8 ms·

Oddly enough, the more tangible benefits to society a job provides, the less it is paid for. It's almost like a "your job is not bullshit" salary deduction. Fr

Oddly enough, the more tangible benefits to society a job provides, the less it is paid for. It's almost like a "your job is not bullshit" salary deduction. From bakery to supermarket to food delivery, pretty much all of the people I interact with daily are paid badly.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Yeah, I have no idea what the solution is, but I was pretty down during the pandemic that all the "essential worker" jobs that we truly depend upon, e.g. delivery, grocery, sanitation, many (but obviously not all) health care workers, etc., are paid shit, and further more often have to put their health on the line to work, while honestly a huge number of highly paid tech worker jobs (that now get to happen from the safety and comfort of home) could disappear and society wouldn't notice.
- jdkee 6y ago
  Tax wealth, not income.
  - DuskStar 6y ago
    Tax consumption, not wealth or income.
    - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
      Generally that's considered regressive (so we all have to eat and eat about the same amount of food each day.) For jeff bezos the Tesco Extra Special range is a rounding error whereas for the bottom 10% it's a large fraction of daily income. taxing that basically taxes a large fraction of their daily income.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Tax consumption progressively.
        Thorrez 6y ago
        How would you implement that? Isn't consumption tax generally a sales tax? At the time of a specific sale it would be hard to find out the right tax rate.
        dahfizz 6y ago
        You could have a large personal deduction. You could tax everything at the lowest rate at the point of sale but make people do the accounting and pay their real rate if they are in a higher rate. The "tax" at the point of sale would act like income withholdings do now. You could categorize good so that yatchs have a much higher rate than groceries. You could also come up with an average price for good so that really expensive e.g. clothes and cars are taxed at a higher rate than they are for "normal" goods. All it takes is some creativity.
        Thorrez 6y ago
        It requires people to save receipts on everything they buy. People (in states that charge sales tax) already sort of are required to do this for goods they buy online that don't charge tax. The vast vast vast majority of people (every single person I've asked) evade this tax. I try to pay the tax myself (I'm the only person I know who does this) by going through online receipts, putting them in a spreadsheet and calculating the tax. I know I'm missing some though, I buy too much stuff. There are even people I know who don't just evade the tax out of laziness, but evade it intentionally to save money, intentionally buying stuff online because it doesn't charge tax. My point is that this will be a very large amount of effort for people, and there will be a large amount of tax evasion due to both laziness and greed.
        082349872349872 6y ago
        That's more or less what an income tax is. To first order, one only needs to realise income sufficient to support consumption.
      - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
        Not hard to eliminate the regressive parts of this, just give a tax credit for the first $X dollars of consumption. It took me a while to understand consumption taxes, but now I'm fully in favor of them. The level of your standard of living is solely determined by what you spend money on, not your total wealth. Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax.
        coldtea 6y ago
        >Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax. It's actually just as easy, if not more. E.g. you don't "buy" a car, your trust/company buys it, and you just happen to use it for "business purposes". Same for all your other needs. And good luck trying to tax spending abroad...
        kiba 6y ago
        Just get rid of any "business purpose" and deductions.
        coldtea 6y ago
        With stopping all businesses from having expenses?
        dredmorbius 6y ago
        Now you can no longer simply tax transactions --- business points of sale are fewer in number than individual budgets, and are better instrumented for bookkeeping, auditing, and taxation --- and need somehow to track all 0ersonal consumption expenditures individually.
    - pydry 6y ago
      That's even more regressive than taxing income, which is even more regressive than taxing wealth.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      The ultrarich don't comsume as much of their wealth, whereas the poorer consume everything they make (aka "hand to mouth"). A 10,000,000/year consumption by a billionaire is an insignificant part of their wealth and their annual revenue, but still allows for an extravagant lifestyle. A 40,000/year consumption by a working class person make barely allow them to make end meet, and it might be everything they made in that year (and they might even owe a lot as well). So, taxing 20% on consumption, would net 2M on the billionaire (a laughable amount for them) and 8K for the working class person (which could be a matter of life or death for them, some health treatment, their kids going to college, etc.)
