General Discussion

Last edited Wed May 15, 2013, 11:53 PM - Edit history (1)

you are making it from other people.

Look at even a small business. I worked for a satellite dish factory. Made a whopping $5.40 an hour (usually). How did the owner make his much higher salary? Did he work for it? I am not sure how much work he did, but generally he was getting his income by paying us less than the value of what we produced. If he takes just $1 an hour from each of his 200 employees, he makes $400,000 a year.

I think CEOs are the same way, except they have many more employees to profit from.

How does Maher make his money? He gets it from advertisers who pay for ads based on his viewership and then add the costs onto their products. He sorta gets it the same way JK Rowling does. It comes from 2 million viewers giving him $5 a year for an hour's entertainment every day. So there he is making, say $5 million a year, and suppose the tax rate is such that if he makes another $5 million that taxes will take 80% of it. Is that such a bad thing? It's money that he is getting from the public and it is going back to finance public purposes.

I can see how it would be bad for him, but it is hard for me to feel the pain of somebody making $5 million a year. Better to finance a school or a library than to finance another private jet or indoor bowling alley for him.

Am I supposed to believe he is an Atlas and that the world will collapse if he shrugs? It didn't collapse in the 1970s. In fact, it almost collapsed in 2008, when the casino games of the rich investing class almost brought down the whole banking system.