...

Y'know...? We wouldn't be looking at having to tax the sh*t out of them if they would willingly pay a living wage to workers. Philanthropy is bullsh*t. Just another way to avoid paying taxes.

I suspect very few billionaires are involved with their lowest level workers pay rates. People working for minimum wage are mostly working in franchised fast food places and such. The people determining their pay rate are far from millionaires much less billionaires. Typically, they are manager/owners who may have one tier of assistant managers above the lowest paid workers. The amount they pay their lowest paid people comes right out of their bottom line and thus their income. Any of them could decide to pay their workers more, if they want less.

In a larger corporations, there are managers who have an incentive to show their labor costs as low as possible to please higher management. There is a whole game theory area about how much to pay people versus turnover costs. The CEO hardly ever gets involved, unless they want to push a particular agenda for political or PR reasons.

So I think a 72% top rate on incomes over $10 million may be something that is workable. Bring back the estate tax, too, on estates over $10 million. 72% would be fine for that too. Nobody's kids need more than $10 million to start something productive. Over that just enables stuff like Trump's daddy leaving him 100's of millions to squander on idiotic vanity projects.

The massive wealth of the billionaire class and their multinational interests is a juggernaut out of control. Of course they don't control anything besides meetings with other billionaire's. They don't even buy their own private jets. But that money just keeps making more money and sucking the life out of the real world economy.

They have the power to take control. But as you can see from the Shultz fiasco, none of them really has clue how the real world works anymore.

I think market world controls a great deal now as state power and public spaces have been outsourced or sold off. Faster under Republican control, slow walked under democratic control.
I agree that it does suck the life out of the economy and cause impoverishment for many.

I suspect all of this discussion will eventually be relegated to a discussion of whether the future of mankind can survive under current economic models. The fundamental tacit assumption of capitalism has been there are infinite resources. What was not foreseen is the rapid automation of the workforce without a commensurate increase in replacement jobs.

The reader can devise their own arguments on resources, but the reality is we live in a finite space. One could argue there are or will be replacement jobs displaced from automation, but I ask based on the surety AI will eventually automate the automation.

The question will become which economic system will guarantee the survival of mankind and the ancillary question is anyone interested in the survival of mankind?

Automation is the real sleeper. I suspect the homeless problem is part of that one. I was watching channel 5, out of Seattle, the other night. They showed two automated cameras moving around. I expect this means that the tv stations no longer need people to control not only cameras but booms, etc. Just another class of jobs going away. Then mix in HUD by Jackass. Raising rents on the poor because "they should also have a job" - I think that includes folks like a 95 year old woman with nothing but minimum Social Security. I live in a place called Port Angeles. I have been told that the local high school has a large population of homeless kids as well (not on drugs, just have no place to sleep, along with mother and father.

Its going to continue and its going to be a LOT worse before somebody figures it out. I read an article about Finland being able to move all of their homeless into places and off the streets. In America, of course, we can't afford something like that with all the wars, tax giveaways, etc.

There is also the simple fact that we, and our gov, simply don't have the capacity for planning ahead. Before anybody starts to seriously work on this one there will be blood on the streets <sigh>

Studio camera automation is almost twenty years old now.
It's basically the province of news programming at the local level because they need the humans for news coverage out there in the world.

I read a story on a study (how's that for convenience) that predicts the loss of 50 million jobs to automation by 2030, assuming current trends hold. Between that and population trends the idea of "employment" will be vastly changed well within our lifetimes. The divergence between employment and compensation will continue to grow. One of the absolute requirements will be a "reconceptualization" of taxation (along the lines of Warren's AND Ocasio-Cortez's plans) to ensure government funding of essential functions - which will expand. The Green New Deal, or something like it, is our future, if we expect to survive. Some kind of universal income is also likely, rather than the expectation of a "guaranteed job".

That's neither a utopian nor dystopian prediction. It's just the rational extrapolation of current trends. We can either plan for it and provide some modicum of control, or be carried along by its currents. So, we have a choice. Hopefully, Trump and the current Congress will be the "old guard" in government thinking. The biggest impediment is likely to be the courts.

I think birthright ownership goes down a bit easier than UBI: Just like every citizen of Alaska "owns" some of the oil in the ground, and gets a royalty check every year, we could just say every American citizen "owns" a certain percentage of every corporation doing business in the US. Their monthly checks are not "free government money for being lazy" but rather dividend checks. (Republicans LOVE dividend checks but hate taxpayer money going to lazy bums.) That "ownership" could be held in trust (kind of like Social Security) so you can never sell it. It just supplies income every month for life. It stops when you die, so no fair leaving it to anybody.

Since it's based on GDP, it is also inflation-proof. For businesses, it's just part of the cost of doing business and affects all their competitors equally. We can add tariffs on items manufactured outside the US that go into the dividend fund.