With wealth inequality and billionaire control over American society growing ever more obscene, it’s well past time to implement a maximum wage limit.

  • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    The problem of this is always the same. Contractors. Is your janitor holding the wage of your CEO down? Easy fix, you are the CEO. Fire the janitor and hire a cleaning company. Since the employees of the cleaning company are not your employees, their wages are no longer relevant.

    At some point, the CEO can just have its own company of 1 employee (himself) which owns 100% of the stakes of the real company, and he can also be CEO of the real company. The real company would just pay massive amounts to the CEO company for “IP” or “consulting”.

    This policy can be implemented voluntarily by companies, but I don’t think a government can make a law to implement this policy without obvious loopholes.

    • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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      16 hours ago

      If you had a minimum wage and defined maximum wage in terms of that, you’d bypass this issue.

      The “creating shell companies to get around laws” and “outsource to contractors to get around employee protections” points are still problems of course. I suspect the most realistic way of dealing with it is making it unprofitable.

      • sqgl@sh.itjust.works
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        12 hours ago

        Shell companies are already used to evade tax. That does not necessarily mean we should abolish tax as perhaps calcopritus is suggesting (I can’t tell).

        Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.

        • luciferofastora@feddit.org
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          6 hours ago

          Shell companies are already used to evade tax

          Yes, and I hate it, but I’m not sure I have a workable solution.

          Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.

          I think it’s a good idea, but it’ll be a hard one to implement

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          I don’t say to abolish tax. With tax, however, you can set taxes on the transactions made for evading taxes. You can’t set a maximum wage on foreign companies though.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        I don’t see what Switzerland has to do with any of this. And why it would be fixed if Switzerland set a minimum wage.

        • sqgl@sh.itjust.works
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          12 hours ago

          I told you: Switzerland is the only country to have held a referendum on maximum wages.

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            But how would setting a minimum wage fix the loopholes of setting a maximum wage. That makes no sense unless you explain further.