Companies should pay higher taxes. After all, they consume more public resources than people do.

Companies want educated employees. Every employee, assuming they were educated in Alberta, requires 13 years of public schooling. More if the employer requires a college diploma or certificate or a university degree. Those years of education cost money.

Companies want healthy employees. The hospitals, clinics, and healthcare professionals necessary to keep those employees healthy cost money.

Companies want secure workplaces, protected from crime, fire, and other physical threats. Those protective services cost money.

Companies want fresh, clean water coming into their workplace and dirty wastewater taken away from their workplace. That costs money.

Companies want robust infrastructure for transporting materials to their workplace and finished products from their workplace. That infrastructure costs money.

And the list goes on.

The demand companies put on public resources far outweighs the demand that individuals put on public resources. Despite this, companies pay less in taxes in absolute dollars than individual taxpayers do.

The Alberta budget 2020 expects to receive $12.6 billion in personal income tax and $4.5 billion in corporate income tax. In other words, for every $1.00 the provincial government collects from businesses, they collect $2.80 from individuals. It’s unfair that individual Albertans should have to bear such a large financial burden just because governments think businesses deserve a tax break.

Companies consume more public resources; they should pay more for public resources.

Here are 10 things you should realize about it.

1. The $1.5 billion the Alberta government is using to buy shares in the company is only part of the package. There’s also a $6 billion loan guarantee. That’s a total of $7.5 billion if the pipeline doesn’t end up getting built with oil prices at record lows.

2. For comparison, the Trudeau government spent $4.5 billion on the Trans Mountain Pipeline. And Canadians own it.

3. This pipeline is supposed to create 1400 direct jobs in Alberta, as well as 5400 indirect jobs. That’s 6800 jobs.

4. Alberta lost over 50,000 full-time jobs between July 2019 and February 2020.

5. The Alberta government laid off 25,000 education staff just this past Saturday.

6. The Alberta government is taking on potentially $7.5 billion in debt to create 6800 jobs. That’s $1,102,941.18 per job. Their Saturday education layoff notice was to save $128 million. That’s $5,120 per job.

7. For $7.5 billion, the Alberta government could’ve hired 1,464,843 people at the rate they were paying the 25,000 they just laid off. Even if you don’t factor in the loan guarantee, that’s still 292,969 jobs.

8. TC Energy, the company building Keystone XL, made $32 million last year from the corporate tax cut introduced in July. They had $4 bilion in profit in 2019. They had $1.1 billion in the last quarter alone.

9. Alberta doctors are having their funding cut by 25% tomorrow, when the new budget comes into effect. In the middle of a pandemic.

10. Jason Kenny doesn’t actually care about jobs.

Between July 2019 and February 2020, Alberta experienced a net loss of over 50,000 full-time jobs. And that was before the province implemented emergency measures that ended up shutting down businesses, forcing people out of work. Plus, with the huge drop in oil prices and the stock markets, unemployment has probably skyrocketed in the province. Alberta already had tens of thousands of people out of work, and the COVID-19 crisis likely pushed that number into the hundreds of thousands. We won’t know for sure until the employment numbers are released in early April.

Regardless, it’s clear that the working class has been hit hard by the crisis. Public facilities have closed, putting public sector employees out of work. Self-isolation and social distancing policies enacted by the province have forced people to primarily stay in their homes, driving down demand for products and services provided by businesses. These businesses have had to close or at least restrict staff hours.

Workers have less money to spend, and businesses have less money to spend. Some workers have no money to spend. And all this simply amplifies the problem.

For some of the working class, this affects more than just their discretionary spending. Some people are worried whether they’ll be able to afford groceries, rent, or any of their other bills.

Clearly we need solutions. And with so many businesses shut down, any real solutions likely won’t come from the private sector. Which means any solutions to the financial strain the working class is under must come from the government.

Which leads me to the response of the Alberta government.

While the provincial government has enacted several policies directed at restricting the spread of COVID-19 and mitigating the effects of the infection, I want to focus on the policies specifically intended to help the working class deal with the financial fallout.

