For an honest answer, it's because the green circle is too abstract. The others are numbers everyone sees on their paycheck.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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If you work for a publicly traded company and wish to become radicalized, you can divide the year's profits (plus money wasted on stock buybacks) by the number of employees to roughly estimate your personal green circle.
You might even add the CEO's compensation to the numerator. I hear LLMs are ready for prime time.
The same reason people running the company are trying to squish the yellow circle as much as possible.
But building a good community through the funding of public services via taxation is a moral/ethical good.
Striving to reduce labor costs to enrich yourself, especially to the detriment of that labor and to an excessive degree of wealth for yourself, is a moral/ethical evil.
Taxation, when run by and for the people who generate it, is a good thing that people should strive to support. It's a misunderstanding to not view taxation in a well working system (examining individual systems, not the whole in some binary fashion) as a cost efficiency for things you already want - childcare, education, healthcare, public transportation (busses, trams/railcars, trains, bicycle infrastructure), insurance, energy, food, research, protection, charity, infrastructure, etc.
This is where the argument always gets muddy. The whole point of government and taxes is that we all chip in to pay for things that benefit everyone, and the government administers it. In the US, especially now, this system has become so perverted that the job of the government has become funneling all that money to the richest people while convincing the general population that what's happening is to their benefit.
Which I understand and agree with. But to come to LateStageCapitalism and claim people who want to minimize taxes have the same motives as the people who want to minimize worker wages is I think too reductive for my taste.
I think the working man shoots himself in the foot when they push to minimize taxing. I think people need to hold taxation and public services in high esteem and it needs to be a pride for people. I think at the same time we have to be honest and outraged by how our tax dollars are spent (in the US at least.
The US being corrupt doesn't change the principle, it just changes how we address this specific instance. But the people who shake their fist at union dues are doing LateStageCapitalisms' work for the oligarchs, just the same as taxes. We should be pushing for more taxes on the wealthy, tax billionaires out of existence and cap millionaires at something reasonable and safe for democracy like let's say 5 million in assets.
Taxes can be a formidable tool against corporations and for the people.
100% agree. I blame entitled billionaires kids for just about all our problems and would love to see a 100% estate tax on any amount over say 10 million.
I'm Australian, living in Australia, but spent 10 years living in the US and have an American wife, and I'm constantly shocked by how little Americans accept for their taxes.
Here, I pay 2.5% of my income so that everyone can get health care when they need it. Not only am I fine with that, but I'd happily pay twice that if they throw in dental as well. But we also give billions in tax breaks to foreign mining companies to come and dig up our minerals and ship them overseas so that my kids and I get nothing from them.
I'm not anti tax, I'm more than happy to pay for healthcare, education, food, housing and more so that everyone has a decent standard of living. But I despise putting a single dollar in the pocket of anyone who is already independently wealthy.
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So how do we unlock the green part for ourselves instead of giving it all to a rich twat?
Seize. The. Means.
Force will be required.
Ask them nicely and then vote for someone who will ask them nicely surely they will give it up without a problem.
Deflationary currency, where they have to give you specific demotion in pay to stay at the same purchasing power. Also housing appreciation needs to be readded to the CPI so that it raises interest rates when it gets too high.
You become the thing you hate. Start a business.
Edit: I just want to clarify that this is supposed to be mostly an outrageous thing to be said. I did that on purpose. I may have forgotten a "/s" to make that clear. Not everyone has the aptitude, willingness, or care to create their own business. Depending on your line of work, it may be a near impossibility to do so, as others have articulated already.
I'm trying to make a social comment on the absurdity of our current capitalistic systems. While it's true that you can keep 100% of what you produce as profit for yourself if you are independent, that doesn't make the prospect any more viable as a course of action. However, having the "opportunity" to start a business and keep 100% of the profits is the excuse any capitalist would provide in this situation.
I suppose, saying "become the thing you hate" didn't make it clear enough to everyone that this is supposed to be a mockery of capitalists.
Good luck being succesfull, everyone can start one...not everyone can pick something that works and/or make it work
Great idea. What kind of business, I wonder? Telecoms company? Bank? Train network? Carmaker? Steel refiner? Power plant? Newspaper? Mobile phone manufacturer? Television? Oh wait, all of those industries are already heavily rigged in favour of the status quo.
Or by "start a business" did you mean buy a van and hire a local school leaver to help you do some landscaping and HVAC?
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In a company you always have people that don't generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
The green part should still be smaller. However you can seize that part by going freelance.
