Can focusing on class instead of race solve our country’s equity issues?
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People hate the lower class. Hate. Look at public policy, how people react to their presence, etc. Essential workers were basically human sacrifices.
And you know who is poor and struggling? A population of former slaves in a country that hates poor people and doesn’t believe in helping them. Or a population that you deny legal rights to so that you can have cheap labor. Or even white trash, I mean, dress like a poor person and watch as staff follow you around while you shop. But yeah, racial groups like African Americans and Mexicans are poor for a reason and yeah people hate poor people
It is absolutely important to spend time imagining solutions that could help change the system itself to prevent future suffering but to offer them to people directly engaged in immediate disaster response is not productive.
To put this in nerd terms don’t be the guy who suggests switching to Haskell/pure FP as a solution to the problem you are debugging in a production legacy OO system that needs to be fixed immediately. Like logically and long term you are probably right but what was the point beside making you feel smug?
Also: intersectionality.
I think this shows your biases. As an example, at my previous company, I was the only one who had grown up on welfare, was a high school dropout, lived near a superfund site, etc.
However, I’m an older, straight, white male, and the millennials I worked with were all from much more privileged economic backgrounds.
But somehow it was okay by the company for them to make public statements such as “we need to quit hiring so many straight, white males", but bringing up class was inappropriate?
You wouldn't operate a hospital triage assuming that someone should go to the front of the line just because they're black, and you shouldn't operate a social triage that way either. Some people have a scratch, and some people are bleeding out
real change can't be popular in the mainstream
Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.
I am frankly not comfortable revealing to my boss or coworkers that I grew up poor because they’ll think of me differently, stop assuming such good thing about me, become wary, etc
Plenty of people hate poor people.
> Some people hate criminals, which are disproportionately poor
Part (or all) of the reason ”criminals are disproportionately poor” is or seems to be the case is that both law making and law enforcement are biased against poor people, in part because some people hate poor people.
> Nobody gets hate crimed for being an honest person making 20K a year and supporting their family.
Yes, when the victimization is through, rather than prohibited by, the law, its not a crime.
None of which, of course, means that class or poverty should replace race (or sex, or LGBTQIA status, or ethnicity, or anything else) in our concerns—life is too complex for only one of those things to be a concern.
I'm not sure what definition you're using for hate. What year is it describing sounds more like a lack of compassion or disinterest.
However, I think Americans would be well served by reflecting on their their thoughts and feelings on the subject of race and introducing class to the conversation. It’s my experience that many Americans simply use race as a proxy for class, often incorrectly.
When's the last time you asked yourself 'What class person X belongs to.'? We think in terms of race and to a lesser extent religion.
Besides, it's not an either-or situation. Why can't we address both racial and class issues?
It is neither in itself an economic system, nor is it particularly responsible for prosperity (its responsible mainly for austerity).
I could be wrong, but don't the poor pay very little tax anyways?
In Spain if you work and you cost your company 26430 euros:
- The company pays 6430 for social security (calculated as a % of your salary, so this is effectively your tax even if on paper it's the company that pays it.)
- You pay 1270 for social security (on paper you pay it but the company gives it to the tax office directly)
- You pay 2338 for income tax (on paper you pay it but the company gives most of it to the tax office directly)
- You end up getting 16390 euros, or an effective tax rate of 38%.
This goes up if you pick a higher salary, obviously. If you work and you cost your company 67000 euros:
- The company pays 16300 for social security
- You pay 3101 for social security
- You pay 11582
- You end up getting 36016 euros, or an effective tax rate of 46%.
If you're a freelancer and you work for yourself it's more or less the same but there's also a fixed tax that while not being very high it's hard to deal with when you're earning 0 when starting out. In practice most people just risk it and don't report their activity at first for this reason.
But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you. Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well.
A contribution towards your pension is not a tax. It's a deferred payment. You will get that money later, with interest.
> Tax rate for capital gains is capped at 26% no matter how many millions you're earning.
Capital gains taxes charge you for the nominal increase in the value of the assets you sell, which means that you pay taxes for inflation. For example, if you bought an asset for 100EUR and sell it one year later for 103EUR, you will pay a capital gains tax on that 3EUR difference, even though you may not have actually obtained any benefit if inflation was 3% that year, so you are actually worse off than you were.
> But if you're truly rich, you don't work, you have assets that appreciate for you
You will pay taxes if they appreciate, but you won't get your money back when they depreciate. You are taking a risk.
> This does not take into account that as a rich person you're going to be spending less of the money you earn than a poor person so you're paying less VAT (sales tax) as well
If two people buy the same asset for the same price, they both pay the same amount in VAT. If the rich person ends up buying more stuff, they pay more VAT than the poor person.