Emergency isolation support

The first programme I want to highlight is emergency isolation support.

This is a one-time payment of $1146 designed to tide people over until federal emergency payments begin in April. While this sounds like a good measure, it’s restricted to only those who must self-isolate, who either have the disease or meet high-risk criteria, such as returning to Canada after being away.

This programme is not available to workers laid off because their employer closed their doors or workers who had their hours significantly reduced. Nor is it available to self-employed workers, such as me, who have lost all their clients.

Utility payment deferral

Another programme the province is offering is 90-day deferral on utilities. This means that those who are struggling financially because of the crisis can arrange for payment deferral with their utility providers. These are not payment cancellations. Workers will still need to make their payments; it’s just that they can put it off for three months.

It’s unclear what that will look like in the end. Will workers have to pay it all back after the three months, or will they be able to make smaller payments each bill?

My own utility bill is over $200 every month. Will that mean that if I take advantage of payment deferral, I’lll need to pay over $800 in the fourth month? For some people, that will be nearly impossible.

Credit payment deferral

This programme is the same as the utility payment deferral, except it applies to student loans, other loans, lines of credit, and mortgages. The same issue exists. Workers will still need to pay the deferred payments back, and it’s unclear if all that money must be paid at once, following the deferral period.

One credit payment deferral programme is for 6 months. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for some workers to have to pay back 6 months of mortgage payments all at once. That would be over $5,000 for us if we qualified for that specific programme.

Education property tax freeze

Another initiative—announced just this past Monday actually—is that the province is reversing a 3.4% increase to the education portion of property taxes.

The province estimates that collectively, this will “save” households $55 million.

Keep in mind that this is not a 3.4% reduction in property taxes. This is a cancellation of a planned increase that had been announced in Budget 2020. Property taxes in April will be the same as they were in March. Functionally, nothing will change for working taxpayers. They aren’t actually saving $55 million, at least not in any meaningful way.

But even if we play along with the UCP rhetoric and agree that households are saving $55 million, we have to remember that there are over 1.5 million households in Alberta. That means the average household will “save” about $37.

That’s not going to go far in helping the working class pay their rent or buy groceries.

Plus, this doesn’t directly help members of the working class who rent, who don’t directly pay property taxes. For them to benefit from this “saving”, their landlord would have to pass those “savings” on to them, and I’m not sure how likely that would be.

Clearly, the measures announced by the provincial government are not designed to help workers. Very few workers will benefit from these measures. They’re smokescreens, engineered to make it seem as though they’re helping while doing very little to make a functional difference.

Workers need help now. Workers need money. Workers need income increased and expenses decreased. Workers need a universal basic income. Workers need the government to pay their non-discretionary spending costs.

Doing so will prevent workers from going hungry, from losing their homes, and from going further into debt. Plus, it’ll boost the economy. Something Alberta sorely needs now.

Our healthcare systems are vastly underfunded as a result of the relentless pursuit of balanced budgets through tax breaks to large corporations and billionaires. When pandemics hit, our healthcare providers end up overworked, stressed, and ill themselves. When pandemics hit, we lack the resources to maintain current healthcare service levels, having to prioritize who gets tested, who gets surgeries, and who gets seen in clinics and emergency rooms.

On the labour side, we find that our system isn’t set up to protect the worker. Public sector workers are laid off (even temporarily) because the public facilities where they work are shut down. Private sector workers are laid off because their employer shuts down due to lack of business or because of government mandate. And when these workers are laid off—whether in the public sector or the private sector—they’re unlikely to have wages continue during their layoff period (unless they were unionized and it was part of their collective bargaining agreement or they lucked out with a generous employer).

Or if their employer doesn’t close shop, the worker may feel forced to go to work, particularly if they have low wages, no savings, no food storage, no way to fulfill their physical needs should they stay home. And if they work in a public environment, where they’re exposed to customers, their risk increases of contracting whatever disease is causing the pandemic, and then passing it onto other customers. And the entire underfunded healthcare system gets overloaded.

