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Comment by AverageDude | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a political party who had guts to take on these kind of people. I wish!

What?

And force a company that has mostly employees in the top 2% to pay them even more? I'm not sure the average person cares.

To force them to charge less for their product?

To hire people they don't need?

What are you expecting?

You can increase the income taxes of wealthy people considerably (specifically income taxes, not business taxes). A 50%+ marginal rate will help motivate C-level execs to opt for re-investing profits into their business rather than into buybacks of their stock to boost their own personal income. At the same time you'd be helping to provide services that will benefit the lives of the bottom 90% of the country with higher tax receipts.

Wealth inequality has been getting steadily worse in the US for decades, and moves like what Microsoft is doing only make that worse.

This. Wondering how easily people make things so simplistic (as the other commenters are doing).

Definitely not this.

Capital is distributed to shareholders when the company has few good options to deploy it internally.

These distributions are then reinvested by shareholders to more efficient purposes.

If a company can’t efficiently deploy its capital and can’t distribute it… it just buys other companies and becomes a conglomerate with ever increasing market power.

> These distributions are then reinvested by shareholders to more efficient purposes.

Why do you think this is true (specifically the "more efficient purposes" part)?

> increase the income taxes of wealthy people considerably (specifically income taxes, not business taxes). A 50%+ marginal rate will help motivate C-level execs to opt for re-investing profits into their business rather than into buybacks of their stock to boost their own personal income

Why would anyone try to make less money as taxes on them increase? Makes no sense.

Because they'd have more capital to reinvest in their business, as I stated. But even if they don't reinvest it the rest of us still benefit in the form of increased tax receipts.

Won't someone think of the poor software engineers??

Haha

Right, because Microsoft 100% consists of highly paid software engineering roles located in the US.

It’s not about poor or rich engineers, it’s about fairness. When people at the top do that, people at other organisations take a page out of their book at rinse and repeat. It’s corporate version of monkey see monkey do. And the worst affected will be on the lower side of salary scales.

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