Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were?
Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.
Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs, so uber doesn’t need an account with a full years salary for every driver somewhere at the start of the year. Get paid before the worker and the worker is in effect giving you a zero interest loan.
Now for a consultant the company may get paid after the worker but the company is rarely waiting a more than a few weeks.
A plumber, doctor, teacher, cook, etc does work before getting paid and the company rarely needs to wait 365 days for someone to pay them for that work. This means your idea is inherently flawed, there’s no broader point when you’re making a mistake.
Further future revenue is generally inflation adjusted. If you borrow 1B to build a power plant you sell electricity at future prices not what electricity was worth when you started building. When the reverse happens say at collages when they get paid months before professors get paid, the school isn’t increasing salaries every month to keep up with inflation.
From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like.
To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.
Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.
Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.