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> and vague populist "we'll just tax X" won't fix it The richest people and biggest corporations own such an unimaginably large amount of wealth that taxing th

• powercf 3y ago
  If wealthy companies should pay French pensions, simply because they can, do you think that wealthy westerners should pay for, say, pensions or services in Africa? Raising taxes on wealthy companies to cover pensions seems arbitrary and unfair (by which I don't mean that taxes shouldn't necessarily be raised).
  • riku_iki 3y ago
    > wealthy westerners should pay for, say, pensions or services in Africa? actually this sounds reasonable, and Western countries obviously pay already through various programs.
  • p-e-w 3y ago
    > do you think that wealthy westerners should pay for, say, pensions or services in Africa? If they have business interests in Africa, absolutely. The world's biggest corporations are profiting massively from having access to the French market. But that access is not a given, it is being granted by the French people, and can be taken away at any time for any reason the French people consider valid.
• cpursley 3y ago
  Care to break down the actual math of how that would work?
  • nikanj 3y ago
    1) We take the cash reserves from large companies 2) Large companies either go bankrupt or leave the country 3) The economy is completely wrecked 4) Venezuela
    • HPsquared 3y ago
      5) We spend the cash reserves, increasing inflation but not getting any more work done
    • nxx788 3y ago
      If we taxed wealth at 1%, the wealthiest would still be getting wealthier and we'd be able to cover the needs of so many more people, fight climate change, or whatever else. You think Apple stops operating here because of a 1% headwind? No way.
  • b112 3y ago
    Some info... All of these problems are due to population collapse, due to incredibly low birthrates. Canada is choosing another method, with current targets of 500k/year, and talk of even higher numbers: https://globalnews.ca/news/9836414/canada-immigration-aging-report/ https://globalnews.ca/news/9836414/canada-immigration-aging-... With 40M people, that's more than a 1% per year. And note, those are immigrants, not refugees, or other classes of new Canadians. Just the housing and infrastructure needs alone, and initial support, as well as dealing with validation -> full citizenship is mind bogglng. But beyond that, I believe it is too fast as a culture shift. I want new blood, new ideas, but I also want the ideals of a hoghly democratic nation, its openness to newcomers, its tolerance to not be lost in a voice of newness. EG, I want newcomer input, but I don't want it to drown out what's here. But that's how worrisome the population graph is. There are not enough young people to take care of the old, the old who have worked their entire lives, building what is around us, and paying for tgeir elders to retire, a social contract that is vital. So we know we are doing a risky thing, as all fast change is risky. But we must, or... what? France chose another path. I can't say it is right or wrong. But ... if nothing is done, it won't be good. The stupid part is, everyone is dealing with this. China, Russia, the entire West, we all knew. We all knew the numbers, all of us, decades ago. But we waited. For example, Canada could have ramped up immigration a decade ago, thus softening the social impact.
• csomar 3y ago
  Peeeew. Dude. > The richest people and biggest corporations own such an unimaginably large amount of wealth that taxing them would fix just about anything. Still peanuts comparing to the "global" economy or a country needs (in terms of pension or health). Also a significant portion of this wealth is paper money that will take a significant hit at sale. > In 2017, Apple's cash reserves were $250 billion. That's just a single company, hoarding reserves that could clear the national debt of most countries. Think about that for a second. Why not then, dip into your bank account? By this logic, there are trillion of $$ in bank accounts all around the world. That's a lot of money. > There is absolutely no shortage of wealth in the world. There is easily enough to pay all the pensions, including far into the future, even considering demographic change. > But of course, if governments are OK with allowing corporations to act like sovereign countries, raising the retirement age can seem like a reasonable alternative to moving all that wealth to where it actually belongs. Sure, let's make every 20-30-40 something work for these 60+ all day instead of having a life. The reality is that the pension system of France was pretty good when it started because there were very few pensioners. Now that the situation is not the same, it means each pensioner will get a little less. And the system is already maxed out to maximum max. Many people are deserting France because of the high taxes and high pension system contributions.
  • southerntofu 3y ago
    > Sure, let's make every 20-30-40 something work for these 60+ all day instead of having a life. Most of the value produced by workers goes into the pockets of corporate overlords. For their bosses and managers, for the shareholders, and for the landlords of the corporate mafia who take in 30-70% of working people's income. By your own logic, abolish corporate profits and for-profit housing, and let every worker enjoy huge benefits and retirement. > Now that the situation is not the same, it means each pensioner will get a little less. This is not wrong. But it's entirely due to Macron reforming the pension system with a "point" system. Without such reform, pensioners would continue to get just as much money, adjusted for inflation.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      > By your own logic, abolish corporate profits and for-profit housing, and let every worker enjoy huge benefits and retirement. Corporations are owned by pension funds. Investment funds own 80% of the S&P 500. They would be insolvent if corporations stopped posting profits. But also, the reason corporations make so much money is regulatory capture. They buy laws that foreclose competition which makes everything cost more. It's the same reason housing is so expensive (the anti-competition laws there are zoning rules). You can't fix this with taxes -- tax them and everything still costs too much. Meanwhile the government is not going to give the money to you, they give it to the politically connected or use it to buy votes from interest groups with inefficient programs. You have to actually fix the laws that enable this -- as in repeal them, not add some more to the pile.
