Why the 1 Percent Absolutely Has No Clue About the Need to Raise Wages
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/why-1-percent-absolutely-has-no-clue-about-need-raise-wagesAs fast food workers are walked out Thursday yet again for higher wages and the right to union representation, they could count some lawmakers and President Obama as being on their side, verbally championing a higher federal minimum wage. And they have the support of a majority of Americans.
But when it comes to corporate decision makers such as those represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, they face hostility and ridicule. In fact, as a recent personal experience demonstrated to me, the wealthiest Americans who control the purse strings of corporate America may actually believe the lie that raising wages is unnecessary and that today’s workers are better off than in the past.
A college friend who works as a business executive was passing through Los Angeles, where I live, and invited me to join him for drinks at a restaurant in downtown L.A. so we could catch up. When I arrived, he was still having dinner with some of his work colleagues. Indicating to me that they squarely fit into the category of the famed “1 percent,” he introduced me as his “radical journalist and activist friend.” Aside from me and my friend, there were two white men, one black man and an East Asian woman seated at the table. The restaurant was exceedingly fancy, and the menu consisted of sufficiently haute cuisine dishes, with prices to match. Bottles of expensive wine washed down platters of soft-shell crab, all on the company card.
Soon enough, the conversation veered into a political direction as the men (sadly, the woman didn’t speak up), lamented President Obama’s fiscal policies, which they perceived as excessively harsh toward the rich.
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-Laelth
Greed is concrete and immediate; good planning generally leads to long-term plans. Now here's an example. I don't remember all the details but IBM starting in the early 70's had a long-term goal of a (as I recall) 90 billion in revenue by 1990. And throughout the 70's and early 80's they were going great guns (they were really booming). Now if you think about this scenario long enough you may detect a serious flaw with this plan. That's right, as 1990 drew near, this goal became short term. IBM did not realize what was happening until it became too late. To recap, in the early years of this period they were making long-term decisions and doing well. As time went along and they neared their goal date without any change on their part they found themselves making short-term decisions and disaster ensued. They lost billions in profit and reputation as well and never did recover to their original promise. OK, I'll stop boring you now. 
One of the reasons for the cluelessness (and not just for the 1%): how often do people emphasize just how different the way things are now to how they were in the not-too-distant past?
Remember the debate adding another tax bracket above $250K? How that was "socialism" and "punishing success"?
Here's a chart showing the number of tax brackets over the history of the income tax.
The overall total number of brackets is the green dashed line.
The blue line is the number of brackets affecting incomes over $250K (adjusted to 2013 dollars)
The red line is the number of brackets affecting incomes over $500K (adjusted to 2013 dollars)
Here's the same thing expressed as percentages of the total number of brackets:
Even leaving aside what the rates were as a separate question, all of the progressivity in the income tax code has been pushed downward. In the 50s fully two thirds of income tax brackets kicked in above the equivalent of $250,000, and nearly half kicked in at levels above the equivalent of a half million.
A lot of that erosion was due to inflation -- brackets were not inflation-adjusted until the 80s -- but the net effect has been eliminating progressivity at high levels. You'll notice that when the top marginal rates were lowered under Reagan, there was no resetting the progressivity to previous levels.
