14 ms·
Amber Waves of Green
- ido 14y agoTED talk from Nick Hanauer (2nd richest amazon guy in the article): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBx2Y5HhplI
- batista 14y ago>Frantz washes dishes at the Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steak house near the harbor in Miami's financial district. He nets $200 for a twenty-seven-hour week and receives no food stamps or government assistance of any kind. I HATE any kind of posh establishment that doesn't pay it's employees well. When I want to spend some money on a posh restaurant or hotel (not that I have any money to do that often) I don't want the people tending me to be making minimum wage, while dinner costs $200 per person. Pay your bloody employees better. To me, any establishment that does that kind of thing, are fake-posh. Paying their staff like shit is like having a huge chandelier made of plastic, or "silverware" made of nickel.
- bgilroy26 14y agoDon't knock it if you haven't tried it http://www.darden.com/restaurants/ http://www.darden.com/restaurants/
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- twoodfin 14y agoI bet there's some competition for those dish-washer jobs: If you believe the article, he's being paid more than minimum wage since he's netting $7.40/hour after FICA and other taxes. Why is he only working 27 hours/week? If he's serious about raising himself out of poverty, finding another part-time job would seem to be a priority.
- rsheridan6 14y agoWho says he's paying FICA and other taxes? I worked for the same employer (Darden Restaurants) when I was fresh out of high school, and I saw the pay stubs of the immigrant workers - they did not pay any of that. Their take home pay was their hourly rate * the number of hours worked. That was a long time ago (mid 90s), but I have no particular reason to believe anything has changed.
- twoodfin 14y agoSorry: I was confused by the HN title, which refers to these people as "Americans", which would imply he's a citizen. The article doesn't make that claim. But at the same time, unless he's here on a student visa or some such, his employer is required to pay FICA taxes, AFAICT. I think that's true for Haitians with refugee status. EDIT: I see the title has been updated. With the exception of the "Americans" issue, I liked the old title better. "Amber Waves of Green" doesn't tell you much about the link.
- ams6110 14y agoJust because they are required to pay FICA doesn't mean they are. Under-the-table cash payment jobs are not that uncommon particularly for laborer work done by (possibly undocumented) immigrants.
- rsheridan6 14y agoThere are a lot of things businesses are required to do that they don't do. I saw the checks - Darden wasn't deducting any sort of taxes from the paychecks (yes, checks, not under the table cash payments) of the undocumented workers they employed. Maybe they showed something different to the IRS.
- antidoh 14y agoMaybe they're "contractors" and it's left up to the employee to pay taxes.
- 14y ago
- Lost_BiomedE 14y agoI think, for restaurants, what happened was commercial real-estate getting crazy expensive and clientele not cooking for themselves like they used to do. The first hurt wages as many restaurants were fighting thin margins, and the second made it easier for restaurants to sneak in the untrained to cook. Once the untrained were acceptable, it was a race to the bottom.
- phillmv 14y agoYou've reversed your economics. In Miami there is merely a surplus of unskilled labour desperate to work under the table. They don't pay more because they don't have to.
- Lost_BiomedE 14y agoIf the customers would not accept food cooked by the untrained, it would not have happened. Customers used to not accept food like that, but when margin pressures forced restaurants to use untrained labor, they found they could get away with it. They haven't looked back.
- phillmv 14y agoFor starters, you have a very weird definition of 'untrained' when it comes to food production. Secondly, the food IS cooked by people who specialize in cooking food. I surely can't compete with a sous-chef. Washing dishes and bussing them back and forth from tables to the kitchen does not require the same level of specialization.
- Lost_BiomedE 14y agoI worked kitchens for about 10 years and have a culinary degree. I can tell you that in many restaurants the cooks have never tasted the type of food that they are supposed to be cooking. They throw in the ingredients but what comes out is a sad given the resources at their disposal. My grandmother can cook better than many places using standard household equipment. It really is sad what we have done to both the culinary world and the home kitchen. Think about cooking different dishes for years, 40 to 60 hours a week. How good do you think they should be? Most good chefs that gave a damn and had the option left the business.
- capsule_toy 14y agoDo you actually know what the margin is or are you just making an assumption? There are certainly posh places that use cheap ingredients and overcharge to get a high margin, but from what I understand, most places can't get away with that. Margins are actually quite low because of the competitiveness of the restaurant industry.
