If bread costs 100$ per loaf, and people are literally starving to death in the streets because they can't pay for food, is this just the "market clearing rate" for bread where supply is meeting demand, or is there a shortage of bread?
You could have a point if bread cost $75 to produce. It does not.
Many of the companies complaining about a shortage of people are posting record profits. Workers are receiving the smallest share of the pie in many decades.
In many cases this really is just stingy employers complaining because they want to keep most of the profit for themselves.
In other cases businesses can't raise prices because their customers don't have any money (because wages are so low and the 1% captures so much economic surplus, stashing it away in investment accounts, causing investors to dash around shoveling tons of cash at anything that looks like yield). In this case hiring workers at higher wages wouldn't be sustainable without raising prices. The "solution" in this scenario is not to suppress worker's wages even further; that only makes the problem worse. The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich to filter the money out of investments and back into the economy where 10: it can be spent by workers, raising profits, leading to expansion, higher pay, more spending, more profits, goto 10.
If we were in a capital-constrained environment then it would make sense to cut taxes to make more capital available for investment. We aren't. We haven't been in decades. Taxes on income & capital gains >10m should be much higher.
Of course not. You'll buy a cheaper loaf or you won't buy bread at all or you might even whine in the media about the shortage of bread. All of which would be understandable irrespective of how high your income is.
I was with you up until this part. This has been tried for decades and it clearly doesn't work. What we need now are tax breaks specifically for small businesses. We want people to be able to work for themselves or work for somebody more willing to share more of the profits with their workers. More businesses willing to pay market rate means more employment, more competition and more pressure on the companies who like to underpay.
Neither idea (tax breaks for SMB, more taxes for rich) are going to happen anytime soon. Nobody with deep enough pockets to lobby for it would want either idea to become law.