Capitalism didn’t create COVID-19. Nor did it cause it to mutate to spread to humans. But capitalism aided in its spread. And it’s not even an issue specific to the COVID-19 pandemic. All the issues I mentioned above exist for other pandemics, too.

There is only one cure (pun intended) to the issues I mentioned above. And that’s addressing the root cause. 

There’s a massive amount of wealth being hoarded by large corporations and billionaires. That money could instead be circulating in the economy: through public funds collected by taxation and spent on public labour or capital projects or through private funds as workers spend higher paycheques. Whether governments spend more money on hospitals or workers spend more money on eating out, spending money is what drives the economy. Hoarding money, on the other hand, hinders the economy. Unspent money can’t create jobs, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars it is.

If a robust health care system that’s prepared to easily deal with the fallout of a pandemic is important to you, then you should support measures to extract more money from billionaires and large corporations.

If a strong public research system that can help find a cure for the cause of a pandemic is important to you, then you should support measures to extract more money from billionaires and large corporations.

If an adaptable public education system that can flexibly educate students during a pandemic is important to you, then you should support measures to extract more money from billionaires and large corporations.

If workers being able to care for themselves in the event of a job loss is important to you, then you should support measures to extract more money from billionaires and large corporations.

If small business owners not having to go out of business due to lack of customers during a pandemic (or even an economic downturn, for that matter) is important to you, then you should support measures to extract more money from billionaires and large corporations.

Those measures can be varied but could include higher corporate taxes, higher inheritance taxes, higher income taxes on the top bracket, cracking down on tax evasion, implementing maximum wages, stronger labour unions, stronger antitrust laws, and so on.

And once that money is out of the hands of billionaires, it can be in the hands of the government and workers. 

In the hands of the government, it can be spent on hospitals and health professionals, universities and researchers, schools and teachers, and so on. It can be spent on social programmes that get more money into the hands of consumers, whether it’s through supplementary income programmes or more progressive options, such a universal basic income.

In the hands of the workers (whether through wages, supplementary income, or UBI), it can be spent on groceries, on fuel, on clothes, on eating out, on new trucks, on housing, on cell phones, on going to the movies, on travel, on hockey games, on theatre productions, on hunting trips, on back country camping, and so on. And all those purchases require a person at the other end selling the product or providing the service. And the more people there are buying those products or paying for those services, the more jobs it’ll require.

The greed of billionaires and large corporations is preventing us from being able to quickly and efficiently respond to this pandemic. The greed of billionaires and large corporations is preventing small business owners from being able to keep their doors open during this pandemic. The greed of billionaires and large corporations is preventing workers from being able to provide for themselves during this pandemic. 

And insisting that cutting their taxes will fix our hospitals and create jobs isn’t going to change anything.

For residential properties, technically, Wetaskiwin is higher, by about 1.15 points. As well, Lethbridge’s residential property tax rate of 11.30 is more than 2 points higher than the provincial average of 9.28.

However, for non-residential properties, Wetaskiwin’s tax rate is 1.31 points lower than Lethbridge. Its non-residential tax rate of 24.33 is nearly 9 points above the provincial average of 15.47.

Lethbridge has the highest non-residential property tax rate and the second-highest residential property tax rate. However, when you account for both residential and non-residential rates, Lethbridge has the highest overall property tax rate.

We often frame property taxes as affecting homeowners, but they affect renters, too. It’d be rare to find a property owner who rents out their home without adding the cost of the property tax to the rent. Arguably, such property owners aren’t affected by property taxes, since they simply pass them on to their tenants.

The last thing the lowest paid workers in the province need when trying to pay for unaffordable housing is having to foot the bill for the highest property taxes in Alberta.

And given that roughly 1 in 3 households in Lethbridge rents their home, it’s not a segment of the population that we can keep ignoring.

