Because I was not a dildo

Financing is one of the major hurdles of employee owned businesses trying to compete against investor owned businesses, so you’re right to identify that. I have 4 main solutions to this problem:

1. Investment isn’t the only way to raise capital. There’s also loans. In a fully co-op economy, the financial infrastructure for loans would likely be more robust. This is already how a lot of businesses get off the ground.

2. A company doesn’t have to be 100% employee owned for the employees to have a controlling stake. An employee-owned company could decide to sell off 49% of its value to raise capital. They could do this at any time, including during startup.

3. The average worker would have more money to do as they please. In 2023, American companies earned a profit of $22k per worker. In a co-op economy, that’s an average of $22k each worker has control over that they currently don’t. Your average worker would be more capable of making the type of investment that you described.

4. Companies don’t necessarily have to start as employee owned. A normal path for an entrepreneur is to start a business, grow it until it’s sustainable and later sell it to somebody. Instead of selling it to an investor, they could sell it to their employees. In a co-op economy, this would probably be required in some way or another.

Unless the tax rate is similar to income tax rates, it still won’t change the growth > dividends incentive. And it would still be very unpopular because it would lower retirement incomes or make existing retirement accounts last for shorter lengths. Any proposal to change how capital gains works would have to also address retirees’ legitimate concerns in order to be politically viable.

Completely agree. My wildest fantasy would be a phase in of co-ops/employee owned companies. This could be done over a 10 year period with each year requiring 5 more percent of the company value be owned equally by the employees (judged by the employee with the lowest stake). By the end of that decade, employees would own a controlling stake in their employers and would have plenty of time to organize a method of governance.

There’s one critical metric that I think would determine how easily a company could make this transition: (total company value)/(2 x total company payroll). A $1M company with a $500k payroll would require each employee to pay an entire year’s salary for them to have a controlling stake. That’s very achievable over a 10 year period without really even having to give the ownership to the employees. The owners could just sell it off to them.

With this metric in mind, the companies that would transition the best would be ones that pay their employees very well relative to company value. Something like a small welding shop with a high number of skilled employees might be able to do this easily. A tech company with huge valuation relative to the number of employees would be forced to offer aggressive stock buying programs for employees (for every share you buy, the company matches 10 shares for example). This would force companies that don’t pay well to either buy back stock, issue new stock, or drastically increase their payroll to make the transition.

This is how incentives are currently structured to play out. If a company makes some money, it can either re-invest it to grow the business or pay it out as dividends. Dividends are taxed as income while capital gains are taxed much lower. This discrepancy in tax rates is explicitly to promote growth.

This is one area I think the left has missed the forest for the trees with the “tax the rich” slogan. The uber-wealthy aren’t uber-wealthy due to high incomes. Steve Jobs famously had a salary of 1$. A higher tax bracket or 2 would barely affect them. You need to tax capital gains as income to actually make a dent. This would also impact a lot of middle-class retirement accounts though so nobody wants to do that. I think a proposal that bolstered social security to make up the difference for retirees should be combined with a proposal to tax all capital gains as income. I haven’t done the numbers, but I bet that the extra tax revenue would more than pay for the extra social security spending.

You just equated blocking c/politics with being broadly pro status quo. You can be politically engaged and active and not like the discussions on c/politics.

Hey I have the stereo on the bottom.

2:46 “am I not speaking clearly?”

I just checked mine and it has no permissions. How is it collecting everything?

I’ve heard a lot of terrible takes when it comes to the gun control debate. But this might be the first well thought out proposal I’ve heard.

Let’s say my name is Jerry. I’m a little short but not a lot. My work hired another dude named Jerry and he was absolutely massive. At least 400 lbs. So he became big Jerry and I became little Jerry. I attempted to just be Jerry but they were having none of that.