Credit: Yes!
With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back.
Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December, for example, the city of Portland, Oregon, passed an ordinance to raise the business tax on companies with CEOs who earn more than 100 times the median pay of their workers. Portland officials said the ordinance is the first of its kind in the country. And now, more cities and states are poised to follow suit.
“The huge divide in income and wealth has real-world implications,” Steve Novick wrote last October in Inequality.org. Novick sponsored the ordinance when he was on the Portland City Council. “Too many Americans cannot get a leg up,” he wrote. “Income inequality undermines the American dream.”
Portland city government projects the tax will raise $2.5 million to $3.5 million a year, which city officials have said will likely help pay for the city’s homeless programs.
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That’s exactly what we need: a maximum wage which has an equality effect equal to the minimum wage; maximizing the amount a single individual can make and the rest of the excess net income going to the government in the form of a tax. This would quickly bring down our “national debt” that the republicans are so worried about. In my view it is absurd to have anyone printing money except the federal government; we should have a national bank that prints the money and can loan it out. I can’t believe our government has to borrow money from banks; it should be the other way around. That would solve most of the problems with inequality in America.
Actually the federal government does not really borrow from private banks.
See the work of Kelton and other heterodox economists in the field.
https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton
She was one of Bernie Sander’s economic advisers from the University of Missouri at KC.
There is too much to put in a comment but needless to say TPTB are happy that people do not understand this. In short, taxes and borrowing do not fund federal spending. This was in fact well known during in the past but the right and its think tanks and propaganda mills have slowly being rendering the federal government as an impudent and incompetent over the last 40-50 years. We are now at the point that the Democrats even believe this nonsense.
This is why the EURO zone is such a disaster, it is effectively on the gold standard as individual counties do not have their own currencies. The same as a state in the US.
As wealth continues to “trickle up” the lower and middle classes necessarily have less to spend. Less money to spend means less demand. Less demand means fewer services and products sold. Fewer services and products sold means fewer jobs to produce those products and services……….a viscious downward spiral where millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet. The rich have too much money. The lower classes don’;t have enough. It’s not rocket science.