But there were a few comments from people saying how good we have it here in Lethbridge, that we should try living in Calgary if we think rent is high in Lethbridge.

Never mind the fact that I didn’t claim rent was high in Lethbridge, only that it was unaffordable, nor did I say it wasn’t unaffordable elsewhere. But those comments did get me thinking.

CMHC considers rent to be affordable if it’s less than 30% of your pre-tax (gross) income. So I wondered what the average income in Lethbridge was, and how that compared to the average income in other cities. So I checked the most recent federal census data.

And what I discovered shocked me: Lethbridge has the lowest average wage of all the cities in Alberta.

Okay, technically, it has the third lowest. Brooks and Wetaskiwn have an average wage lower than Lethbridge’s, but only by $18 and $82 per year, respectively. Lethbridge workers make $1.50 more per month than Brooks workers and $6.83 per month more than Wetaskiwin. For all intents and purposes, the three cities are tied for last place in Alberta.

Not only is Lethbridge tied for the lowest paid workers in the province, but workers here are paid $1,000 per month less than the average of all 18 cities.

I also compared the average income for Lethbridge to the average income of the 58 communities in Canada that are larger than it. Lethbridge isn’t the lowest, but it is below the average of all 59 municipalities. It’s also the second lowest of the 7 largest municipalities in the Prairies.

Calgary, on the other hand (since people said we should try living there), has the highest average salary in Alberta, the highest in the Prairies, and the third highest in Canada. Calgary workers make, on average, $1,646.75 more per month than Lethbridge workers.

Finally, Statistics Canada categorizes income earners in $10,000 increments (those making under $10K, those making $10–20K, etc). The 4 lowest paid categories (under $10K, $10–20K, $20–30K, $30–40K) together make up 53% of the workforce, and each category has over 8,000 people in it—over 21,000 workers make between $10,000 and $30,000 alone. The fifth most populated category has over 7,600 people in it, yet it’s still under $50,000. 64% of the workforce makes under $50,000. The highest paid category—those making more than $150,000—contains only 2.4% of Lethbridge workers.

When people tell you they’re having a difficult time getting by in Lethbridge, believe them.

Here we go.

We all know there is nothing “safe” when it comes to drugs and opioids and supervising this deadly habit only increases the many dangers that affect our beautiful city and negatively impacts the livelihoods and safety of each one of us. When will we taxpayers finally be “heard”?

First, it’s not called a safe consumption site; it’s called a supervised consumption site. I’m not sure why people keep using the other phrase.

Supervising drug use does not increase dangers in the city, nor does it negatively impact every person’s livelihood in the city. Supervising people who use drugs means that there is literally less drug use than if the SCS didn’t exist.

Between 28 February 2018 and 31 December 2019, there were 373,956 visits at the SCS. Assuming all those visits were for drug consumption, that’s over 370,000 instances of drug use that didn’t happen in public. That means fewer overdose deaths in public, fewer needles and other drug paraphernalia in public, and fewer instances of drug usage in public.

Having a supervised consumption site actually improves the quality of life in the city.

Roast to the SCS for administering Naloxone over and over again to a drug user who has no intention of quitting. As I see it, the SCS is not helping the situation, only prolonging the inevitable, as these users just don’t care and will never become a useful part of our society. My question is why is our health-care system supporting this? It’s time our civic and provincial governments do something and for starters shut it down.

Of course the SCS is helping the situation. They are keeping people alive. There is value in stopping people from dying.

And since when did we determine that a person’s worth is based on their utility to society? Does that mean every person in a persistent vegetative state should be killed? How about everyone who is born with a debilitating condition that prevents them from taking care of themselves, or who contracts or develops one later in life?

That sounds like eugenics to me.

Our health care system supports supervised consumptions sites because they prevent deaths, they reduce disease transmission, they reduce drug litter, they reduce public drug usage, and they reduce healthcare costs by reducing drug-related hospital visits and EMS calls for service.