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I recognize what taxes pay for and I recognize even I get something from them. I dont mind that I live in one of the most taxed countries in the world because I'm not afraid of getting mugged every day, see no trash on the streets, have access to free healthcare and schools etc. Yeah, sure, the state is not an efficient way of doing things and it could be better but I also recognize that not everything is perfect. I don't see the reason to completely gut the state, have no taxes and hope a for profit, privatized, system will be better just because the state is inefficient or theres some corruption. Not a good enough reason imo. I'd think differently if the problems were more dire, but they just arent. Not here at least.
Profit? What does that get me? Companies find ways to evade paying taxes on them, then invest into ventures that extract more money from its populace (like real-estate). I recognize profit is kind of the driving force of the economy... I mean money needs to flow to other companies in form of investments which creates jobs but this isn't strictly a necessity. More often than not, its just hoarded by the top class. More often than not, its just theft. Profit is theft.
My father feels that it is injust to say that because
- They hired you
- You need the job
- How would they (the company) make any money if they gave the workers whatever wage they wanted
his response to people asking for better wages actively and talking about their value being stolen is 'why did you look/choose this job'
his idea of an union is essentially a single legal union, which can only strike when in agreement with the company (???)
and he is a landlord and was the factory manager, and would likely think differently if he didn't get the benefit of rent money from both the apartments and a shop downtown
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Honest question: say it gets divided, who will decide on the right margin the company run with?
It's so weird that Americans cling to feudal landlord mentality like a lifeline, and also call it "freedom".
And by landlord mentality I'm not just talking about conservative thinking. It also drives the idea that it's perfectly fine to learn skills by watching what other people do and then basing new work on it - but when software does that, it's "stealing". Righteous outrage! Not fair! That's mine! Just another form of landlordism, but it's the good kind! (as usual)
Personally, I've been trying to reduce both the green and the red to make my yellow bigger. This is possible because in my country, I can pay myself a moderate salary and still get health insurance. Then eventually I can pay myself dividends on the last year's profit when doing the annual financial report, and I can buy some things as business expenses (which makes them cost me about 60% less of my time compared to buying them as a private individual from post-tax income).
On the green front, I'm reducing it by 1) charging quite a bit of money for an hour of my time, definitely more than I got paid as a full-time employee 2) also having some foreign contracts where I can charge even more money and as a bonus, bring more money into my country
Now since all this still leaves me SIGNIFICANTLY less well-off than a lot of people who most certainly don't work 10, 100 or 100000 times harder than I do, this has actually turned me even more against capitalism than ever before (despite the fact that I literally make more money than I ever have before). I'm doing moderate tax optimization, about as much as I can do while still considering it ethical, work 200+ hours a month, and at the end of the day, while I might retire a millionaire, I'll never make it to a hundred million. Even 10 million is only possible with lucky breaks in investments.
How does it scale to include the whole working class?
It doesn't. The rest of the working class is even more screwed. That's why being just slightly more well off at the cost of a lot more work is making me hate the economic system even more.
Without owning my own company, I had an effective tax rate of about 50% on my income before you even consider that nearly all goods and services also have 22% VAT and my income was capped by my salary as I worked full time. Now I'm paying about 30% effectively and my income potential itself is higher. But you look at the people who own companies where their source of income isn't their own labor and they pay way less tax (company lambo, completely tax-free daily allowance on "business trips", etc) while earning at least 10x more than I do... And that's before you get to the oligarch class, people earning 100000x what I do, maybe 1000000x. Luckily we don't have many billionaires in my country, maybe none? But we certainly have too many millionaires and a lot of them got wealthy off the privatization of industries in the 90s.
The yellow vs green circle is what I've chosen to sell my time for. It's a choice.
The taxes portion is also a choice, but I only get to choose whether and how much to fund schools and hospitals and accessible healthcare on a 5 year ticket.
I'm only glad that the bundle i pick that goes status-quo on healthcare and schools is also the one that doesn't hate brown people or women AND has a chance of getting to run the show.
Sorry, I forgot what we were talking about. How does anarchy fund accessible healthcare again?
Chose, so you weren't born into it but migrated into it? For lack of a better choice?
The late stage anarchy threat is over there. Here we criticize capitalism. Or are you looking for the apathics anonymous? Or the bootlickers forums?
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Joke's on you, I'm just slacking off on company time.
no joke, but i had a VERY well paying job where nothing happened, so i'd just go on reddit all day
Security inspector at the local nucular power plant?
I like the cut of your jib
noice 👏
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