They used the colossal profits of their oil industry to make major investments into their infrastructure and education system. If Norway was doing worse than us, we would see a ton of immigrants from Norway, but the only immigrants we consistently see are refugees from less developed nations. Strange that we never see people trying to leave all of these socialist nations to live here.
By this logic, that must mean my home state of New Hampshire is eclipsing the economies of California and Texas. They’re larger populations, they must be doing something wrong.
I’ve spent years becoming an expert on how we’ve ended the world, you’re not about to convince me in my area of expertise that green energy is a scam. Especially when we’ve barely invested any more into it than proofs-of-concepts like basic solar panels and wind farms. EMP drilling is capable of digging 20km down from any place on Earth’s surface to release infinite geothermal energy, we didn’t bother investing into the technology until the 2020’s when it could’ve been done decades ago. Before we were stuck with this massive and disruptive transition we see today.
Some of the boomers always tell us Gen Z to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and retail jobs wages shouldnt be increased because they’re “teenager jobs”. Im sick of it
I don’t think those stats on their own tell the whole picture. You really need to get a full view of what corporations are spending on before deciding whether this is appropriate or not.
For example, perhaps a large portion of the non-labor cost is tied to infrastructure.
Surely you wouldn’t want much slower performance when playing overwatch? Some of it may be for software that at one point replaced manual work. I don’t think you would want businesses to eschew new software in favor of maintaining large workforces dedicated to manual repetitive work. That would be a recipe for failure.
Not to mention that these numbers don’t actually tell you much about actual per capita earnings. A corporation could have 10 employees in total, each being paid $400k a year, and that could still only be 8% of their total expenses.
I can’t speak to the accuracy of those stats, but just like almost anything, there’s much more to the story than what two data points can tell you.
I will agree with the insurance, medical, and 401k but taxes today are much lower. Top marginal corporate tax rate was 46% today its 21%. Top federal income tax rate was 70% today its 37% this is for the year 1979 compared to 2022.
Eisenhower taxed corporations and the top 1% at 90% each, and this was in the 50’s. The economy was in a literal fantasy setting of growth and economic mobility for decades afterward.
The reason? The only way for these businesses and the rich to make money was to expand as much as possible, which spurred massive amounts of innovation, competition, and job creation until the 80’s (when taxes on both were cut to 35% and then paid for by taxing social security income that working class already got taxed for).
Notice how all of that utopian quality stopped as taxes gradually become so low that it became easier to just hoard everything and use it to lobby Congress and buy out your competitors until every sector became a corporate monopoly/oligarchy once again.
Oh, I see the correlation. The current system is literally siphoning money from the lowest paid and giving it to the top. (billion dollar subsidies from tax dollars to the wealthiest corporations)
The tax rates are here: As I am unable to post links, you’ll have to remove the space between the .org
taxpolicycenter .org/statistics/corporate-top-tax-rate-and-bracket
taxpolicycenter .org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates
Wonderful find! Mean GDP of $61K per year doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you remember that over-privatized and/or unregulated sectors can force macroeconomic factors into place that make essentials like housing, transportation, education, or healthcare double or triple the price for a third to half the quality. Being the wealthiest nation on Earth is the ONLY reason our nation can afford to put our working class through all of that sloppy design.
GDP per capita should seriously show the mode instead of the mean, mode would represent working class income way more. The mean GDP per capita bumps the Average American income from 25K per year to 60K per year because Bezos exists.
Income inequality/inequity has been worse than during The Great Depression since like 2018. Major crash coming in 2023, hopefully will force through some more grassroots policies and politicians…
Wouldn’t put too much faith in that as people are easily corruptible. Once those grassroots politicians get a taste of power and get their first bribe, the cycle will repeat.
Corruption within government tends to share a strong positive correlation with large population sizes per elected official. When you have to run for office in a population of hundreds of thousands to millions, instead of 50,000 (like the Founding Fathers intended for the House and Senate), the only ones that can win by design are either the rich or the ones selling their souls to the rich. It becomes too expensive for grassroots movements to be involved when you need to pay for large scale campaign expenses like security, advertisements and campaign buses rather than knocking on doors and printing flyers. Either have to be rich, or let lobbyists pay for it. Founding Fathers would be baffled we ever made states larger than 100,000 in population size because the Senate was never designed for that scenario…
That’s why the Founding Fathers constitutionally mandated adding seats to the House every 10 years as state populations grew. Any legislative body that doesn’t add seats to compensate for population growth quickly becomes an exclusive club that only corruption can consistently reach. For some reason, we locked the House’s seat number to 435 in 1937 in direct violation of the Constitution…
The ones that desire endless wealth or power always end up being the last to deserve either. Major political/business structures need to be designed around that fatal and inevitable flaw of human nature by diffusing the power between more individuals than fewer.