It’s not time for the governments to shut down the SCS; doing so will make the drug crisis worse in Lethbridge: more deaths, more drug litter, more health risk to the public, and higher healthcare costs.

The SCS should go and bed detox more needed. The SCS is just perpetuating and increasing the drug problem and crime is escalating.

The SCS shouldn’t go, but I do agree that we need more detox spaces.

The SCS is not perpetuating the drug crisis, let alone causing it to increase. I could see that maybe being the case if they were providing drugs, but they’re not. The drug crisis was in Lethbridge for years before the SCS opened. They opened in the middle of a drug crisis that was already escalating.

Crime has indeed increased in Lethbridge, but I’m not sure I’d say “escalating”. The crime severity index for the Lethbridge region in 2018 was 158.68, the highest it’s been since 1999. The CSI for 2019 has yet to be released. However, we must remember that this index has been increasing in Lethbridge since 2014. For example, the CSI for 2018 increased by 13.05% over 2017, and while that seems like a lot, it went up by 13.42% in 2015, 15.94% in 2017, and 24.35% in 2014. Since the CSI started rising in 2014, the 2018 rise was the second slowest increase. If the SCS is causing crime to go up, we should see the 2018 CSI increasing dramatically, not slowing.

It appears our elected officials choose not to listen to the people of this once decent city and allow and further this SCS to continue, resulting in crime escalation etc., drug use is a criminal problem and should be imprisoned or forced into rehab where they will be required to kick the habit and not allowed to repeat.

Except plenty of people support the SCS. Hundreds of supporters came out the rally last summer. So, yes, they are listening to the people.

Crime is not escalating, and certainly not because of the SCS. See my previous comment.

Drug use is a criminal problem only because it’s against the law. Decriminalize it, and it’s no longer a criminal problem. Possessing marijuana used to be a criminal problem; now it’s not. We could do the same thing with other drugs. We make some drugs legal (such as marijuana, tobacco, alcohol, and prescription drugs), yet others we don’t. It doesn’t make sense.

Imprisoning people who use drugs doesn’t work. We’ve been trying that for over 50 years. Yet we still have drugs. We’re in the middle of a drug crisis. All while drugs have been illegal and people have been imprisoned for using, possessing, and dealing drugs. But drug usage is still happening.

Forcing people into rehab is a dangerous precedent. Should we force people into certain diets so we can avoid having to pay for diet-related health issues? Should we force diabetic people to take insulin, so we don’t have to treat them for shock? Should we force people with cancer into treatment, so we don’t need to pay for their palliative care? We shouldn’t be deciding what health care people should and should not take.

To the people responsible for continuing the SCS, a total waste of resources which could be put to better use. They have cause a complete fiasco with our ambulances in that every time an O.D. drugee gets responded to by our EMS crews there is one or more crew that is taken out of the response system and causes a shortage.

The SCS is not a waste of resources, for the several reasons I’ve already outlined above: saves lives, reduces disease transmission, reduces public health risks, reduces drug litter, and reduces health care costs.

Regarding EMS responding to overdoses, by having a supervised consumption site, we have fewer EMS responses to overdoses. The SCS has trained medical staff who are fully capable for responding to overdoses on their own, reducing the need for EMS intervention.

Between 28 February 2018 and 31 December 2019, 3,130 medical emergencies occurred at the SCS. For every 10 overdoses occurring in the SCS, 8–9 of them never require EMS personnel. The vast majority of overdoses in the SCS are handled by the SCS personnel. That’s literally thousands of overdoses since the SCS opened that EMS personnel haven’t had to respond to. If the SCS didn’t exist, EMS call volumes would most definitely be higher.

The problem with roasts like these is that perpetuate myths they’ve heard without researching the validity of those myths. And so they continue on, and people keep repeating them, until they confuse them for truth.

People who oppose the Lethbridge supervised consumption site care more about ideology than they do facts.

The article then goes on to list the average cost of rent in Lethbridge: $923 for a 1-bedroom apartment and $1,051 for a 2-bedroom apartment.

