as managers simply because the boss trusts them more or they inspire more authority. In that case, the firm and the boss take responsibility for such a decision to trust someone to be a manager, even though they may not be the best fit for the position. And they may eventually pay a price for sub-optimal decisions.

You're right about the fact that the more people are possibly capable of doing the job, increases the level of the salary, but it's also about how many people are required to do the job. We will simply never need as many brain surgeons as we will need plumbers, this has little to do with how hard the job is cognitively.

Not sure if anyone really assesed how many brain surgeons do we really need. There are places, countries, where judging by the hectic schedule of their brain surgeons and the long waiting lists for getting an operation, the system would surely not suffer if it had more of them. But the thing is they are very hard to train and bring to that level of experience that they are capable of saving lives doing one of the most complex types of operations. So the scarcity of brain surgeons might not have much to do with low demand for such jobs, but more with the sheer difficulty of finding even enough people willing and capable enough to go through all the stages of training required for such a job. So, I think brain surgeons would still be paid high wages, even if there were more of them. I don't think their high pay is only explained by their scarcity, compared to the sheer availability of plumbers.

I'm not disputing that there's a reason for it, I'm merely disputing that producing real value for a company always results in high pay. And the latter simply isn't true. Good luck trying to grow cacao on a large, intensive scale in the northern hemisphere.

Well, as I implied in one of the arguments I made above, the market is not always efficient, neither at a macroeconomic level nor at a microeconomic level. There are plenty of examples of CEOs that brought their companies to their knees with a slew of stupid management decisions. And there are plenty of examples of bright people who never managed to get to top jobs, for different reasons (power relations in the administrative board, their difficult personalities, different contexts that prevented them from getting there). That still doesn't imply that those that end up occupying high-paid jobs are not, on average, more valuable than those of lower pay. In a well-run company, there usually is a hierarchy of pay that is based on how much value their employees can bring. So, no, I wouldn't say that "producing real value for a company always results in high pay", because you can rarely find situations in which something always happens in human relations. There's a myriad of factors at play and outcomes are not always efficient. However, on average, if they didn't bring more value, nobody could even justify or think they're worth paying that much. You can employ your relatives in a company and you can get away with other inefficient decisions to some extent, but if you build a company only based on that, eventually you go belly up. The accumulation of bad decisions, lack of adaption to market conditions and so on will eventually punish you and run you into the ground. If you don't have capable people who can deliver and can justify their pay, eventually there will be others in other companies doing that and getting better results.


We seem to have a different definition of production and value. In any case, it doesn't really go against anything I said, nor does it say anything about his cognitive ability in contrast to other jobs. All it shows is that, as you say, those in power usually do whatever it takes to benefit those in power and keep them in power, and thus you should already see that you can't just make a direct link between reward, ability and value.

That example was meant to show that managerial positions can make and do make a big contribution, sometimes they even save a company from complete failure. So their high pay is very often justified. CEOs are often very smart people with unusual capabilities. However, they're not immune to the effects of power corruption. I think what most people complain about when they talk about such cases is how big the discrepancy between CEOs and average workers can be in terms of pay. Even though, it's up to each company to decide how much they want to reward a CEO for his/her services, it's really none of your business if you're not a shareholder, tbh. You don't have any skin in the game to have a right to criticise them for how they handle their own private money.



You dont have to argue it. It's implied. And as i explained, what you say doesnt really counter progressive tax. As long as you specify it in the rule. The point of the car tax was simply to point out that its not unfair to pay a tax just because someone else doesnt pay it. You're not adressing this. I am aware you never said that fair taxatation applies to people of similar income, that was my point. You say the rule should apply to all equally. I say it does. It applies equally to all who earn equally. This was your objection to progressive taxation, and i'm pointing out your objection doesnt hold. You may still think flat tax is fairer, i dont care. Im not in the business of changing minds. But it ought to be clear, that whatever reason you have for believing flat tax is fairer, has nothing to do with the rationalization you gave for it. All rationalizations are post factum, btw. But yes, different types of tax systems can coexist, and sometimes tax is introduced due to greed, sometimes out of need, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes bad. So what

