Not you particularly, I meant the original: "it feels like every share of income is at its lowest except for the ultra wealthy."

It's ambiguous in several way, no time scale, "ultra wealthy" isn't defined, and "income" somewhat ambiguous.

Median household income is the stat usually used to measure income and it's still increasing.

Things barely increasing after nearly 40+ years of being completely flat isn't the win that poster thinks it is, maybe if you're doped up on neoliberalism it sounds nice but everything else people need to survive are also increasing in costs massively.

> Incidentally, corporate taxes are why many small business owners pay themselves wage income, rather than doing stock buybacks or dividends.

You've been sold some BS. Usually this is because you're required to take a "reasonable" wage for your role in a company. Otherwise I guarantee you every independent contractor out there (among others) would be operating in a way that made 100% of their income business profit, rather than wages, as it has enormous tax advantages. Approximately everybody tries to find out the least they can take as wage income without pissing off the IRS, and sets their "wage" to whatever that is.

I've often wondered why we don't abolish corporation tax and instead tax capital gains and dividends like normal income.

So if I buy and sell Pokeman cards I shouldn't have to pay any tax because WotC pays corporate taxes?

If the income was earned through dividends, maybe this would be a reasonable argument. Most of the time stock just gets bought and sold by investors rather than the company itself though, so it's not clear why corporate tax would have anything to do with this.

Sure, the stock price should somehow be tied to the actual value of the company, but for a while now it's been mostly indistinguishable from a Ponzi scheme other than a few companies that do sometimes decide to buy back some stock, which makes it slightly less sketchy but if the value is from the company buying it back, it's a lot closer to debt or a bond, which is not at all how anyone treats it.

How Elon Musk's secretive foundation hands out his billions - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/23/how-elon-... - January 23rd, 2019

"Spending for the public benefit" has a lot of latitude.

So “landlord” and “commercial landlord living entirely off of passive income” are worlds apart.

Buying a fixer-upper outside of town with high-school and early 20s grinding, renting out 3+ rooms to cover the mortgage for painful years, working 80 hour weeks, refinancing against that first house into another under-maintained property where you live in half while upgrading the other, ending up with a rental duplex and drastically reduced living cost, is viable by 30. Maximizing youth savings, first house programs, and primary residence rules create less punitive economics.

It sucks and will let one learn why landlord is a pain in the ass job, and relies on sweat equity and modest lifestyle, wanting to commit to real estate, and non-ideal properties. Trade school or skipping college for early income and low debt make the numbers crunch easier.

Investing consistently into the market in your 20s probably out performs it by 65, and a young bankers lifestyle is a joy of its own, but: owning property young is achievable for electricians, security guards, and janitors.

Live in a poor place. There are plenty of cheap houses, but you do have to leave expensive areas (shocking, I know).

While about 50% to 60% of the adult U.S. population are active W-2 wage earners at any given time, the percentage that relies on labor exclusively (meaning they have zero capital income or assets to fall back on) sits right around 40% to 50% of working households.