However, it never goes on to say how those prices are “affordable” or “reasonable”. So, I decided to do the research the reporter didn’t do to see if rent in Lethbridge indeed is affordable.

CMHC says that “housing is considered “affordable” if it costs less than 30% of a household’s before-tax income.”

Well, $923 a month for 12 months comes to $11,076, which is a third of $36,920. For the average rent of a 1-bedroom apartment to be affordable in Lethbridge, the renter needs to make $36,920 a year, before tax. For reference, that’s about $17.75 an hour for full-time work.

I decided to check the census data for income level in Lethbridge. The most recent census we have is for 2016, so it may not be entirely representative of current numbers, but I haven’t been able to find anything closer.

What I discovered is that about 38,320 people in Lethbridge make under $40,000, which is less than the salary needed for the average rent of a 1-bedroom apartment to be affordable. That’s 53% of all those employed in Lethbridge.

That means more than half of those employed in Lethbridge cannot afford the average rent of a 1-bedroom apartment in Lethbridge.

Now, keep in mind that the 30% I mentioned above, which CMHC considers the cutoff for what is affordable, includes not only rent but also utilities (electricity, heating, water, etc). It’s not clear from the December 2019 Rent Report that the Herald cites whether their data includes utilities. If they don’t, then that likely changes the affordability of rent in Lethbridge.

The Utilities Consumer Advocate website shows a range of $250.62–257.90 a month for electricity and gas together for Lethbridge. My water, wastewater, recycling, and trash collection bill comes to just over $100 a month. So, assuming these rates can apply across the board, and we choose the UCA’s lowest rate, that’s about $350 more per month. That adds an extra $4,200 to our annual wage of $36,920, for a total of $41,120. That’s $19.77/hour, with full-time hours.

Statistics Canada groups workers in income levels in $10,000 increments, so it’s difficult to tell how many workers in Lethbridge make $41,120 or less. We do know 53% make under $40,000, and 64% make under $50,000, so the total percentage of the workforce unable to afford the average rent of a 1-bedroom apartment in Lethbridge is at least 53%, but possibly as high as 64%

Either way, the majority of workers in Lethbridge can’t afford it. So, in short, rent is not affordable in Lethbridge.

All it took was a bit of research to verify it, instead of just parroting the information in the press release.

This is the thing that Conservatives and Liberals can’t seem to get through their heads. Poor people can’t afford to save. They can’t afford to spend in order to later receive a tax break. Tax breaks, top ups, matching funds—none of them help poor people because they all require poor people first spending money they don’t have: if you don’t have the money to spend, you can’t benefit from these programmes.

Take the Canada Education Savings Grant, for example, which was the programme referenced in that news story. The CESG is money the federal government adds to a registered education savings plan, up to a maximum of $7200. To get the grant, parents must already have an RESP set up for their child.

The table below shows that for a family to receive $1,500 in the CESG, they first would have to deposit at least $7,000. They have to first save 4.5 times as much!

Tuition for 1 year at the University of Lethbridge is $5000, which increases to $6,500 once you factor in fees and $9000 with books and supplies. That $1,500 won’t cover even one semester of tuition, let alone the other costs of education. Even if the family maxes out their grant, it still wouldn’t be enough to cover even one year of schooling.

These programmes exist as ways for governments to make it seem like they’re helping the poor, but they know very well that most people won’t take advantage of them. Because poor people can’t afford to save.

Our first year of marriage, our household income was $13,000 a year. We entered our marriage with both of us already in debt. We lived off a lot of margarine and rice. We received food hampers at Christmas time. We had no vehicle. I was still wearing my worn out mission suits to church on Sundays.

When a company came along that promised to give us a year’s supply of groceries that would could pay off in installments, it felt like a godsend. We were so elated that we had no idea that we were signing a 5-year loan with an interest rate above 30%. That, of course, put us further into debt, and the food we got was either non-perishable or frozen, so we still had to buy groceries every month.