Just applying the rule to everyone in the same way doesn't mean it's fair. The idea of progressive reward or punishment has always been ingrained in the human sense of justice. Imagine 2 men are convicted for stealing bread. 1 is a poor man who stole one loaf to feed his family. The other is a rich man who stole 5000 loafs of bread to enrich himself further. I don't think anyone believe it's fair to give both men 2 years in prison just because we ought to apply the same punishment for stealing bread, regardless of the amount of bread stolen etc. People pretend equality of outcome is some dirty word, but it really depends on what you mean by it, as it changes depending on the POV you take. The rule can be: All patients who go to the hospital should get equal treatment. If the outcome is: all patients get the best possible care for their affliction, then that's fair and just, despite everyone getting different treatment. If the outcome is: all patients get 2 tablets of aderol and are sent home, then this isn't remotely fair at all despite everyone getting the same treatment, as this treatment benefits some patients, while it doesn't affect others, and is even detrimental to many. You can't just make it the rule to give everyone the exact same treatment, call it fair because everyone is getting the same treatment and whenever someone raises problems about the outcome, say well... you should only judge a rule by it's application, and not by it's effect. That's strange, don't you think?

In any case, you can't just look at income tax in a vacuum, the reason we have it, is not because we want income to be taxed fairly, we want our society to be fair, at least when it comes to certain fundamental things that we consider basic living rights. Progressive income tax is not a end in itself, it's a means to an end. The end is the social democracy in which we have agreed to shoulder the burden of certain issues collectively in order to guarantee to everyone a basic level of living standard and security. In order for this system to work, a progressive income tax is required. If you don't believe it's a good system and you don't want to pay that tax, then you shouldn't be allowed to participate in anything that's a result of the social security system.

As for the education debate, im not talking from personal experience, i'm talking about experiments done by prestigious institutes and researchers, acadamic papers, etc. What you proposed has been tried out by a few school programmes and it had didnt have great results. More schools are starting to move away from education that's obsessed with outcome and performance, and are instead focusing on learning trajectories that focus on individual development and foster love of learning. Outcome based assessment that measures performance doesn't really create an environment that stimulates learning, and that's basically what a teacher ought to do. More and more people start to catch on that the competitive business model is a poor learning model. It may even be a poor business model in most cases, as it's associated more often with increased levels of depression and burn-outs.


As for the paygap, im talking about the usa, and i specified which kind of teacher i was talking about. In any case, there are different kinds of plumbers too.

Mitoe is indeed not necessarily smarter, though hes perhaps, or even likely, nore experienced. Obviously there are reasons why someone is a manager, im not disputing this. Im just disputing that ones position in a company, or in the economy, isnt entirely due to ones own (cognitive) abilities, but just as much about other things which can't easily be represented in a graph. Such as, trustworthiness, as you mentioned, but also weight, height, friendliness, toughness, other character or physical traits, not to mention other biases that are more or less abstract. And thats within a job. The type of society will also determine which type of job is lucrative, and this has little to do with who does the job. What it shows at most is which (cognitive )abilities are valued by our society, and wether a person possesses those. It says nothing about a whole range of other potential or actual abilities not measured or not valued.

Youre right that we can probably use more brain surgeons. And basically right about the rest too. Im sure it would always be a high status high reward job, since as you say, its life saving. But i think that if there would be way more of them required in general, and therefore way more of them trained (assuming this is possible) wages would go down. Obviously not enough for it to become a low paying job or anything.

For your one example of a manager saving the company, there are dozens of others who have ran it into the ground, and still walked away with a big severance package while their workers lost jobs and had to sue for backpay. Anyway, im not saying managers are useless, when you talked about producing value and gave microchips as an example, i thought you were talking aboit tangible goods. Which is why i gave cacao beans as an example. In case, shareholders get paid more than workers who actually produce to company's product, and those shareholders definitely dont produce anything of value.