      - el_nahual 6y ago
        Consumption can be taxed on a sliding, marginal scale, and it has no upper bound, unlike income tax which can't go above 100%
      - weaksauce 6y ago
        it's staggering just how large a billion of something is... a million seconds is about a 11.5 days. a billion seconds is about 32 years. a few million dollars to a billionaire is next to nothing.
      - ropable 6y ago
        So don't tax the first (e.g.) $25,000 of a person's annual income/consumption, then tax the remainder at a progressive rate.
        coldtea 6y ago
        Even if we tax it at a progressive rate, the total consumption tax paid by the rich will be only nominally, not percentage wise, bigger than the middle class/poor, because their consumption doesn't even come close to their revenue/wealth (aside from the fact that it's also hidden behind 2000 shell companies whose assets they use for personal use).
      - dahfizz 6y ago
        We need to separate the location of the tax and how progressive the tax is. They are orthogonal. Any tax can be made more progressive in implementation (high deductions, tiered rates, etc). Impact on poor vs wealthy shouldn't be a consideration when deciding what we want to tax.
    - el_nahual 6y ago
      A characteristic of consumption taxes that is often ignored is that they can go above 100%. So a progressive consumption tax could easily be 0 for low levels of consumption and 100%+ for ultra-high ones (think, over 10MM/yr). I can't think of why we wouldn't tax consumption above 50MM say at a multiple or two of 100%. Since much of this consumption is conspicuous, it's even possible that high levels of taxation could even be geffen-like: Yes, we both have lear jets but I'm so rich and spend so much that mine cost _twice_ what yours did.
    - stephenhuey 6y ago
      My college roommate came back from an economics class one day and giddily told me how the professor talked about awesome it would be to just tax on consumption...except that it would likely incentivize a lot more black market trading.
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    Except we don’t tax non-profits and the rich are already smart enough to have trusts, foundations, a string of 506(x) variation entities, already at their disposal. We need a tax system overhaul but I’m afraid no one has the political will to do it before stagflation creeps in from the current fed policies and bankrupts is all anyway.
  - gameman144 6y ago
    I'm confused as to the motivation here; taxing wealth as opposed to taxing income seems to disincentivize saving and investment as opposed to consumption. Some consumption is definitely necessary, but I'd argue that savings and investment are also extremely important to an efficient economy. From the practical perspective, if one has the same lifetime earnings as another, they will have paid the same amount of tax over their lifetime. Why should they be taxed again for choosing to save or invest that money? I'm all for taxing any gain once it's actually converted into income (and while I understand the motivation behind different capital gains rates, I'm not super opposed to taxing capital gains as income.) Taxing wealth always seems to me to be explicitly taxing the choice to invest in the future or build something, though.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      All taxes have an impact on something. Taxing income disincentivizes circulation of money within community. When A does some work for B, B does some work for C, C does some work for D, and each of them pays a fraction of the income to the govenment, after a few steps the money effectively disappears from the community. The only way to get it back is to do some work for someone outside the community. But maybe the people A, B, C, D are effective at helping each other locally, but not really competitive at providing work outside the community. With no income tax, they could trade with each other. With income tax, their choices are either gray market or poverty. Wealth tax hurts the startups. Income tax hurts the local communities. Land tax hurts the rent seekers. The rent seekers and startups have greater lobbying power than poor communities, and our laws reflect that.
- snarf21 6y ago
  We could get rid of capital gains tax and tax it as normal income. We could also get rid of like kind exchange. This money could be used to lower or eliminate income taxes for the poor. It is all about incentivizing how we want capital to be invested for the benefit of society. Today we've decided that shareholders are primary for public companies. The stock market is at all time highs but it comes with a cost.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    Yeah, when it comes to capital gains I always thought it made the most sense to tax it as normal income but to index the basis against inflation.
