@jessi_camembert Not getting you. I don’t see any screenshot in the chain above. You’re now saying retail workers’ pay is fair?
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Musidorus
3.6K posts
@musidorus that’s actually the point Marx makes in the screenshot i used to kick this off, but thank you!
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Is the argument here than when the cashier scans a $45 bag of dogfood, he has personally made the company $45?
Jack@whothehellsjack
No I work in retail where I can quite literally see how much money I’m making the company. I’ll do anywhere between $600 and $2000 in a 5hr shift while only making $71. It’s more radicalizing to see the dramatic extent at which your surplus labor is being extracted
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@jennifersrude Not a direct answer but people on the left are principally concerned with how they’re perceived by other people (so less interested in nature).
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has a single person in the history of humankind ever once associated the love of nature with the right? Is that something that has ever happened literally once at all?
Possum Reviews@ReviewsPossum
I'm not sure how appreciation of nature became right-wing coded in my lifetime, but there's probably something to be said about that.
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@jessi_camembert Read a standard economics textbook such as the below and you will understand that in a competitive market, such as for retail workers, people get what they’re worth.
amazon.co.uk/Economics-20ed…
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@musidorus Agree to disagree, but either way since you’ve got time to read my tweets you’ll see I said there’s no straightforward answer and increased wages alone won’t transform our entire system. If you believe otherwise, you’re welcome to go through your own math on your own time.
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A far better policy than capping food prices would be increasing Universal Credit/other direct cash transfers.
Avoids price distortions and gets money where it’s most needed. ft.com/content/857363…
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@v_j_freeman Those aren’t assets unless they’re also government liabilities, in which case… uh-oh
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What’s the biggest wealth asset class in the UK? Property? Financial wealth? No! It’s pensions! And guess what? Up to 40% of the wealthiest owners of this asset class are those in receipt of public sector pensions. The ‘wealthiest’ in the UK inc doctors, teachers, civil servants.
Alex Wickham@alexwickham
EXCLUSIVE: Andy Burnham won’t commit to keeping Labour’s manifesto promises on tax and has opened the door to new tax rises if he becomes PM. His decision to back the current fiscal rules wins him a reprieve from markets, but it limits his options to fund policies like council house-building. It raises the prospect of tax hikes. Asked by Bloomberg if he is committed to Labour’s election manifesto pledges not to raise income tax, national insurance, VAT or corporation tax, his campaign declined to say so. They also didn’t rule out new taxes on wealth. Burnham’s spokesperson says he doesn’t want talk about tax policy during this by-election: “Andy is fully focused on working hard for every vote in Makerfield so he can represent them in Parliament. Andy is not standing on a national manifesto at this election; he is standing to make a difference for the people of Makerfield and to bring the change he has delivered in Greater Manchester to the national stage.” Burnham has recently called for the top rate of tax to be hiked to 50p and a council tax reevaluation to target the wealthy. “We have overtaxed labour and undertaxed wealth,” he said last year. But former Jeremy Hunt SpAd Adam Smith says wealth taxes don’t raise sufficient revenue and it is inevitable Burnham will have to look at the big taxes if he is going to implement bolder policies.
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@democracyinc1 @Fiat__Justitia I am a working class black trans woman.
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In the United Kingdom, we’ve managed to achieve communism for 95% of the population.
If you have kids, unless you earn more than £80,000 gross, you have the same quality of life as those on benefits.
And the government managed it without a revolution.
Incredible really.
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@jessi_camembert @Koookiiing Working class people don’t all have time to read Das Kapital. Please could you tell us the answer?
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I am not sure how we fell so out of love with the value of prices - they send the purist of all allocative signals. The value in high prices is the supply side signals they send to expand production. If you are capping prices you are basically admitting your supply side agenda is utterly broken.
Ashley Armstrong@AArmstrong_says
EXCLUSIVE: UK government is in talks with large supermarkets about voluntarily capping food prices on basic food items, four people told @FT. Comes after SNP’s food caps were branded a 1970s style gimmick. as.ft.com/r/81df6833-5eb…
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@democracyinc1 @Fiat__Justitia Doesn’t at all contradict what he said, you grasping turd.
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@Fiat__Justitia If you make 80k a year and can’t live on that, then you need to stop buying avocados and Starbucks ☺️
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@ApoStructura In South American cities rivers are treated as storm drains at best, or even sewers. Consider Marginal in São Paulo.
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One interesting thing I’ve noticed is North American cities tend to have their downtowns built half a mile AWAY from their river, usually on a single side.
Contrast that with European cities that are usually concentrated around the banks of their river.
carz@Carzonfye
If you didnt build your city on a bigass river basically you’re stupid
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@TheHauskarl I am old enough to remember the Wests and the killing of Jamie Bulger.