Im not criticizing them currently, but i dont see why i dont have a right to. Public companies or not, that attitude will set us back to the time of the industrial revolution, which produced the inequality and misery that triggered social reforms that are the foundation of the modern social democracy.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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I could see a Kamala Harris/Tony Evers ticket doing well. Boosting African-American turnout in Detroit in Philadelphia would probably be the dems' best bet at flipping Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Wisconsin has less than half the amount of black people as those states, so having Evers (the current governor of Wisconsin) might take 'em over the finish line. Tammy Baldwin might be a substitute for Evers, since she's a Senator from there. The democrats have a bit of an issue where their choices are either bland neo-liberals or radical progressives, both of which are going to be poison against an incumbent President. (See: John Kerry and George McGovern) Doing a Bill Clinton-esque personality oriented campaign is the only way out of this hole I've been able to think of.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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I think you are very wrong @Amsel_ ppl would prolly NOT want another Clinton look-a-like. And I also really hope that the identity politics are soon a forgotten thing. The election will be about getting rid of corruptions and money buying politicians. It will also be about a public healthcare system, and a living wage. I really do not think Kamala Harris is the best pick. Imo she made some good things, but there are shady things in her past.
But lets talk about Kamala Harris, cos she def is a hot candidate, according to mainstream corp media.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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iwillspankyou wrote:I think you are very wrong @Amsel_ ppl would prolly NOT want another Clinton look-a-like. And I also really hope that the identity politics are soon a forgotten thing. The election will be about getting rid of corruptions and money buying politicians. It will also be about a public healthcare system, and a living wage. I really do not think Kamala Harris is the best pick. Imo she made some good things, but there are shady things in her past.
But lets talk about Kamala Harris, cos she def is a hot candidate, according to mainstream corp media.

I agree that people would probably not want a Clinton look-a-like. That's kind of what I meant when I said running a "bland neo-liberal" would be a bad idea. Although, I don't think the election is going to be about the things you say it will be. I think it's going to be about 1) moderates 2) the working-class 3) candidates' character.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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@Amsel_ I agree on no 2 the working class, and I think they are fed up with "moderate" and moderation, and I am not sure what you mean by "candidates character". If you mean that they have a record of not taking corp donations I will agree.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Amsel_ wrote:I could see a Kamala Harris/Tony Evers ticket doing well. Boosting African-American turnout in Detroit in Philadelphia would probably be the dems' best bet at flipping Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Wisconsin has less than half the amount of black people as those states, so having Evers (the current governor of Wisconsin) might take 'em over the finish line. Tammy Baldwin might be a substitute for Evers, since she's a Senator from there. The democrats have a bit of an issue where their choices are either bland neo-liberals or radical progressives, both of which are going to be poison against an incumbent President. (See: John Kerry and George McGovern) Doing a Bill Clinton-esque personality oriented campaign is the only way out of this hole I've been able to think of.

I think Michigan goes blue with any candidate tbh. Whitmer cleaned up when she ran against a mini-Trump. This election is going to be 100% about turnout. For sure a bland neo-liberal would lose. Any candidate that can energize the base will
Win.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Once Trump and Pence are impeached simulatenously Pelosi will be President and she'll easily win with the incumbency advantage.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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iwillspankyou wrote:@Amsel_ I agree on no 2 the working class, and I think they are fed up with "moderate" and moderation, and I am not sure what you mean by "candidates character". If you mean that they have a record of not taking corp donations I will agree.

By moderates I mean swing-voters. The type of person who isn't particularly aligned with either party, and will just vote for who they think is best. A lot of the time they don't even decide who they're voting for until they're in the voting booth. By candidates' character I was talking more about image. Everyone is going to be taking corporate donations and have super PACs set up for their campaign. Especially if they win the nomination. The democrats just made big gains in the house thanks to corporate money, and it would be insane to give that up. By candidates' character I'm speaking more of "is this person charming?" "does he have a clean history?"

n0el wrote:I think Michigan goes blue with any candidate tbh. Whitmer cleaned up when she ran against a mini-Trump. This election is going to be 100% about turnout. For sure a bland neo-liberal would lose. Any candidate that can energize the base will
Win.

What type of candidate do you think can energize the base?
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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Amy Klobuchar 2020
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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What type of candidate do you think can energize the base?

A candidate that talks about the issues that most US ppl are concerned with, and does not take money from big money interests. I have my favorite you might know ;) Sanders have already energized the base :shock:
I also like Tulsi Gabbard, and Nina Turner if she decides to run.
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Re: 2020 Democratic Primary

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He energized the base so hard that he lost
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