  - herpderperator 6y ago
    In the US, investments held less than a year are taxed at normal income.
  - pkaye 6y ago
    Isn't Biden proposing to do that for those who earn more than $1M. Not sure how likely that will pass though.
  - innagadadavida 6y ago
    How about we abolish all taxes and just tax the total wealth? That will give people the incentive to work as opposed to making a quick buck and retiring.
    - bluedevil2k 6y ago
      How many people are looking to make a quick buck and retire? The people who are billionaires are billionaires because they are super competitive and super hard workers. Gates, Bezos, Jobs - you think they worked 8 hours a day when they were growing their companies? No, those guys are driven to succeed and that doesn’t just go away when you make X dollars.
      - 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
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- xorcist 6y ago
  Medical doctors are paid pretty well, and that's a real job if there ever was one. It's interesting to see how that profession has held up so well, in almost all parts of the world, while others have slowly inflated supply to lower payments.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Medical doctors are paid pretty well, and that's a real job if there ever was one. On the other hand, the health industry (from drugs to hospitals) makes a shittoan of money, and most of it is by pushing BS on people and (in the US) by overcharging 10x simple procedures...
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    > while others have slowly inflated supply to lower payments. Could you give some examples? Real personal income has been rising pretty steadily for as long as the data has been collected [1]. So the median person earns more as the years go on, not less. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
    - xorcist 6y ago
      Relative to other jobs, not in absolute terms (which isn't very meaningful to compare). Lots of specialized jobs start out well paid and then spread out over time as more enter the profession. Airline pilots, for example, used to be a lucrative job but isn't now. School teachers used to be paid well. Engineering is a bit of a mixed bag, but there are plenty of examples there too. Medical doctors is the common exception to this.
rebelos 6y ago
Your observations are coincidental and skewed by cognitive bias. A neurosurgeon is one obvious counterexample. The predominant determinant of labor compensation is substitutability.
- Maarten88 6y ago
  > The predominant determinant of labor compensation is substitutability. Which proves the article right: the guy labored hard to move the proceeds of his partners work into a forest of trusts that only he knows and that only benefits him personally, by statute. He can't be substituted anymore!
  - rebelos 6y ago
    Labor compensation is a subset of compensation in the abstract (or, even more broadly, "return on time and capital"). Importantly, in most economies, it's typically set by employers hiring within an efficient labor market.
    - brmgb 6y ago
      I might have believed you before the covid epidemic but I think it definitely proved that wrong. We have a dearth of essential people. Nurses are a perfect example. Yet they keep being paid like crap. It is becoming clearer by the day that the job market is not an efficient market at all. Why keep pretending ?
      - rebelos 6y ago
        First of all, everything is running remarkably smoothly given the circumstances. The Covid-19 statistics are largely a consequence of people acting individually out of self interest and ignorance, yielding negative systemic externalities, and not a dysfunction of the healthcare system. Furthermore, if you think about how insurance risk pooling works, it's quite easy to see how an insurance-backed, profit-motivated healthcare system may not be the best vehicle to address a systemic health problem afflicting the entire population. You may recall AIG as a rough analogue for this situation. Or even entities insuring against natural disasters in California. The government has to step in to prevent failure. And then we have the most obvious counterargument to your flawed thesis: why would labor compensation go up during a recession with high unemployment and considerable attendant macroeconomic instability? Those factors have contributed to dramatically increased substitutability and thus quite naturally suppress wage growth.
newguy1234 6y ago
Labor is not valued based on the "benefits to society" it provides. It is valued based on supply and demand. The low paid jobs are jobs that basically anyone can do with minimal education or on the job training. If those jobs were harder to do then they would certainly be paid more.
