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Originally Posted by Frank MetaMusil
Yeah and that's not kosher for a lot of people. I'm definitely not going to work any harder if the government just redistributes my extra efforts and savings to someone else.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
I agree, I make money for me and my family, wealth re-distribution to me is disturbing.
I think that taxing people nearly half of their wages is brutally wrong.
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I think you are both looking at this from a different perspective than what I was referring to. I was talking about the minimum wage increase and how one poster claimed it was printing money. What it actually does (or at least the intent of it) is it takes money that would go towards a companies profits and puts it in the hands of workers who are also consumers. This puts that money back into economic circulation rather than into a bank account to collect interest. People will argue that businesses reinvest that money back into the local economy as well, while that may be true to some extent I would argue it is not as impactful for another McDonald's to open up rather than have 20 employees at an existing McDonald's each having more income to spend at existing businesses, while at the same time reducing their reliance on taxpayer funded social support. The same could be done by the government implementing something like mandatory prescription/dental benefits. (That might actually even be an arguably easier route to take for businesses).
People might say I'm anti business or a union shill, but in reality I'm just looking at the big picture. Yes businesses deserve to make money, but so do their workers. People always say "well that worker chose that job" or "that business owner deserves X because they put up the upfront costs, if the workers want to make what the owner makes they could have started their own business". The reality of the situation is that even if everyone who wanted to make more money just started their own business, their would be too many businesses and not enough workers. Not enough workers means not enough customers, which means less businesses are needed.
The economy needs businesses, workers and consumers to thrive. Businesses create jobs, jobs create consumers and consumers create a market for business, nobody can argue that. So everyone plays a role in this. Does that mean everyone should be compensated the exact same amount? No, however there needs to be a shift in how the economy is regulated. The rich have been getting richer, while the poor have been getting poorer. This is a fact. Wealth disparity is becoming a huge problem that many aren't willing to acknowledge, but it is a very real concern. The more wealth and power to consolidate business that the rich have, the more power and control to dictate which way the economy goes and what the quality of life is for upper middle to lower class workers.
As far as the tax argument is concerned, when the gst dropped to 5% from 7% did it really impact your work ethic? Taxes are what they are, I'm not in favour of over the top taxation like 99% over X amount of income. But I don't think the current structure is very fair either. People will argue that businesses won't operate if taxes are too high and it will discourage entrepreneurs from starting up new businesses because there will be no incentive. While that may be partially true, it overlooks one important factor, people are greedy.
If the tax rate for any income over $250k went up to 50%, for every person who is persuaded to not make that extra money because of the taxes, there will be someone who is willing to pay the extra tax for the extra income. At the end of the day business owners spend money to make money, extra expenses for them are not ideal, but at the end of the day they'd rather spend more money to continue to make money than to not spend it and make less or nothing. What Walmart has done here is an example of that. Oil companies do the same, when the price of oil goes up, they have no problem paying the wages they need to in Alberta while making less profit per barrel because it's still enough for them to want to do it. Giving them a break on taxes to lure them here makes as much sense as every worker in the oil and gas industry offering to work for minimum wage. That break will not provide stability for us, it'll just provide them with an opportunity to make money until they find another reason to pack up and stop drilling when it suits their needs.