You want to help employees earn more? Just flat out cut taxes. The more profits Walmart is able to keep, without any danger of being taxed away, the more likely they are to give pay raises.
Tax hikes are "pass-throughs" to workers and consumers.
Tax reductions (or
any windfall) are "pass-throughs" to owners-investors.
Nike workers in Taiwan make $5/day. USA workers make above that rate
per hour. Even a zero tax rate would not bridge this gap.
The logic of capital mandates 3rd world Labor Costs. 3rd world labor markets are typically cultivated by freedom hating dictatorships, many installed or protected by advanced industrial nations (who want access to artificially low rates for labor and raw material). The biggest threat to any global supply chain is a freedom loving, well educated, politically active middle class. Why? Because they are more expensive than their sweatshop variants. And they have the power to organize when companies like GE pour toxins in, say, the Hudson (unlike families in Mexico living under dictators).
Uncle Milty's book - which I confess to respecting - should have been entitled "Capitalism and Slavery". Right? Slaves produce the highest returns. This is why many of our largest corporations, like Apple and Nike, have their products manufactured by the next best thing, sweatshop workers.
Labor is an expense. The point is to reduce its cost by any means. Tax reductions will never offset the expense of first world labor markets.
The point of Reaganomics was to minimize the burden of labor on capital. Unfortunately, the reduction of labor costs had the unintended consequence of destroying middle class purchasing power. As a result, we replaced wage-based consumption with debt-based consumption. Starting in the 80s, American families began taking on unprecedented amounts of debt. It worked great for a couple of decades. But now the American consumer is, in the aggreggate, to indebted to borrow enough to meet the needed demand levels for job growth.
I'm not saying that it's possible to return to the pre-Reagan, pre-Globalization wage/benefit structure. There's no going back. I'm just saying we're up shit's creek without a paddle.
