What Kind of Job Is Important

The relevance is really obvious in the wake of the several recent very destructive natural disasters. Obviously, not a comprehensive list of important jobs.

Lyrics

What Kind of Job Is Important
© copyright 2017 Patricia M. Shannon

What kind of jobs are important? What do we really need?
What is it we cannot live without, not just an expression of greed?
We need food and water, shelter from the cold.
The farmer, the plumber, the carpenter are far more important than gold.

(chorus)
Those who have been thru the tunnel/valley, seen the light then returned to our shores,
tell us helping each other, and always be learning, that is what we are here for.

(bridge)
And no one returns from the other side to say that our value is shown
by the size of our stock portfolio, or the number of cars that we own.

Some people think they're important, because they sit at their desks all day
making money by moving money around in a circular way.
But what use is money if there's no one who can buy,
and no one to fix the power lines, or the pipes when the water runs dry.

(chorus)

The Mathematics of Inequality

 

 

Mathematical analysis shows that without redistribution, wealth becomes increasingly more concentrated, and inequality grows until almost all assets are held by an extremely small percent of people.  History shows this analysis is accurate.   I first saw such an analysis years ago, I believe in Scientific American in the winter in 1990, 1991, or 1992. I haven't been able to find the article in the Scientific archives, because they don't have good enough descriptions for the column where it would have appeared. I bought several articles I hoped would be the right one, but didn't find it. Luckily, there were finally some more recent analyses I was able to reference in my blog.

 

https://now.tufts.edu/articles/mathematics-inequality

By Taylor McNeil
October 12, 2017

Seven years ago, the combined wealth of 388 billionaires equaled that of the poorest half of humanity, according to Oxfam International. This past January the equation was even more unbalanced: it took only eight billionaires, marking an unmistakable march toward increased concentration of wealth. Today that number has been reduced to five billionaires.

Trying to understand such growing inequality is usually the purview of economists, but Bruce Boghosian, a professor of mathematics, thinks he has found another explanation—and a warning.

Using a mathematical model devised to mimic a simplified version of the free market, he and colleagues are finding that, without redistribution, wealth becomes increasingly more concentrated, and inequality grows until almost all assets are held by an extremely small percent of people.

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It’s easy to imagine how wealth-attained advantage works in real life. “The people with that advantage receive better returns on their investments, lower interest rates on loans, and better financial advice,” said Boghosian. “Conversely, as Barbara Ehrenreich famously observed, it is expensive to be poor. If you are working two jobs, you don’t have time to shop for the best bargains. If you can’t afford the security deposit demanded by most landlords, you may end up staying in a motel at inflated prices.”

The model tracks the data with remarkable accuracy, he said.

•••••

Putting aside ethical issues of growing inequality, it can also create an unhealthy economy, Boghosian said. “That’s because when wealth concentrates and the middle class is depleted too much, you may get very wealthy industrialists, very wealthy manufacturers, but to whom do they sell their products? It locks up the economy,” he said.

•••••

https://www.austms.org.au/Jobs/Library4.html

THE MATHEMATICS OF INEQUALITY

By Mark Buchanan
reprinted from The Australian Financial Review
September 2002
(originally in New Statesman)

•••••

Even if everyone starts out equally, and they remain equally adept at choosing investments, differences in investment luck will cause some people to accumulate more wealth than others. Those who are lucky will tend to invest more, and so have a chance to make greater gains still. Hence, a string of positive returns builds a person's wealth not merely by addition but by multiplication, as each subsequent gain grows ever bigger. This is enough, even in a world of equals where returns on investment are entirely random, to stir up huge disparities of wealth in the population.

•••••

Hours needed to escape poverty

 

Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes on an Epic Scale

 See link for details:

https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Last June, drawing on the largest trove of confidential American tax data that’s ever been obtained, ProPublica launched a series of stories documenting the key ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, strategies that are largely unavailable to most taxpayers. To mark the first anniversary of the launch, we decided to assemble a quick summary of the techniques — all of which can generate tax savings on a massive scale — revealed in the series.

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Ultra-rich tax cheets

 

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1707357036244070662?t=ZCmukmlcBp9XqPYJKYzDTg&s=19

Senate Dems have obtained extraordinary new data from the IRS on tax avoidance by the super-rich.

Nearly 1,000 people who earn over $1 million per year didn't file tax returns at all for at least one year from 2017 to 2020, the data shows.

