Increase the minimum wage to a living wage
That certainly would increase the average wage and help close the "disparity gap". Now, which model do you want to use to consider the minimum wage a living wage? Single, single with a child, two parents with one child, two adults two kids? Do you put a sliding scale on it to adjust for how many kids a family has? Here's a living wage calculator for Tulsa, Ok. If that simply means taking the current minimum wage of $7.25 and raising it to $8.41 in a place like Tulsa the impact is pretty much imperceptible. Taking minimum wage in LA of $8.00 and raising it to $11.20 for a single adult means a much greater impact.
http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/counties/40143Let's say for argument's sake that to make minimum wage a living wage for single parents with two kids, we had to double the current minimum wage nationwide. How is that paid for? What would the affect of the sudden inflationary pressure do to our economy and how many jobs would be cut as a result as employers would figure out ways to get the same amount of productivity out of a smaller work force in order to stay competitive with foreign compeition.
Require that all employers pay into some sort of minimum retirement plan for workers, even for part time workers. Make current retirement plans more portable and less accessible by the employees. End things like “401k Loans”.
They already do pay into a retirement and disability plan which is fully portable and inaccessible to workers. They even pay for long term medical care after retirement: it's called Social Security and Medicare.
Make corporate boards and execs more accountable to non-instutional shareholders. Change the culture that a CEO is worth hundreds of times more than other workers. The CEO (in most cases) is not the owner and pay that disparate is a disservice to both employee and shareholder
Why is high executive pay necessarily a disservice to the employees? Don't you want the best CEO money can buy to lead the company through smooth and tricky economies? Don't you want someone who is an innovator and extremely creative? Considering the culture that Steve Jobs fostered at Apple, the thousands of jobs his ideas created, as well as his overall contribution to modern technology do you think he should have had his pay capped?
Now, how do you change that culture without nationalizing businesses? If I don't like the way a particular company is run or think the CEO and other execs are over-paid at my expense as a shareholder, I don't buy that stock. If anything, they need to be more accountable to institutional share-holders as those are generally pension plans or folks with 401K investments who really don't have any investment savvy so they are invested in a lot of mutual funds and have no idea what companies they are actually part owners of.
Create a single payer national health care system, get out of the employer insurance system. Pay for this by closing loop holes in the corporate tax system. The net to companies should be overall should be zero since they won’t be paying employees health care costs any longers. Companies with lots of US workers should actually save money. Companies with lots of foreign workers or companies that don’t cover employees will pay more, this will encourage more US based employees and make sure that all Americans are covered. Additionally, like what most of the world does we should lower healthcare costs by mandating healthcare costs and tying payments more to outcomes than counts of procedures. Stop bankrupting people for healthcare costs.
How exactly does that close the wage gap? As we've learned over the last three years, corporate America says "mandates" stifle employment. A lot of countries where they have comprehensive health coverage also have a lot of people living on the government dole. I simply don't see where single payer creates jobs. If anything it might eliminate a lot of insurance service industry jobs.
Toughen rules regulating layoffs, employers laying people off need to take more responsibility for impacted employees. Encourage employers to repurpose employees rather than highing in one place while laying off in another.
Employers pay unemployment insurance. They way I see it is either they can lay off workers when demand is slack or they no longer need them due to better automation, or cut their pay. Neither is a great solution but it's a reality when American companies have to fight foreign competition because everyone is too afraid to apply tariffs anymore. As a business owner, would you want the government telling you that you could not lay off more than X employees at a given time or that you have to pay someone 90 days severance? What about accountability to share-holders when things like that could really tank profits and value to the shareholder?
Rework the corporate tax code providing penalties for moving jobs overseas instead of incentives
In principal, I agree. But, what's to keep a corporation from changing their corporate HQ and governance to a foreign nation? In reality the incentive corporations have for moving jobs overseas right now is the penalty of paying higher taxes on their U.S. operations than they pay over seas. One example would be Cisco's Ireland operation. Tax credits and cuts on everything from federal returns to free property taxes and sales tax exemptions seem to be what has stimulated hiring and expansion the most in the states, but that goes back to corporations not paying their "fair share" in taxes. I really have no good ideas on how you change that dynamic.
