I once again stumbles across one of those neo-socialist videos where the author compared the net worth of billionaire CEOs with the salaries of entry-level workers who had just been hired into one of the companies of said CEO. About how the CEO is worth such-and-such amount of billions of dollars, while the entry-level worker gets a salary of such-and-such amount of dollars per hour. In this particular video the author was advocating for a "wealth tax".
There were several things wrong with that video. The fact that a "wealth tax" of billionaires would do jack squat to the salaries of entry-level workers was just the least of those. (The only thing that a "wealth tax" would do is to increase governmental tax revenue by a small fraction of a percent, all of which would just be wasted on the same things they are wasting that tax money anyway. The entry-level workers would see little to no benefit from it at all.)
One of the major problems in the video, something that's ubiquitous in the neo-socialist narrative, is equating "net worth" with "income".
It was quite notable, when one pays close attention, how the author of the video talked about how the "worth of (such-and-such CEO) is 100 billion dollars" while the hourly salary of an entry-level worker is such-and-such amount of dollars. What the actual income of the CEO is was conspicuously absent from the video.
In other words, the author (like so many of these people) are comparing apples to oranges. He is comparing net worth with income, even though those are two completely different things. By omitting this difference these people are deliberately deceiving their audience, implying that the two things are somehow equivalent. Not explaining what "net worth" means, leaving it to the impressions of the viewer, and especially when comparing it to someone's hourly salary, is deliberate deception, effectively lying by omission.
Most people who listen to these videos, articles and meme pictures simply don't stop to think what "net worth" means, nor whether it can be directly compared to someone's income. They just hear "very big number vs. very small number", and their rational thinking stops there. Hey, both numbers are measured in dollars, so both must be measuring the same thing, don't they?
There's also a kind of double deception going there: Even those people who at some level understand that someone's "net worth" is not the same thing as their income, might still often be left with the impression that it means how much money they have eg. in a bank. Their cash. That if such a CEO wanted to withdraw their entire net worth, eg. 100 billion dollars, from the bank, they could just go and do it. They could, if they wanted, create a big pile of that cash, like in the movie The Dark Knight (where Joker burns such a huge pile of cash.)
But that's not what someone's "net worth" means. Someone's net worth is the money they own, plus the value of their private property (such as houses and cars), plus the value of any stocks and other similar assets, their share in property such as manufacturing plants and so on and so forth. Quite often a good majority of the "net worth" of a big CEO is actually in the value of the stocks they own, which is not cash. (Stocks give dividends, which is income, but that's not the same thing as the value of the stocks themselves.)
The fact is that if the government imposed a "wealth tax" based on someone's net worth, it would probably be larger than the billionaire's income. In other words, the billionaire would have a negative income because of such a tax. He would literally not be able to afford to live because he would have to pay more in tax than he gets from his job and property ownership. The only way for such a person to survive would be to sell his property, which would benefit nobody.
Most importantly, it would not benefit the entry-level workers working at the companies of that CEO. Their salaries would not increase. In fact, on the contrary it may well be that their salaries would decrease because the wealth tax would make it less affordable for the company to pay such salaries. Any theoretical benefit that the workers could get from the government because of the microscopic increase in tax revenue would be nullified ten-fold because of the decreased salaries.
But these neo-socialists will never explain this to you. Heck, most of them probably don't understand any of this at all. They will just keep contrasting someone's net worth with someone else's hourly salary, hoping that the listener will be confused by the two numbers and how different they are.
Sadly, a lot of people do get bamboozled by this.
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