- pixelbash 6y ago
  Some of the hardest jobs are underpaid, and level of education means less than it used to. Nurses and scientists for example. Partner is a microbiologist PHD graduate and starting salary wouldn't be much different my self taught first coding job - not that getting a job right now is really possible anyway.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Yeah, I have no idea what the solution is, but I was pretty down during the pandemic that all the "essential worker" jobs that we truly depend upon, e.g. delivery, grocery, sanitation, many (but obviously not all) health care workers, etc., are paid shit, and further more often have to put their health on the line to work, while honestly a huge number of highly paid tech worker jobs (that now get to happen from the safety and comfort of home) could disappear and society wouldn't notice.

jdkee 6y ago
Tax wealth, not income.
- DuskStar 6y ago
  Tax consumption, not wealth or income.
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    Generally that's considered regressive (so we all have to eat and eat about the same amount of food each day.) For jeff bezos the Tesco Extra Special range is a rounding error whereas for the bottom 10% it's a large fraction of daily income. taxing that basically taxes a large fraction of their daily income.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Tax consumption progressively.
      - Thorrez 6y ago
        How would you implement that? Isn't consumption tax generally a sales tax? At the time of a specific sale it would be hard to find out the right tax rate.
        dahfizz 6y ago
        You could have a large personal deduction. You could tax everything at the lowest rate at the point of sale but make people do the accounting and pay their real rate if they are in a higher rate. The "tax" at the point of sale would act like income withholdings do now. You could categorize good so that yatchs have a much higher rate than groceries. You could also come up with an average price for good so that really expensive e.g. clothes and cars are taxed at a higher rate than they are for "normal" goods. All it takes is some creativity.
        Thorrez 6y ago
        It requires people to save receipts on everything they buy. People (in states that charge sales tax) already sort of are required to do this for goods they buy online that don't charge tax. The vast vast vast majority of people (every single person I've asked) evade this tax. I try to pay the tax myself (I'm the only person I know who does this) by going through online receipts, putting them in a spreadsheet and calculating the tax. I know I'm missing some though, I buy too much stuff. There are even people I know who don't just evade the tax out of laziness, but evade it intentionally to save money, intentionally buying stuff online because it doesn't charge tax. My point is that this will be a very large amount of effort for people, and there will be a large amount of tax evasion due to both laziness and greed.
      - 082349872349872 6y ago
        That's more or less what an income tax is. To first order, one only needs to realise income sufficient to support consumption.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      Not hard to eliminate the regressive parts of this, just give a tax credit for the first $X dollars of consumption. It took me a while to understand consumption taxes, but now I'm fully in favor of them. The level of your standard of living is solely determined by what you spend money on, not your total wealth. Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >Plus taxing consumption would be much easier and harder to skirt than a wealth tax. It's actually just as easy, if not more. E.g. you don't "buy" a car, your trust/company buys it, and you just happen to use it for "business purposes". Same for all your other needs. And good luck trying to tax spending abroad...
        kiba 6y ago
        Just get rid of any "business purpose" and deductions.
        coldtea 6y ago
        With stopping all businesses from having expenses?
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        Now you can no longer simply tax transactions --- business points of sale are fewer in number than individual budgets, and are better instrumented for bookkeeping, auditing, and taxation --- and need somehow to track all 0ersonal consumption expenditures individually.
  - pydry 6y ago
    That's even more regressive than taxing income, which is even more regressive than taxing wealth.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    The ultrarich don't comsume as much of their wealth, whereas the poorer consume everything they make (aka "hand to mouth"). A 10,000,000/year consumption by a billionaire is an insignificant part of their wealth and their annual revenue, but still allows for an extravagant lifestyle. A 40,000/year consumption by a working class person make barely allow them to make end meet, and it might be everything they made in that year (and they might even owe a lot as well). So, taxing 20% on consumption, would net 2M on the billionaire (a laughable amount for them) and 8K for the working class person (which could be a matter of life or death for them, some health treatment, their kids going to college, etc.)