• kneebonian 3y ago
  > The richest people and biggest corporations own such an unimaginably large amount of wealth that taxing them would fix just about anything. They don't have wealth though, they have capital or money but not wealth. Wealth is actual goods and services, money is an abstract representation of the ability to obtain these things. As the pandemic proved it doesn't matter how much money you have, if there just isn't stuff to spend it on. To quote Douglas Adams "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." Any real solution needs to focus on wealth creation, and not on moving around small green pieces of paper. As long as people's standard of living is increasing they really care a lot less about money and income inequality, people only start caring about that when they realize things are getting worse.
• NoLinkToMe 3y ago
  I mean put it into perspective. There's 300 million Americans who will live on average 15 years in retirement, currently at an average retirement income of $75k. So this group will be spending about $1 million in retirement per person, so for 300 million Americans you're talking about 300 trillion in spending during their retirement. Now you take the most wealthy and successful corporation in the history of mankind, Apple, take its cash reserves (250 billion), subtract its debt (100 billion), and tax it (e.g. 10%) and you're left with 15 billion, which gives you the fraction 0.00005 of the 300 trillion you'll want to raise for US retirement of everyone alive in the US today. So in actuality you'd need to have another 20 thousand Apples, and you'd get to your number, just for the US population. Ignore of course the rest of the 97% of the world population, despite Apple having earned its cash reserves from its global business, they'll need to find their own first-in-class corporate behemoth to tax for their retirement. ---- I think more importantly, you have to acknowledge that money is just a tool for expressing value, but fundamentally has no value. What does have value is actual production. Everything that the people of the Earth can produce in a given year, and consume in a given year, constitutes their wealth. The more people work & produce, the richer we are, in total. Apple could have 1 quadrillion in cash, if nobody on the planet is working, Apple and everyone else is extremely poor. Retiring simply means: you do not produce, but you do consume what others produce. And that's fine if it's sufficiently balanced, where the working produce sufficiently for their and the non-working's consumption. And in France it was extremely clear from all studies that this condition wasn't going to be met the coming decades. Raising money through taxes doesn't change that fundamental truth, that this system is only sustainable if it is balanced, and it wasn't. To simplify it, if every working person produces 2 loafs of bread, and every person eats 1 loaf of bread per day, in a population of 10 people you need 5 to be working, and 5 can retire. 10 loafs are produced, and 10 loafs are consumed. If the retirement age is low enough that 3 people work and 7 retire, you'd produce 6 loafs, but the population still needs 10 loafs to consume. Taxing companies in this population to finance this earlier retirement age, just puts money in the hands of the 7. It doesn't change the fundamental issue, which is that there's 6 loafs of production and 10 are necessary. So you'll see rapid inflation, bread becoming very expensive, some working and some retirees having no bread, in other words, poverty, versus the situation where the retirement age was a bit higher and all demand was being met by supply. Of course actual economic models are way more complex, but this example illustrates: it's not money, or taxes, that constitutes or generates wealth, it's just a unit of account. What makes us wealthy is that which we produce. And human activity (= work) is the engine of that production. Reducing the retirement age = less human activity = less work = less production = less wealth. You can put taxes at any level, but that remains true. And France chose heed this rule, because all actuarial & demographic tables showed it can't sustain the wealth with the growing number of retirees, lower number of working age population, and growing life expectancy, at the old retirement age.
• sofixa 3y ago
  Look, I completely agree that the wealthiest should be sharing more of the burden. However France already has quite high taxes, and is in the EU, so when the taxes get too high, people and companies can very easily move to a neighbouring country. Removing the fortune tax in France resulted in a net tax benefit because people who were subject to it returned to France and their regular taxes were added.
• j16sdiz 3y ago
  > In 2017, Apple's cash reserves were $250 billion. To put it in context, in British, _annual_ health spending is 280 billions. Those reserve can't last for a year in a smaller country.
• 2devnull 3y ago
  250 billion isn’t much relative the revenue and expenditures of governments. Government operates in the trillions. California lost 40 billion in a couple months trying to administer unemployment insurance, something you would expect a government to be able to do with some competence, having many decades of experience. But nobody cares in the government if the government should lose 100 billion here, a trillion there, because hey there are still rich people we can tax to get more money! There are no consequences for losing tens or 100s of billions on dollars, you get promoted in the public sector because your budget was large, not because you spent the money well. Government will never be incentivized to function properly until their revenue, like any and all successful institutions, is dependent upon their own competence. Endless skies the limit money with no consideration for how wisely or efficiently that money is used is an obvious recipe for national failure.
  • Retric 3y ago
    California has a larger economy than Germany and is only beaten by US, China, and Japan. It just has vastly more money than most countries.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  governments need to balance their budget many do, even ones with big pensions programs and social safety nets even many currently indebted ones have before government revenues via passive rent seeking behaviors of other people’s production are not the only ways governments have raised revenues before
• siffin 3y ago
  It seems like a fundamental error to believe that money itself has value, but many people make this error all the time, as you just have. Just because cash exists somewhere as numbers in a system, it doesn't mean those numbers can jump out of the system and suddenly manifest as young, capable humans who can help retires. Plus, as others have pointed out, 250 billion it isn't even a drop in the bucket. If there is 2 trillion dollars of profit held as cash by companies, that doesn't mean they are holding back 2 trillion dollars worth of production. It means they're holding a claim on the purchasing power of 2 trillion dollars VS the total of all worldwide cash value, say 2% as an example. If the 2 trillion is taken out of the bank and spent, say on social services, it just dilutes the current purchasing power of the remaining cash value. It does not create 2 trillion dollars worth of value from nowhere. I return to my opening claim, that money itself doesn't have value. If anything, money could be described as, "A claim on a certain percentage of the worlds output at any given moment, limited by locale." That percentage claim is wildly unstable and changes as money is created/destroyed.