And at the end of the day, most of the income taxes obtained by the government are paid by the upper quintile of the population. Which is to say, the working class enjoys social services they can't afford thanks to a small percentage of the population that pays on their behalf.
Not only that, Spain is one of the few countries in the world with a wealth tax, which starts once you reach 700k EUR, so it's not exactly taxing billionaires, either.
That's quite a naive take. European public pension systems don't work like that. The money is not invested, it is spent immediately to pay pensions to those who have already reached retirement age. What you get is a promise that some day you'll also get paid pension. But there's no guarantee that this will happen, since, as I said, this money is not invested, or set aside in a vault, it's spent immediately. And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again.
People should have voted for a better system, then. In Spain I've heard the same people complain about the unsustainability of the pension system while also complaining about the "Austrian backpack" approach, which is one way to address that problem.
Personally, I would prefer something like every person born in the same year contribute to the same pension fund, to be invested and redistributed as they turn 65, sort of like a mandatory annuity. It would avoid introducing these sort of inter-generational tensions.
> And given current demographic trends you have very slim chance of ever seeing that money again
That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
The Austrian backpack is extremely beneficial to large companies, thus is of no surprise that it gets touted in the news from time to time.
They don’t talk that much about its biggest drawback: in a market where wages are already low and talent is rarely valued, it would make firing people so cheap, companies wouldn’t really have any incentive to keep highly paid employees, even if they are excellent performers.
Spain is a... pathologically left-wing country, I would say. That indicates, among other things, a profound lack of knowledge of economics, which explains what you say (and some other stuff).
>That can be solved via immigration. People may not like the solution, but it is available to them, should they choose it.
Spain's youth unemployment rate is at around 28% right now. As long as there is a single unemployed Spanish person, especially young people, we shouldn't be accepting any more immigrants.
You can expect commenters on HN to interpret this as racism, but actually, it is just a simple logic: First you need to fix the economy so that it can create jobs, then you invite potential workers to immigrate.
Take Poland as an example of this: they way are ahead of Spain on "demographic collapse" curve, but also have a blooming economy - unemployment rate is one of the lowest in EU at 2.7 percent. Two millions of Ukrainian refugees came in there in the past year, and you know what? Most of them found jobs.
The assumption here is that economies led by right wing governments are more successful, which is hilariously untrue.
Having strong social protections and higher taxes does correlate with higher living standards, though. No social protections and no taxes correlate mostly with failed countries, so there is that.
The top 1 percent’s share of federal income taxes paid rose from 38.8 percent to 42.3 percent in 2023.
The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.3 percent.
I do believe that is taxing the rich
Most billionaires don’t even earn money from a salary, but instead from lower taxed capital gains.
But reducing the argument to rich vs. poor also misses out how unfair the tax system is to the middle class of wage earners in the US.
Why? You can easily compel compliance and there are millions more poor people tha. rich people. The way laws are structured today, the marginal dollar costs a lot to extract from a billionaire.
Difference in scale being a difference in kind. More money is easier to shelter if it has a legal origin.
And if you’re working poor (ie making $20k/year) you’re paying 7.5% in payroll taxes to cover social security and Medicare. This is also flat and so regressive.
You certainly pay less percentage and less absolute taxes than the rich, but it’s still something.
The challenge is that it’s hard to reduce these taxes any lower. Unless you want to change social security to a straight income redistribution program and not the pretend pension it is now and do something like the first $50k isn’t taxed and 10x the taxes on people from 50-200k (currently only 0-168k is taxed but almost half of people only make 50k so taking off the bottom drastically reduces tax revenue).
Or you could remove sales tax on people who make less than $20k but that’s hard to monitor properly and rebates don’t help much with day to day needs.
Tl:dr; the poor pay taxes, but not that much.
That is technically correct, but misleading, because even when it is not paid for by government food assistance, the sale of food is not taxed--at least, it is not in any of the 4 US states I've lived in.
But I think the important part is that poor people spend a larger percent of their income on things with sales tax than wealthy so sales tax impacts them more significantly. Thats what I meant t saying it’s regressive [0].
[0] https://www.accuratetax.com/blog/regressive-sales-tax-infogr...
Specifically, food from the "hot bar" in a supermarket is taxable, whereas a can of ravioli for instance, is not taxable even though it is a processed food by almost anyone's definition.
Prepared food like the food bar is full sales tax.
And raising capital gains taxes? What so they can screw over the middle again when they retire and have to intermittently sell off? It’s absurd.
"Tax the rich" only gets politicians to move around the income brackets and punish high-earning, honest professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Numbskulls who have never even filed a 1040 can't comprehend that the mega rich do not derive the majority of their wealth from income.
We should simplify our tax system to eliminate sophisticated tax strategies and level the playing field. Income tax should be reduced overall.