On 25/9/17 2:08 pm, Rich Ulrich wrote:
On Mon, 25 Sep 2017 07:12:09 +0800, Robert Bannister
wrote:

On 25/9/17 1:56 am, Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-09-22 19:16, Robert Bannister wrote:
On 22/9/17 7:28 am, Wolf K wrote:
On 2017-09-21 19:25, Robert Bannister wrote:
[...]
That is the part the really sticks in my throat: they get these 7
figure jobs as a figurehead while they are still receiving thousands
of taxpayers' money in superannuation.

While "private" business people get several times that much. That's
what stick in my throat.

Well, at least that money comes from the business, so only indirectly
from their customers/clients, whereas politicians' money comes
directly from taxpayers, especially from the poorer ones who can't
access tax loopholes.

So you think when you indirectly pay a CEO $10,000,000, that's OK, While
directly paying an MP $150,000 is not?

More or less, yes. I'm a socialist, not a communist. I do, however,
object to them receiving $10m "bonuses", especially when the share price
has gone down. Once, I used to believe that nobody deserved to be paid
more than or even as much as a thousand times what the lowest paid
worker received, but then I realised that entertainers (which includes
so-called sportsmen and -women) will always get what the market dictates
and that there is no way of controlling this without totalitarian
government.

Or, tax it. - When Ronald Reagan was president of his labor union,
the income tax rate was 91% on that portion of income above
some cutoff. The only people who /paid/ that much were a couple
of champion boxers and a few members of his union, the Screen
Actors Guild. That was the 1950s, when labor unions were strong
and the U.S. economy had its best performance ever.

This is another problem: the people "earning" the most often pay the
least tax either because they can afford really clever accountants or
because, like our Prime Minister, they keep their money in an offshore
tax haven... or both.


I liked the commentary that blamed those friendships with stars
for Reagan's bias against taxing wealth.

I don't have any fixed opinion on what entertainers should earn, or
keep after taxes. I concluded a dozen years ago that anyone who
whose corporate job paid over $1 million was probably breaking the
law if he earned it (blood money), or else was screwing his company.
Since then, I've tentatively raised that acceptable level to, maybe,
$3 million -- not for a good reason, but because so many CEOs get
that much.



There is only one wallet.

Ours.

Precisely. Keep that in mind next time you read the business pages.



--
Robert B. born England a long time ago;
Western Australia since 1972