- geuis 14y agoI have some perspective on this. I'm a white guy that lives in San Francisco. I also used to live in South Florida and spent a lot of time in Miami. My ex-girlfriend of 8 years was Haitian. I got to know and love her parents, Marie-Ange and Frantz. They moved from Haiti in the 60's to NYC, then later to Miami when my ex was a girl. I had a chance to learn a lot about Haitian culture and history. They are, almost without exception, some of the nicest and hardest working people I've ever met. Some of her family are doctors, lawyers, and musicians. Others struggle everyday to put food on the table. Frantz never spends much money, and worked as a foreman for years. He helped to build a lot of modern Miami. Despite never having an abundance of money, he always gave to help others. Miami is a very, very hard place to get ahead. It is, per capita, one of the poorest cities in the US. The opportunities for most people, especially immigrants, are lacking. Frantz in the story is likely doing the best he can to support his family in a very shitty situation. Based on my experiences, I will make the claim that it's nearly impossible for him to find a second job. He's likely another hard working, striving young man like countless others I know. But his opportunities in the place his family lives don't make his life easy. I don't know if there's a clear point to my story, but I hope my experiences provide some extra background to the discussion.
- register 14y agoIt's a real scandal that a person that makes 500.000 $ a month pays only 11% taxes. This system is completely unfair. This is not liberalism: this is simply the law of the strongest.
- yummyfajitas 14y agoI agree. It is a scandal that reporters constantly focus on the individual tax bill of investors while completely ignoring taxes paid by the corporations they own. The solution is simple: stop taxing corporations and replace it with taxes on capital gains/etc. (Also, while we are at it, equalize the taxation of cap gains, dividends and interest.)
- scarmig 14y agoIndeed. Corporate taxation makes for good applause lines, but at least in our particular system it's basically a giant target for "lobby for special tax breaks, but only if you're rich enough to hire a staff of lobbyists." My favored solution is having two taxes: a heavily progressive consumption tax, and a flat capital gains/etc. tax. Because what people usually are bothered by are the Paris Hiltons of the world, not the humble billionaire featured in the article.
- msellout 14y agoHow about an externality tax? Anything that hurts anyone else, even via causing jealousy, gets taxed as appropriate for the size of the externality.
- scarmig 14y agoTaxing externalities is, of course, a good idea, and key to any functioning system of property rights. I don't believe they should be used for revenues, because once you do that, it misplaces the incentive: now the government makes more revenue per unit externality. So I favor a flat rebate for all externality taxes.
- 14y ago
- BadassFractal 14y agoI wonder what folks on HN thought of PG's essay on this subject: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html I'm simply not sufficiently well versed in economics to be able to judge what's best for society. I'm also hoping that this is not purely subjective, and that indeed there might be an optimal golden middle. On one hand PG's arguments make sense to me, on the other, I cannot but feel pulled in the opposite direction by some kind of populist/socialist desire to chip in more and make society a better place. That said, I don't have millions (billionaires seem to be more generous, so I'm not going to consider them) and thus if I ever were to become wealthier, I wonder if I also would really mind sharing more. I already don't particularly enjoy paying 30% or more of my income, but I feel like I'm doing my part (being originally from EU perhaps conditioned me to think that this is "the norm"), although I wish that money was better spent by the people in power.
- rsheridan6 14y agoPaul Graham convincingly argued that the existence of wealth inequality was not a bad thing, compared to a completely level society, but nobody is really arguing for a completely level society where dishwashers make as much money as doctors and entrepreneurs. Look at the second richest person in the article, the Amazon investor - no doubt he believes that entrepreneurs and investors like himself should be allowed to get rich, as does pg, yet he favors increased taxes on the rich. Paul Graham's article doesn't deal with his arguments, which are far more common in the real world than arguments for a return to the 98% tax rate of 70s Britain or the economics of East Germany, which are the most relevant real world cases pg refers to (at least nobody was arguing for that at the time pg's was written - I'm not quite sure about the Occupy crowd today). So pg devastated a strawman.
- bonaldi 14y agoThe essay is truly horrible. I don't have the time to take it to bits, but a couple of starting points: - he conflates earnings and effort, as if by earning 100 times you were necessarily 100x more productive at some point. - related: wealth is categorically different. The worst chess player and the best chess player must both play the same game. But if chess were wealth, the poor guy would have to carve his own pieces and rent the hall, while the rich guy would turn up and sit while the game played itself, no effort required - he's right that the middle-classes are the true engines of wealth creation, not the rich. This is the crux of the problem: income inequality destroys the middle class. It leaves only very poor and very rich. No middle class = no wealth generation. That is why it's an issue for everyone, and no amount of "smart people who work hard deserve to control 99% of capital" changes that.
