Pirez wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:34 am
I agree that a little bit of inequality is not a bad thing. Nobody is made equal after all. But I think we are far past the point of inequalities being in "a little big" category (and some people like René Dumont have been arguing for decades that us, less-fortunate people living in fortunate countries, live off the inequalities and exploitation of poorer parts of the globe). What constitutes work anyway? If you take my case, I take out of my time to manage a sports club as a volunteer. It takes away a whole lot of my time and town halls are always so grateful that the dynamics of entertainment in the city are preserved. We get subsidies barely enough to scrape by and I don't get a cent. Would you tell me that I work less than Elon Musk, whose lone activity these past weeks has been to tweet heinous shit on Twitter all day? Volunteers at the food bank take out of their time to prepare food for the homeless. Shouldn't that be encouraged?
On the other hand, before I left my soul-crushing job as project manager in IT, I was paid pretty well to do jack shit all day, because upper management couldn't settle on what to do. I honestly can't look at one of my childhood friend, a basic worker in my village's grocery shop, in the eyes when I know that I was paid twice the amount when he's blown his back multiple times in the past five years working 8 to 6 since he was 17. We have been told these people deserve less because it's low skilled, but I believe it's the opposite. Him and nurses and teachers, who are ever so drastically underpaid and for some of them (nurses) have been... stripped of their right to actually protest.
Of course, the amount of time worked is far from the sole factor in people's income in reality; that was just a very basic example to illustrate the pitfalls of trying to attain perfect equality. For the most part (that is, with the exception of anything part of government planning such as public services), it's all down to a question of supply and demand. The harsh reality is that nobody's interested in paying for the various volunteering activities you mentioned, and that lower qualified workers are easier to come by and therefore cheaper. That's why things like public services and minimum wages exist in some countries, to mitigate market forces and ensure certain outcomes.
I also have a lot of respect for the work of the people you mentioned, but I cannot agree with your statement that "it's the opposite" and that they deserve to earn more than more qualified professions. Otherwise, why would someone go through the hassle of studying longer or in harder fields if they're going to earn less than if they didn't? Long and/or selective education is an investment for your future that will allow you to work higher paid and less exhausting jobs, and those who willingly decide not to follow this path should accept the consequences. Of course, it's no so simple everywhere (I'm thinking of countries with little to no free or highly subsidized higher education), and there's also the question of social determinism, but the latter is a problem of the educational system, not the economic system, and as for the former, I think that the situation is far from bad in France in that regard.
Not that I like the way government planning is done right now: I certainly agree that teachers should be paid a lot more here, but then let's also tackle the issue of the ministry of education employing more administrative personnel than teachers! It's a recurring pattern in this country that while more could be spent on certain things, a lot more could be saved elsewhere, because we're wasting more than enough money on useless things to actually need to raise taxes again!
Back on the subject of equality, it's important to remember the meaning of the word: equality is identity, and two people are really equal only if they the very same person. When we talk about equality in such political and socioeconomic contexts, we are always referring to more precise concepts, such as equality of income, equality of net worth, equality of rights, etc. But which should be strive to attain, if any? It's often unclear which one people are talking about.
Pirez wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:34 am
Besides, since capital always encourage investments that are detrimental to the ecologic wellbeing of our planet, I believe our society is already doomed.
I'm pretty sure that's it's the mere existence of humans in great numbers that is detrimental to the ecology.