    - el_nahual 6y ago
      Consumption can be taxed on a sliding, marginal scale, and it has no upper bound, unlike income tax which can't go above 100%
    - weaksauce 6y ago
      it's staggering just how large a billion of something is... a million seconds is about a 11.5 days. a billion seconds is about 32 years. a few million dollars to a billionaire is next to nothing.
    - ropable 6y ago
      So don't tax the first (e.g.) $25,000 of a person's annual income/consumption, then tax the remainder at a progressive rate.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        Even if we tax it at a progressive rate, the total consumption tax paid by the rich will be only nominally, not percentage wise, bigger than the middle class/poor, because their consumption doesn't even come close to their revenue/wealth (aside from the fact that it's also hidden behind 2000 shell companies whose assets they use for personal use).
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      We need to separate the location of the tax and how progressive the tax is. They are orthogonal. Any tax can be made more progressive in implementation (high deductions, tiered rates, etc). Impact on poor vs wealthy shouldn't be a consideration when deciding what we want to tax.
  - el_nahual 6y ago
    A characteristic of consumption taxes that is often ignored is that they can go above 100%. So a progressive consumption tax could easily be 0 for low levels of consumption and 100%+ for ultra-high ones (think, over 10MM/yr). I can't think of why we wouldn't tax consumption above 50MM say at a multiple or two of 100%. Since much of this consumption is conspicuous, it's even possible that high levels of taxation could even be geffen-like: Yes, we both have lear jets but I'm so rich and spend so much that mine cost _twice_ what yours did.
  - stephenhuey 6y ago
    My college roommate came back from an economics class one day and giddily told me how the professor talked about awesome it would be to just tax on consumption...except that it would likely incentivize a lot more black market trading.
- godzillabrennus 6y ago
  Except we don’t tax non-profits and the rich are already smart enough to have trusts, foundations, a string of 506(x) variation entities, already at their disposal. We need a tax system overhaul but I’m afraid no one has the political will to do it before stagflation creeps in from the current fed policies and bankrupts is all anyway.
- gameman144 6y ago
  I'm confused as to the motivation here; taxing wealth as opposed to taxing income seems to disincentivize saving and investment as opposed to consumption. Some consumption is definitely necessary, but I'd argue that savings and investment are also extremely important to an efficient economy. From the practical perspective, if one has the same lifetime earnings as another, they will have paid the same amount of tax over their lifetime. Why should they be taxed again for choosing to save or invest that money? I'm all for taxing any gain once it's actually converted into income (and while I understand the motivation behind different capital gains rates, I'm not super opposed to taxing capital gains as income.) Taxing wealth always seems to me to be explicitly taxing the choice to invest in the future or build something, though.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    All taxes have an impact on something. Taxing income disincentivizes circulation of money within community. When A does some work for B, B does some work for C, C does some work for D, and each of them pays a fraction of the income to the govenment, after a few steps the money effectively disappears from the community. The only way to get it back is to do some work for someone outside the community. But maybe the people A, B, C, D are effective at helping each other locally, but not really competitive at providing work outside the community. With no income tax, they could trade with each other. With income tax, their choices are either gray market or poverty. Wealth tax hurts the startups. Income tax hurts the local communities. Land tax hurts the rent seekers. The rent seekers and startups have greater lobbying power than poor communities, and our laws reflect that.
snarf21 6y ago
We could get rid of capital gains tax and tax it as normal income. We could also get rid of like kind exchange. This money could be used to lower or eliminate income taxes for the poor. It is all about incentivizing how we want capital to be invested for the benefit of society. Today we've decided that shareholders are primary for public companies. The stock market is at all time highs but it comes with a cost.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  Yeah, when it comes to capital gains I always thought it made the most sense to tax it as normal income but to index the basis against inflation.
- herpderperator 6y ago
  In the US, investments held less than a year are taxed at normal income.