Also: The 2,000 people who represent the highest-income non-filers in at least one year from 2017 to 2020 owe a total of more than $900 million in taxes.

@RonWyden obtained the data from the IRS. I got a look at it.

GOP wants to gut IRS enforcement.

The GOP House voted to repeal IRS funding for expanded enforcement against rich tax cheats. Most of the 2024 GOP candidates have attacked that funding.

But it's already bringing in more revenues from wealthy tax avoiders. Rs want to roll that back.

Here again, the "working class GOP" makeover is mostly baloney. Republicans claim expanded IRS enforcement will hurt workers and small businesses. 

The reality is enforcement makes it more likely that elites and workers will be treated *equivalently.*

Why Billionaires Fund Anti-Trans & Anti-Black-History Political Movements

 

https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-billionaires-fund-anti-trans-255

Thom Hartman

AUG 16, 2023

House Republicans want to give themselves $8,000+ pay rises, while furiously opposing other government spending

 https://www.businessinsider.com/house-republicans-seek-8k-pay-rise-themselves-oppose-other-spending-2023-7

Sophia Ankel 

Jul 14, 2023, 6:35 AM EDT

• House Republicans want to give themselves pay rises of at least $8,000, Roll Call reported. 
• The push came after they negotiated cuts to three federal programs for low-income people.
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New GOP bills would hand richest 1% over $28 billion in tax cuts next year

 

https://www.rawstory.com/new-gop-bills-would-hand-richest-1-over-28-billion-in-tax-cuts-next-year/

 

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
June 12, 2023, 1:01 PM ET

Tax cut legislation that House Republicans are set to consider this week after pushing the global economy to the brink of disaster would deliver more than $28 billion to the richest 1% of Americans next year—and just $1.4 billion to the poorest fifth of the country.

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That's according to a new analysis of the legislation by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which estimated Sunday that the poorest fifth of Americans would receive an average tax break of just $40 next year under the three new Republican bills, one of which is titled the Tax Cuts for Working Families Act.

By contrast, ITEP showed, people in the top 1% of the income distribution would see an average tax cut of $16,550 under the legislation.

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The richest 1 percent dodge taxes on more than one-fifth of their income, study shows

I suggest reading the whole article.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/26/wealthy-tax-evasion/

 

By Christopher Ingraham
March 26, 2021 at 7:08 a.m. EDT 

The richest Americans are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the Internal Revenue Service, according to a comprehensive new estimate of tax evasion, with the top 1 percent of earners accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes.

That’s costing the federal government roughly $175 billion a year in revenue, according to the findings by a team of economists from academia and the IRS.

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The researchers say that years of IRS funding cuts, combined with the increased sophistication of tax evasion tactics available to the rich, have made shirking tax obligations easier than ever. And they say that these estimates probably understate the true extent of tax evasion at the top of the income spectrum.

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But the new study finds that even the IRS’s standard corrections underestimate the true extent of tax evasion among the rich.

The researchers were able to demonstrate this after the IRS and Justice Department initiated a crackdown on tax evasion in 2008. That effort led to the creation of the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program, which allowed taxpayers to disclose previously hidden offshore assets and pay a penalty in exchange for immunity from prosecution. According to the IRS, tens of thousands of taxpayers took advantage of the program before it shut down in 2018.

Hundreds of those taxpayers, as it turns out, had also been randomly audited before the creation of the program. The researchers matched those audits with the subsequent disclosures, and found that IRS auditors missed the offshore assets roughly 93 percent of the time.

These riches sheltered overseas, moreover, were concentrated almost exclusively among the very top earners.

The study also uncovered evidence of widespread underreporting of income among proprietors of pass-through businesses, whose revenue is taxed on their owners’ returns. “Up to 35% of the income earned at the top is not comprehensively examined in the context of random audits,” the authors found.

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Since 2010, total funding for the IRS fell by about 20 percent, according to recent congressional testimony by IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. The number of enforcement staff employed by the agency fell 30 percent over the same period.

Those staffing cuts have, in turn, driven a sharp drop in audit rates, especially for wealthy taxpayers. In the mid-2010s, close to 30 percent of the returns of the richest 0.01 percent of taxpayers — those earning at least $10 million a year — were typically audited. By 2019, that number had fallen to well under 10 percent.

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