When we moved to Lethbridge three years later, we lived off under $10,000 a year. We had no access to hunting, no food storage, no vehicle, no transit pass, no bike, no eating out, no prepackaged food, no space for a garden, no bartering groups, no extra deductions, no credit cards, no date nights, no cell phones, no laptops, a small townhome, no gaming systems, no smoking, and no drinking. No way to cut our expenses.

I couldn’t hold down more than one job because I was going to school, and the job I did have was only part time. And tuition ate up most of our money.

We had to roll pennies to buy one bag of fruit. We stole toilet paper from the church and brought it home to use. I had to walk downtown from the Westside to cash a paycheque because we had no money for the bus.

And all this was before our first child was born. Once they was born, our expenses increased. Sometimes, we had to choose between food and diapers.

We had no money to save. We didn’t even have money to pay our bills. Our bills got so behind, they went to collection agencies, one of whom even took us to court. Having no money is why I dropped out of school the first time.

Not everyone can save.

Billionaires steal money from workers by not paying them what they’re worth, then they hoard the money, tying it up in stocks, real estate, and other investments, which keeps that money from circulating in the economy.

If workers received that money instead, they’d spend it. They’d buy more groceries. They’d buy more gas. They’d buy more clothes. They’d eat out more, go to the movies more, and go to arts and sporting events more.

As workers spend more money on groceries, production at agri-food facilities would increase. As workers spend more money on fuel, production at oil extraction facilities (and downstream refinery facilities) would increase. As workers spend more money on clothes, production at textile facilities would increase. And so on.

And as production increases, so do the jobs needed to make that added production possible. Plus, increasing worker wages increases class mobility, reduces poverty and homelessness, improves education, improves healthcare, reduces crime, and improves quality of life in general. And since the rich are the ones that primarily fund political campaigns, they can influence public policy more than the average worker can.

Billionaires kill jobs. Taking money from billionaires creates jobs.

Billionaires worsen quality of life. Taking money from billionaires improves quality of life.

Billionaires improve public policy for the wealthy. Taking money from billionaires improves public policy for everyone.

Another way companies generate profit is by keeping the cost of raw materials low. Whether it’s getting municipal water at low rates, low royalty rates on oil and gas extraction, discounts on forestry harvesting, or low costs for mineral extraction, companies are intent on convincing governments to keep their resource extraction rates low. The less they pay to extract public resources, the more resources they can extract for the same amount of money. The more public resources they can extract, the higher the profits they’ll make on their final product.

In addition, billionaires depend on government subsidies to realize company profits. Their companies depend on publicly funded infrastructure to move their products to market, receive raw materials to produce those products, and to get their employees to work. Their companies depend on publicly funded health care to keep their workforce healthy. Their companies depend on publicly funded emergency services to keep their employees and workplace safe. Their companies depend on publicly funded education to provide an educated workforce. Their companies depend on publicly funded municipal water and sewage services for production. And so on. And those are the indirect subsidies. That doesn’t include tax breaks, grants, and other direct financial subsidies that companies can then use to boost profits.

It’s a myth that billionaires generate their wealth by their own hard work or other metrics of merit (education, experience, etc). Their wealth comes from worker exploitation, resource exploitation, and government subsidization.

Society needs to do away with billionaires. It needs to prevent average CEO pay from being 270 times higher than average worker pay. It needs to implement a maximum wage. It needs make resource extraction more expensive. It needs to tax billionaires at higher rates.

Some people might cite all the donations the wealthy make to nonprofits. Here’s the thing though. The causes they donate to—poverty, homelessness, disease eradication, clean water, and so on—are causes that could be eliminated if workers had more money and governments had higher revenues. If governments had higher revenues, they could improve health outcomes, such as higher life expectancy, lower infection rates, and improving water quality. If workers had higher wages, they wouldn’t need to be poor or homeless. Billionaires hoarding wealth is causing the problems they’re donating to.

Society needs to stop subsidizing the wealth hoarding of billionaires.