- Ordinary income has sky-high taxes compared to capital gains, and you don't even have to pay the taxes on capital gains if you don't realize them!
- Inelastic labor supply mismanaged into increasingly soggy demand, mathematically tanking wages
- Attributing credit for job creation to capital without attributing blame for job destruction to capital
there are more, but these are all Political Economy decisions that didn't have to be this way. They are this way because people with money and power wanted them to be this way and were willing to morally compromise to get them this way.
We've been pushing all the money into the capital economy and all the taxes into the labor economy and this can't go on forever.
Worse, it's just a long post trying to show that doing math with a calculator somehow disproves real-life ethics.
What did George Lucas do?
LeBron has to be worth a few hundred million. What did he do?
Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.
They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”
They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”
But that’s obviously not their point.
The thumbnails often just tell the welder story, for instance. It’s very clever (misleading).
Don't >95% of tech companies offer stock options or equity, from startups to FAANG?
Looooots of caveats here.