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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • WiseThat@lemmy.catoFuck Cars@lemmy.caOur approach to road safety
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    2 months ago

    I take it you’ve never been on a job site, because there is a TON of infrastructure and protocol that cranes and crane operators have to follow to make sure everything is as safe as possible.

    You need to have extensive training to be allowed to do overhead materials handling, the ground conditions need to be thoroughly checked, the job site needs to be planned and laid out, in general there are a ton of constraints and checks to make sure that there is virtually zero risk that a random person could accidentally walk into a danger zone and get hurt.

    That’s pretty much the exact opposite as with cars. Pretty much every parking lot I have ever been to is front-loading, which REQUIRES that pedestrians have to cross the main driving path to get to their destination and there is very little training and certification required of drivers compared to crane operators.



  • In Canada, we spend about $8k on healthcare each year per person. This is mostly taxes, but also partly co-pays and private employer insurance.

    America spends about $14k per person.

    In both the USA and Canada, about 28% of government spending goes to healthcare. In the US that means about ~6k in total government budget from your tax dollars is spent on healthcare, while in Canada it’s about ~7K.

    The difference is that the average american also pays an additional $8K in their own after-tax dollars from their pockets in insurance and direct-billing for services.

    And for the privilege of paying nearly twice as much, the Americans have a life expectancy of 6 years less than Canadians (76.3 vs 82.6)



  • And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

    Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

    With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

    However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.