- mgkimsal 14y agoWas anyone else bothered by the pictures not matching up with the sections? Each picture was followed by a section that wasn't related to the text, which was a bit confusing.
- robbiea 14y agoYes, I definitely was. I figured it out after a while, but it definitely bothered me.
- seanalltogether 14y agoI was also bothered that he glossed over his own income level so quickly, he really should've interviewed somebody else.
- srs0001 14y agoGlad that bugged someone else.
- tomerv 14y agoAlso, for some reason all the 'ffi' trigraphs are replaced with 'ffl': For example, the second sentence in the first paragraph starts with "The offlce building..."
- anothermachine 14y agoSome bizarre OCR technology, or special typesetting code from the print edition getting misinterpreted?
- petercooper 14y agoThe trials and tribulations of the poor and rich ends of the spectrum don't tend to surprise me, but the wildly varying ways the middle class perceives their incomes always does. It surprised me that a family bringing in $900 a week ($47k per year) doesn't feel comfortable in Des Moines (statistically it's above local median). But then they note every 2 weeks they pay $375 for health insurance.. 20.8% of their pre-tax income! Yet their "state and federal" taxes are only about 10%? For all the bleating about paying "less tax" than other countries, it's ironic that an ostensibly "free market" healthcare system is less efficient, more cartel-like and wildly more expensive for its users than, say, the "socialist" one in the UK where you could live well on the same money and still be paying your fair share without getting any handouts.
- rubashov 14y ago> ostensibly "free market" healthcare system Some guy said of sick care in America: The American health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. You really have to pick one or the other of socialism or the free market. Our current system is the worst of both worlds.
- michaelochurch 14y agoYou really have to pick one or the other of socialism or the free market. Our current system is the worst of both worlds. That is the essence of contemporary corporatism. It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism, because it's neither system. The problem is one of social topology, from which money disparities follow, but it's otherwise not really about money per se. Modern corporatism works like this: a well-connected, parasitic elite (~0.5%) gets the best of both systems: the chance of personal enrichment and the freedom of capitalism, and the safety net (up to outright governmental favoritism, as seen in corporate welfare) and low minimal expectations of socialism. The other 99.5% get the worst of both systems.
- ams6110 14y agoAre you excluding the "free" healthcare in the UK from your definition of "handout"? What "fair share" of taxation would they be paying in the UK?
- jws 14y agoThe original title was useful. Changing a descriptive title to a useless phrase is disrespectful of the HN reader's time.
- funkeemonk 14y agoConsidering how much the US has spent and is still spending on the military for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I don't quite get the perception that taxing the rich more would fix anything. The bucket is leaking like crazy at the bottom and the solution is to pour more water? It may be fairer, but will it produce that much benefit, especially when compared to how difficult it would be to make this change? Is this tax-the-rich issue a red herring? How much more money would end up in Uncle Sam's coffers anyway if the richer are taxed more?
- ams6110 14y agoThis is my main feeling as well. Why does everyone think that taking more money from "the rich" and giving it to the government is going to have better results for society than just letting the rich spend it as they please?
- sxp 14y agoBecause taxes have given us public schools, public infrastructure, and other public services. While all of these could be done better by the private sector in theory, there is no evidence that it will happen in practice.
- sp332 14y agoSince just a few percent of the US population make 40%+ of the money in a given year, increasing taxes on those relatively few people would have more effect than taxing any other group of citizens. Also, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples', bringing their tax rate into line with the rest of the country seems like a no-brainer way to increase tax revenues substantially.
- yummyfajitas 14y agoAlso, since their effective tax rate is actually lower than most peoples'... No. The people with the highest incomes already pay a disproportionately high portion of their income in taxes, far more than the poor or middle class. Bringing their tax payments into line with the rest of the country would cause them to pay a lot less in taxes than they do now. http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay-greater-dollar-amount-income-taxes-federal-government-bottom-90 http://taxfoundation.org/article/new-data-top-1-pay-greater-...
- _delirium 14y agoI hope that if I ever find myself making $625,000 per week, I'll be a bit happier with my life, and less angry about poor people getting too much, than this Wayne fellow is.
- juddlyon 14y agoBut those damn bus workers on stress leave are ruining the country!
- funkeemonk 14y agoAnd with that, I understand why the rich are secretive about their wealth. It's ok if you're poor and pissed about the rich, but if you're rich and pissed about the poor, lose all your friends. Collect $200M as you pass Go.
