Swimming in Money
Too many people spend money they earned..to buy things they don't want..to impress people that they don't like. --Will Rogers
Gravity Payments, a credit card processing company, founded and located in Ballard, which is one of the iconic neighborhoods of Seattle, has been a pioneer since 2015 at demonstrating how a - relatively - small company with robust profits and growth potential can show another way to conduct business in America.
Dan Price and his brother, Lucas, launched the company in the early 2000’s and, judging by what I have seen of Dan via Andrew Yang interviews with him and his Twitter feed he was destined to thumb his nose at your garden-variety capitalism. From what I understand, around 2015 Dan opted to sacrifice his million dollar a year salary in order for their lowest paid full-time employee to be paid $70,000 a year.
The skeptic in me notes that he probably ran the company for more than a few years taking home a million plus a year, so that by the time he decided to be beneficent towards his employees - in terms of salaries - he was pretty well set. The realist in me also notes that it is not necessarily easy to get by in Seattle on $70,000 a year. For instance, you won’t be purchasing a home in any of the tonier neighborhoods on that salary, but I know from firsthand knowledge, if you husband your resources and are able to discipline yourself from spending sprees, it is a ‘livable’ wage, and then some.
So, it’s a start.
Much has been made of his wealth-sharing tonic by those who espouse a Universal Basic Income or some version thereof. When the COVID recession hit, Gravity was confronted like every other business with a substantial loss of income. However, because Gravity’s employees appreciated the monetary sacrifice it’s executives had made previously, the 200 person workforce chose to take a 20% reduction in salary to see the company through and, of course, to avoid furloughs and layoffs.
As of today, they’ve rebounded and according to what I’ve read sales are strong.
Meanwhile, companies like J.C. Penney, who fired or furloughed many employees while their executives continued to draw enormous salaries, foundered and filed for bankruptcy. I realize that is comparing apples to oranges, but I believe this is the kind of transformative thinking capitalism needs.
The wage gap between executives and their employees has done nothing but widen over the past 70 years. Just as the wealth disparity between the richest micro percentage and the rest of us has expanded enormously.
I happen to believe society would be stronger if everyone were stronger. Yes, radical, I know.
To make everyone stronger we need to drastically raise the minimum wage. $7.50 an hour does not cut it anywhere in the country.
We need to build a health care system - an actual health care system - that is not for profit.
We need to return to the days when economic booms subsidized our citizens education. As it did in California, Texas and Alaska in the middle of the last century.
We need to elect public servants and we need to institute a rule where they cannot raise their level of income without raising the minimum wage commensurately.
Money is wasted everywhere and on a daily basis. But nowhere is it wasted more than on people and families who can no longer ever spend what they already have. I’m not sure where that threshold lies but I am willing to be generous.
As an example, it sounds reasonable enough to me that an income of a million dollars a year should be ample even for someone living in New York City. So, if you earn a cool million, you are not subject to the onerous tax burden of monies above a million. Your tax rate is - for argument’s sake 25% - and you can use most of the usual ‘breaks’ to get that reduced.
If you are being paid $10 million a year, well, I have some bad news for you. The additional $9 million will be taxed at 90% with absolutely no way of dodging it. You can’t even dodge it by deciding what charity you want to throw it at.
Why? Because it will be going into a General Fund that funds a very generous Universal Basic Income. $100,000 a year for full time employees, $50,000 a year for miscreants like me who choose not to work full time.
If you are voluntarily not working at all and are capable of working, you will have to manage on the largesse of society - free health care, free education, the charity of a friend and their couch. If you are incapable of working due to illness or injury, you’ll have to manage on the $100,000 a year program.
I know. Utopian. Pie-in-the-sky. It would never work for a multitude of reasons.
Perhaps so.
But the one thing I know is that the argument that there is not enough to go around is bullshit. It has always been bullshit.
The numbers are unfathomable for our minds. Unfathomable. As such we make up well thought out reasons for why the wealth can never be spread around.
Maybe in the future - assuming the human race has a future - AI (artificial intelligence) will be able to manage our affairs, cut waste down to next to nothing and show us how to equitably spread the wealth around without inconveniencing a soul.
By showing us how it would be possible, maybe AI will be able to make the unfathomable fathomable.
Which reminds me of something I saw while browsing about yesterday. I think it was on a T-shirt:
I am not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.
Which reminds me of the time my much more intelligent brother did not believe there was such a word as “whelm”. I told him at an Olive Garden outing in Austin with the family that I’d read you could be overwhelmed, you could be underwhelmed and you could be whelmed. He didn’t believe me. But it’s true.
It’s our steady state - whelmed.
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More on the row over our infantile president’s remarks about members of the military and whether or not he would be so boorish (my favorite expression for the *sshole). The answer is - of course he would. If for no other reason than he likes to think of himself as a ‘mob boss’.
Remember the tape of him authorizing payment to Stormy Daniels? Remember how Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the president preferred using inferences and allowed his henchmen to ‘fill in the blanks’, though what he wanted was clear - classic mob parlance? Remember the audio at some dinner party where he instructed Lev Parnas to ‘take out’ the ambassador to Ukraine?
In The Godfather, the character Sonny Corleone (played by James Caan) captures exactly what a president with five deferments steeped in the mob culture of New York would think about those in the military.
Also, as for QAnon, which I wrote about a while back, Trevor Noah and The Daily Show has the perfect primer for you. I’d say “Enjoy!” but the whole Q thing makes me want to vomit.
Which would be wonderful, but what would be equally wonderful would be for you to share my posts widely and often. I would very much appreciate that. - JLM