- pkaye 6y ago
  Isn't Biden proposing to do that for those who earn more than $1M. Not sure how likely that will pass though.
- innagadadavida 6y ago
  How about we abolish all taxes and just tax the total wealth? That will give people the incentive to work as opposed to making a quick buck and retiring.
  - bluedevil2k 6y ago
    How many people are looking to make a quick buck and retire? The people who are billionaires are billionaires because they are super competitive and super hard workers. Gates, Bezos, Jobs - you think they worked 8 hours a day when they were growing their companies? No, those guys are driven to succeed and that doesn’t just go away when you make X dollars.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xorcist 6y ago
Medical doctors are paid pretty well, and that's a real job if there ever was one. It's interesting to see how that profession has held up so well, in almost all parts of the world, while others have slowly inflated supply to lower payments.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Medical doctors are paid pretty well, and that's a real job if there ever was one. On the other hand, the health industry (from drugs to hospitals) makes a shittoan of money, and most of it is by pushing BS on people and (in the US) by overcharging 10x simple procedures...
- dahfizz 6y ago
  > while others have slowly inflated supply to lower payments. Could you give some examples? Real personal income has been rising pretty steadily for as long as the data has been collected [1]. So the median person earns more as the years go on, not less. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
  - xorcist 6y ago
    Relative to other jobs, not in absolute terms (which isn't very meaningful to compare). Lots of specialized jobs start out well paid and then spread out over time as more enter the profession. Airline pilots, for example, used to be a lucrative job but isn't now. School teachers used to be paid well. Engineering is a bit of a mixed bag, but there are plenty of examples there too. Medical doctors is the common exception to this.

rebelos 6y ago

Your observations are coincidental and skewed by cognitive bias. A neurosurgeon is one obvious counterexample. The predominant determinant of labor compensation is substitutability.

Maarten88 6y ago
> The predominant determinant of labor compensation is substitutability. Which proves the article right: the guy labored hard to move the proceeds of his partners work into a forest of trusts that only he knows and that only benefits him personally, by statute. He can't be substituted anymore!
- rebelos 6y ago
  Labor compensation is a subset of compensation in the abstract (or, even more broadly, "return on time and capital"). Importantly, in most economies, it's typically set by employers hiring within an efficient labor market.
  - brmgb 6y ago
    I might have believed you before the covid epidemic but I think it definitely proved that wrong. We have a dearth of essential people. Nurses are a perfect example. Yet they keep being paid like crap. It is becoming clearer by the day that the job market is not an efficient market at all. Why keep pretending ?
    - rebelos 6y ago
      First of all, everything is running remarkably smoothly given the circumstances. The Covid-19 statistics are largely a consequence of people acting individually out of self interest and ignorance, yielding negative systemic externalities, and not a dysfunction of the healthcare system. Furthermore, if you think about how insurance risk pooling works, it's quite easy to see how an insurance-backed, profit-motivated healthcare system may not be the best vehicle to address a systemic health problem afflicting the entire population. You may recall AIG as a rough analogue for this situation. Or even entities insuring against natural disasters in California. The government has to step in to prevent failure. And then we have the most obvious counterargument to your flawed thesis: why would labor compensation go up during a recession with high unemployment and considerable attendant macroeconomic instability? Those factors have contributed to dramatically increased substitutability and thus quite naturally suppress wage growth.

newguy1234 6y ago

Labor is not valued based on the "benefits to society" it provides. It is valued based on supply and demand. The low paid jobs are jobs that basically anyone can do with minimal education or on the job training. If those jobs were harder to do then they would certainly be paid more.

pixelbash 6y ago
Some of the hardest jobs are underpaid, and level of education means less than it used to. Nurses and scientists for example. Partner is a microbiologist PHD graduate and starting salary wouldn't be much different my self taught first coding job - not that getting a job right now is really possible anyway.