The Western World is at a stage of economic crisis. Wages have clearly fallen below where they should be, and the cost of living continues to rise. The issue with simply raising employees salaries is that many small businesses are already stretched thin. It's great to have major corporation pay out of their billions of dollars of profits to help their employees. When you're raising wages across the board and expect a mom and pop restaurant to pay a dishwasher $50k/year plus benefits, it's another matter.
At the end of the day, the gap between rich and poor has become so extreme, and it will get worse as we stare down the incoming wave of inflation.
This is a horribly complex issue that I don't know the answer too. A few reforms I think could be helpful:
1. Increase the tax base by limiting small corporations. The point of lessening the tax rate for corporations was to help out small businesses and allow businesses to carry over funds year over year. It wasn't to have every CEO set up a personal corporation and avoid taxes.
2. Taxes on principal residences. Obviously this is going to be controversial. The principal residence exemption was meant to allow people to sell their properties and move to a new one without paying tax. You could simply allow a roll over to deal with this, where tax is deferred as long as a new property is purchased. The current gap between generational wealth is just too extreme. The exemptions weren't meant to provide people with 7 figure exemptions, while everyone else rents.
3. Economic reforms to encourage local small businesses. These businesses are the lifeblood of any society and all that stands between a society and total corporate domination. We have a system where that seems to give more breaks to larger businesses, while punishing the smaller ones.
4. Steps have to be made to deal with the intergenerational wealth issue. Is not just an issue of wealth between generations but also social mobility. The wealth of your parents should not be determinative of your own wealth.
|