We Desperately Need Maximum Wage Laws
With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.
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Nah, change income and networth tax brackets. More brackets, over a wider range
The lowest incomes pay no tax at all. The higher you get, the more you pay. Once you reach 1 million per year, income taxes go to 100%.
Same for networth taxes. Let's say that the max networth should be 20 million
Again, those that have nothing, pay nothing Those that have a little, pay a little Once you reach 20 million, anything over that goes automatically 100% to tax
Nobody van get richer than that level, ever... The numbers are quickly made up but with more details added, I think that system would be awesome. We can keep everything the exact same, we only change this.
Nobody will be much richer than the rest, or much poorer than the rest
Governments will have huge tax incomes that it can use for the social net that protects everyone. Use it to find free healthcare, free education, free housing, universal income, you name it.
Tie those numbers to minimum wage or UBI values. If the rich want more, they gotta let others have more too.
Oh sure. The numbers are made up, of course and a lot of details would have to be added, but in basics, i think that idea would work
I put together a concept that I called "Universal Ranked Income". Everyone gets benefits like generic food, basic shelter, healthcare, utilities, and so forth for free. Money is used to buy luxuries such as bigger houses or fancier clothes, and jobs are classified into ranks. Each rank grants an absolute income per year while someone holds a job. Without a job, a citizen gets $10,000 per year by default. Someone with the highest ranked job, such as an Astronaut at Rank 5, gets $100,000. After taxes, it is about $8,500 and $60,000 income respectively. The lowest rank job (2), such as a waiter, gets $40k, $30k after their own taxes. Someone with the best job gets x2 income than a waitress.
There are also hard caps on annual income, savings, and assets of $100,000 for each category. By making incomes very fixed, we make it easier to detect when someone's wealth is too large, making it easier to investigate them and to confiscate their outsized wealth. We might also be preventing inflation, since incomes are fixed numbers - the economy has to react to the wealth bands, rather than the income reacting to the economy.
That seems rather over complicated and would cause a lot of other issues. Your entire economy now has to deal with everyone basicsally having more or less the same income, while vendors get very limited in how they can differentiate with prices. Inflation will still exist,how will you fix that with these fixed incomes?
One option is for the government to use its taxes to pay for inflation, especially for goods from outside the nation. There will have be some sort of "translation" layer of internal economy against that of foreign nations, so the government would have to develop tools and institutions for handling that. For the universal goods that the nation supplies to people, it can use taxes to buy the necessary supply chains. Companies that sell luxury goods will have to compete against the free articles, so there is pressure on corporations to adjust their pricing and quality against what the government offers.
For the URI (Universal Ranked Income), the bulk of taxes comes from corporations, since they are expected to regularly exceed the wealth caps by a good deal.
In any case, I don't think it is actually complicated, at least compared to our current economy. For example, prices of goods vary from one location to another, also known as cost-of-living. URI instead makes all locations in the nation have free basic goods and services, and jobs to have fixed incomes. People will be able to much more easily understand their fiscals, both as a business and as individuals. Much of our current economy is also built on exploitation, such as ghost jobs, the threat of firing people, wage theft, immigrant pay, and so on. By making it easy to understand how much money there should be, it makes it easier for people to detect and oppose corruption. Further, universal benefits like free shelter, healthcare, food, and so forth, allows for unionization since bad companies lose a great deal of exploitative pressure on workers.
What we lose by sacrificing capitalism's efficiency, we get back in controlling corruption and ensuring fair dealings.