this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Personally, I've been trying to reduce both the green and the red to make my yellow bigger. This is possible because in my country, I can pay myself a moderate salary and still get health insurance. Then eventually I can pay myself dividends on the last year's profit when doing the annual financial report, and I can buy some things as business expenses (which makes them cost me about 60% less of my time compared to buying them as a private individual from post-tax income).
On the green front, I'm reducing it by 1) charging quite a bit of money for an hour of my time, definitely more than I got paid as a full-time employee 2) also having some foreign contracts where I can charge even more money and as a bonus, bring more money into my country
Now since all this still leaves me SIGNIFICANTLY less well-off than a lot of people who most certainly don't work 10, 100 or 100000 times harder than I do, this has actually turned me even more against capitalism than ever before (despite the fact that I literally make more money than I ever have before). I'm doing moderate tax optimization, about as much as I can do while still considering it ethical, work 200+ hours a month, and at the end of the day, while I might retire a millionaire, I'll never make it to a hundred million. Even 10 million is only possible with lucky breaks in investments.
How does it scale to include the whole working class?
It doesn't. The rest of the working class is even more screwed. That's why being just slightly more well off at the cost of a lot more work is making me hate the economic system even more.
Without owning my own company, I had an effective tax rate of about 50% on my income before you even consider that nearly all goods and services also have 22% VAT and my income was capped by my salary as I worked full time. Now I'm paying about 30% effectively and my income potential itself is higher. But you look at the people who own companies where their source of income isn't their own labor and they pay way less tax (company lambo, completely tax-free daily allowance on "business trips", etc) while earning at least 10x more than I do... And that's before you get to the oligarch class, people earning 100000x what I do, maybe 1000000x. Luckily we don't have many billionaires in my country, maybe none? But we certainly have too many millionaires and a lot of them got wealthy off the privatization of industries in the 90s.