Except a large portion of revenue does not go to workers, but to shareholders, who pay far less taxes then those who strain their backs in creating said revenue.
Lots of people love to throw around the word "shareholders" like it's a pejorative. The word seems to carry connotations of greedy old Uncle Scrooge, Uncle Pennybags, or some spoiled Saudi Prince. That's a highly distorted view.
Lots of "shareholders" are people's retirement funds, pensions, and the like. When those funds finally pay out, they get taxed as income just like for everybody else.
Even including stocks owned through retirement and pension funds, 84% of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and roughly half of all households have exactly $0 invested in the market.
Saying that Uncle Scrooge and his buddies own all the stocks is not much worse than implying that normal people own a significant share of the market through their retirement accounts.
This is a stupid argument. Say we have 100 people in our economy, 90 of them $50k, 9 of them make $200k, and 1 person makes 1 million. Everyone invests 10% of their income in 'stoks' which cost $5/each.
Each of the 90 people invest $5k and have 1000 stoks.
Each of the 9 people invest $20k and have 4000 stoks.
The millionaire invests $100k and has 20,000 stoks.
The top 10% have 99.96% of the stoks.
It would be weird if the richest people didn't own most of the stocks. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem.
Except it's not 10%, or 1%. It's stats like "3 hedge fund makers make more than 140,000 teachers". The problem isn't disparity, it's the absolute mind boggling nature of it.
All of a corporations actions are to create shareholder value. Retaining earnings and investment in growth does that too. If it wasn't you'd get some activist investors rallying for a takeover.
The underlying issue seems to be whether it is ethical for a business owner to make money.
Except for outliers like Apple, it is atypical for shareholders to get more of revenues than the workers.
Payroll, benefits, offices, etc are easily >50% of revenue in virtually all ventures (including diamond trade and definitely your favourite tech unicorn)
No, The only portion of revenue that goes to shareholders would be that of profits, and Netflix doesn't pay dividends so none of that money goes to shareholders. It goes to capital re-ivestment, or the workers in the form of bonuses and the like. The sharholders in a company like netflix only make money when the companies shares become more highly valued (usually from that profit re-investment).
Also implicit in this statement I think, is the assumption that shareholders don't provide as much value to the business, or perhaps the economy writ large.
Arguably the investors at least initially play a more crucial role than any employee no mater how back-breaking their work because without starting capital most businesses don't even get started in the first place.
But in general all aspects of the business contribute to success, Shareholders, employees, and executive. I don't think moralizing one class over another is useful to this sort of conversation.