- _delirium 14y agoThat might be part of it, though I think a bigger part is worry about friends/acquaintances interacting with you in a less-than-honest way once they know you're rich. The asymmetry makes some sense to me, though. A poor person may or may not be justified in where they direct their anger, but I can see why they're unhappy. If you've got a lot of money, it seems strange to be actually angry about wealth distribution. I could see intellectually opposing various kinds of economic policies, but I mean, in the meantime, you still have a pretty good life.
- Tobu 14y agoI was really worried at this guy managing to be so poorly educated for the power he has (see: his SuperPAC contributions). I know this was a long time ago and he is old now, but he must have interacted with a lot of poorer people, especially when he had to earn money to pay for college, some of whom must have been generous in their own way. It takes a high level of magical thinking to think he was the only one to give the kind of selfless help that Dr. Hudson's Secret Journal recommends.
- OpieCunningham 14y ago
- taylonr 14y agoI'm not sure that if the author tried to write an article that did nothing but reinforce stereo-types he could have done a better job of doing so. I read that article and I don't think anything in the article surprised me. Immigrant working for next to nothing? Check. Middle class family living paycheck to paycheck in middle america? Check. Millionaire who drops 100k for a business manager? Check. Dot.Com millionaire who takes everyone he can on his private jet? Check "Self-Made Man" who doesn't want to pay more taxes? Check.
- Tobu 14y agoThere's a lot more detail than that. The way the lower-class people were paid (prepaid cards!) and how they budgeted were interesting to me; the details and evolution of the healthcare costs in particular were eye-opening. I'd have appreciated similar detail for the richer ones, but it would take a lot more virtual ink I suppose.
- taylonr 14y ago"The details and evolution of healthcare costs in particular were eye-opening" How long have you been working? I ask out of curiosity, because I've been working for the past 12 years as a software developer. For the last 8 years if I didn't change jobs or get a promotion there was only 1 time that my raise out-paced the insurance increases. The fact that the lowest paid guy got paid via pre-paid debit card is only surprising because I assumed it was cash under the table. I know that in central Missouri that if you work construction it's common practice to pay you in cash for the first 2 weeks because too many people don't stay on for two weeks. As a result employers see it as too expensive to fill out all the paperwork etc. I guess I just thought most (if not all) of this was common knowledge, and I'm in a upper-middle bracket and come from an upper-middle class family, so it's not like I "came up from welfare" and saw all this first hand. However, I assume that the stories of these family run a lot deeper. I just kept thinking "Is it really news that a dishwasher gets taken advantage of and lives in a scary neighborhood?"
- Tobu 14y ago
- encoderer 14y agoMy wife and I are fortunate. We're not wealthy by our standards, but I do recognize that we certainly would be considered wealthy by a lot of Americans. Our household income is about 4-5x the national average, and we have no children. My understanding of the stats informs me that our household income puts us in the top 2.5%. Certainly a very blessed situation to be in, and one that we both work very hard to achieve. But here's the striking truth about wealth distribution in our country... The power-law-ish distribution of our wealth means that quantitatively, as a percentile, I'm much closer to the "1%" than I am to the "50%". But qualitatively, the struggles I face -- saving for retirement, knowing that if I had a serious illness our cash flow would dry up, etc -- my life is nothing like the "1%". Another way to put it... I'm near the very top of the small pile of wealth shared by normal Americans. I'm having a hard time properly articulating this but I think you get the point. It's almost as if, by percentile, you'd think "wow, I really have earned a big slice of this pie" only to find out that more than half the pie was taken by 0.5% of Americans before it was ever put on the shelf to cool. That until you're invited to take a sliver from that first half, you'll never get more than crumbs of the share that's split 298.5 Million ways.
- muhfuhkuh 14y ago"knowing that if I had a serious illness our cash flow would dry up" I will never in my life understand how Americans (myself included) can think this is, in any way possible, okay. Or, how, if we just moved it more toward private companies having more control over our healthcare than they already do, that it'll get better. It's asinine.
- encoderer 14y agoI didn't mean that as a commentary on our healthcare system. I mean that my income would be reduced to whatever level our long-term disability insurance provides. Since you mentioned it, though: for people that are well-off in this country, the healthcare system works fine (more or less). That's probably a large source of the complacency. For both my wife and I, our health insurance plans are very good. They are paid 100% for us. They include a 10% co-insurance but a relatively low out of pocket cap.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jimduey 14y agoOn that great universal healthcare system in the UK, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9362183/NHS-facing-colossal-care-bill-unless-system-is-overhauled-urgently.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9362183/NHS-fa...