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This story always stuck with me.
Like a trail of breadcrumbs through a maze, I trace such events backwards - a temporary checkpoint in time, a savegame to which I can never return - to give myself a point of reference.
Where are we now in relation to the Britain we once knew?
Amidst all the talk of progress, tolerance and virtue, it has never been so apparent that we live in the ruins of better days and a better country.
People without that historical point of reference will never understand, perhaps even believe, that what Michael says here is true.
This was considered a crime of such rare callousness that it lingered in the news for months, even years afterwards.
Things that are as bad, possibly even worse than this, happen every single week in Britain.
If you are too young to remember; they are gaslighting you. This isn't the country I remember. I don't appreciate the country the liberals have built for us.
I don't like it at all, in fact, and it stings not just because I can remember - but equally - because I can't forget.
Rest in Peace, Sophie.
Michael Orthodox ☦@Michaeldudufudu
This was considered a rare crime in the UK in 2007
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@kn_owled_ge Oxford and Cambridge don’t allow this and do alright.
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I think canceling legacy admits was a grave mistake that is designed to ruin "one of the crown jewels of this country".
Professors and admins forgot what the business model of Academia has been for thousands of years.
The public doesn't pay my salary. Wealthy alums do.
Why do they do it? Because they want their kids to come study with me. Just like King Phillip wanted Aristotle to teach his son, Alexander (you know him as "the great").
And they were always happy to also pay for poor kids' education, so their own kids will have "normal" friends and will not grow up with too much privilege.
But we just took that away from them. We killed the goose and gave up on the golden eggs because of "equity".
This will end Academia as we know it, and it was the plan all along.
No matter, something more aristocratic will arise. The wealthy will always want me to teach their kids. They just won't pay to teach yours.
i/o@avidseries
Everyone I know is against legacy preferences. People want meritocratic standards. But the fact is that blacks admitted to elite institutions have SATs and GPAs that are always well below the mean, while legacy admits almost never do (in fact, they are sometimes above the mean).
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@andrew_lilico It never seems to occur to them that tax might contribute to the “cost of living”.
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It's not *necessary* for everything the government does to be unutterably stupid. Even quite left-wing governments can do things that are wrong but not absolutely stupid. Capping food prices under these circumstances is just *stupid* by any reasonable measure.
Andrew Lilico@andrew_lilico
So the government is setting the price of food now? What next? Food rationing? I *absolutely* do not want food prices capped. Why on Earth would I want supermarkets to sell out of the food I want to buy, so it's not available for me (which is what capped food prices will mean)?
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@bphillipsonMP And making sure people don’t pay to educate their own children.
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This is a reminder of what politics is really about.
A Labour government delivering for working people and making sure all of our children get the best start in life.
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A 91% tax rate on high income brackets is a pigouvian tax on inequality. It’s meant to discourage plutocracy the way a carbon tax discourages CO2 emissions. That few people actually paid that rate was a feature, not a bug.
Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦@JessicaBRiedl
As other economists have shown, Gabriel Zucman's tax and inequality data is wildly misleading. He turns seemingly every methodological dial to claim that inequality has soared and high-earner taxes have collapsed. In his own data, virtually the ENTIRE drop in high-income taxes come from Zucman's highly unorthodox assumptions about the incidence of the corporate tax - which he claims cost the top 1% of earners 29% (!) of their income in 1951, and yet now costs them 6%. And this questionable data accounts for his ENTIRE claimed "drop" in higher-earner taxes. You see - on the income tax side - Zucman's own data shows that the average individual income tax paid by the rich has RISEN - not fallen - since the 1950s. See gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/ then click on "Table 2: Distributional series," and navigate to tab TG2b, column T for income taxes (and column U for corporate taxes) As much as Zucman builds up 1950s income tax rates, almost no one actually paid 91% tax rates - or even touched a tax bracket over 50%. And that's why actual income tax revenues - including income tax rates paid by the rich - were *lower* in the 1950s than today. Zucman's rhetoric is peddling a "tax the rich" utopia of the 1940s-1960s that his own data shows did not exist.
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@TheGhostSleepi1 CH doesn't have a small state nor does it have low taxes once health insurance is added on. I looked at it once and on my middle income back them tax plus HI came to almost exactly the same as the UK.
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Britain easily could & should be like Switzerland- richest country in the world, squeaky clean streets, roads flatter than a manta ray, small state, low taxes, strong civil liberties, ruthlessly efficient transport.
Michael A. Arouet@MichaelAArouet
I was in Switzerland this week. Each time I go there, it amazes me how perfect, well-organized and safe it is. It’s the last country in Western Europe where one doesn’t have the feeling that everything is deteriorating. Why don’t more countries have direct democracy? It works.
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