Simplify the corporate tax code, maybe institute a VAT at least partially in its place in order to lessen the tax cost on small businesses and make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes.
That's somewhat what the Fair Tax purports to do. Again, see my comments on tax avoidance above.
Remove “goodwill” writeoffs, make any writeoffs be more tangible.
Agreed. Not sure what that does to the wage gap, but there are a lot of gratuitous write-off's in the corporate tax world.
Require that goods produced overseas and imported to the US meet US standards for safety and quality, for workers too. No sweatshop goods allowed.
How do you feel about tariffs? I'm a fan of them. That's one thing we could do to help protect American jobs.
We spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense spending. This is insane. Cut defense spending in half and devote that money into more research and education
We do spend far too much being the world's top police force! Defense spending has created many high-paying jobs and created many practical products which have improved all our lives though. I'm sure there are plenty of areas the government could spend half that money and still have a meaningful impact on the economy. In addition, I think we also need to quit offering up billions in the face of every international disaster and allow others to contribute more.
Increase teacher pay and teacher quality. Develop a multi track national education system instead of trying to pigeon hole all students into a pre college system. Teach higher level math at younger ages, teach more science
As you know, I'm not for increasing teacher pay just for the sake of increasing it. Develop an accountability and reward system which offers merit-based pay increases. I also agree that the pre-college model we use now doesn't serve all students well.
Make education more socially important nationally, stop promoting politics and religion over science
Make sex education real and make it really required. Make contraceptives easily obtained and create a culture where we are more adult about sex and its consequences.
I guess I've never thought of education as not being socially important. I disagree on the sex ed issue. That's simply encouraging parents to abdicate one of the most important roles of parenting to the government and schools. It also does nothing to close the wage gap which is what this discussion was supposed to be about. If anything we need to increase emphasis on the family being the primary care giver of children, not the school system. I simply don't see that happening without spiritual principles being given the proper priority instead of being looked upon with scorn.
Make housing more affordable nationally. Stop creating inner city public housing ghettos and move public housing to peripheral areas of cities and link those developments to inner city jobs and services via dedicated mass transit. This will encourage more inner city growth, less inner city crime and over time lessen sprawl. This in turn will make cities cheaper to run.
The idea of making housing cheaper nationally is how we ended up with ghettos in the first place. I disagree on spreading low income housing around. See what it's done to areas like 61st & Peoria and 31st & Mingo in a matter of 25 years? It's resulted in lower property values for the long time home-owners and they've become crime pockets.
Lower crime rates and decrease prison populations with shorter and more reasonable prison terms. Dedicate the saving to better police protection, especially in high crime areas. Crimes are less likely to be committed when potential perpetrators know they are likely to be caught
I don't think you can lower the crime rate in a meaningful manner when you empty out the prisons. That said, I agree we are warehousing a lot of drug users who could successfully be treated outside prison walls so long as those aren't cases where the drug use ended up in severe child neglect or abuse or the death of someone else. For the most part, I view the war on drugs as a failure, at least to where users have been given longer sentences than dealers. Still doesn't do a lot to close the wage gap though.
Legalize and tax marijuana and other low level drugs, do a better job keeping it out of the hands of kids. My high school student says that drugs are far easier to get than beer.
The best way to keep drugs and alcohol away from kids is stronger parenting.
This reads more like the liberal playbook, but there are certainly some ideas in there which, in theory, would create jobs and increase wages which is what I asked someone to put up instead of being mired in the problem that there is a wage and wealth gap. In my opinion, every time societies have tried to flatten the curve between the have and have nots, it's resulted in higher rates of poverty for everyone. Cuba would be a perfect example of that.