Pirez wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:34 am
I certainly am no economist, and yeah, I guess your arguments make sense in a crushing-the-numbers sort of way, but I also know that our redistributive system also redistributes a lot to the companies themselves (fiscal niches, CICE and whatnot). I believe that looking into the number specifics is scrutinizing the tree and missing the forest behind it : We have all of those taxes that all corporations are telling us are the bane of our economy, and yet the wealthy continue to accumulate wealth, with which it is documented that they use it to buy capital in media to influence public perception of topics (Murdoch with Fox News, Musk with Twitter, Bolloré with C8, CNews and Europe 1, Saadé with BFM, soon Musk again with Tiktok?), most notably economic topics which makes the circle complete. It looks to me that if you want to reduce inequalities, whatever we are currently doing is not enough. We rarely talk about the countries that went against the mainstream doctrine of reducing cost of labor and investing in the capital (see : Iceland in 2008 that refuses to bail out the banks, Spain today which went on the more "socialist" route of paying workers more) and they seem to be doing fine. But when we point this out suddenly "it's not the same context in those countries". When I was a teenager, we have to copy word for word the playbook of the UK (privitazation a-gogo) and Germany (precarious, but less taxed 400€-jobs) and those countries have now... greatly diminished social services and are reliant on migrant work to reduce costs even further, which drives up dormant racism in their society (see : Manchester this august, Madgeburg this Christmas. And don't get me started on the "he was a migrant" thing, since he openly aligned with the far-right)
The redistribution to companies is a good point, I'm curious as to how much this amounts to. As for the rest, you're bringing up way too many different topics for me to properly address them here without writing an essay. Let's just say that none of the problems you mentioned is going to be solved by taxing work more. I can't complain about my financial situation, but I don't live in the same world as those billionaires you mentioned, and yet for every additional euro my company is paying me, I only get about 0.3. How does that even make sense? And I'm not even taking into account the fact that I'll have to pay VAT after that.
I also think your presentation of right-wing "influence" and society's racism is a bit exaggerated and simplistic, but that's a topic for another day.
Pirez wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:34 am
Inheritance is in itself unfair. Take the issue on the other side of the coin : if you can inherit wealth, and the amount of wealth is finite, then you can also inherit poverty. Kids that would "never fulfill their potential" because they won't afford college (a problem that, granted, is very less prevalent in France. However, with dotations towards universities ever so decreasing, the quality of education is decreasing and private schools are out of reach for those people, so we are slowly getting there) and therefore having to work more tedious work that society tells us shouldn't be paid handsomely. Taxing inheritance is restoring balance.
Besides : in France, the first 120000€
per child is tax-free. It encompasses 85% of French population. So I would assume your parents are in the top 15% in terms of patrimony if it gets you all worked up that much.
I realize I rewrote my sentence halfway and ended up writing the opposite of what I meant.
Yes, taxes on income are more unfair than taxes on capital gains, but what I meant to say is that both are even more unfair than
the absence of or the low extent of taxes on inheritance! I hold a liberal stance from an economic point of view, but I pretty much subscribe to the statement that inheritance is theft. Why on Earth would some people be born with billions and other with nothing? Even much smaller amounts like the tax-free €120,000 you mentioned can be life-changing for a young adult starting their professional life. And anyway, most people inherit their money much later in life, when they least need it, so this capital is essentially immobilized for the benefit of the retired small bourgeoisie. In fact, I don't get why most people only care about taxing work so much, when drastic taxes on inheritance complete with proper redistribution would essentially reset the counter at each generation (in fact, continuously) and entirely neutralize whatever inequality might have built up during the span of one lifetime. I know it's probably near-impossible to enforce at a country-level, but surely we can do better here. And for the record, I don't think I'll be inheriting much.
On a side note though, I don't think it's fair to attribute the decrease in the quality of higher education to the universities getting less money, when the main factor by far is the decrease in the quality of primary and secondary education, which might also be impacted by budget cuts but is, for the most part, the mere result of an organized sabotage of national education in which school programs are simplified year after year, basic principles such as not letting a kid make it to the next grade until they've mastered theirs are not respected, and the devaluation of the moral authority of teachers.
Pirez wrote: Wed Jan 15, 2025 9:34 am
Indeed, but that would be a change of pace for this topic. But to resume the distraction nature of this topic here's my latest bad idea and my take on Denver the last Dinosaur.
CinéspaEN.png
Denver.png
And now I have the song in my head.
). Based on that, a tax cut in France is not the same as, say, a tax cut in the US and its 28% ratio.
), which opens a whole lot of problems in itself.
