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by hawkice 34 days ago
The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.
1 comments

>The vast majority of the value provided vs extracted, for any business, is related to consumer surplus and gross margins, as opposed to payroll.

Not sure what you mean here but I suspect we're talking about different things. Payroll is obviously value created by the business that's directly given to the society where the business operates, and it's not uncommon that it's higher than the company profits.

Take Amazon for example, payroll costs are much higher than the profits.

Car companies also create a secondary maintenance and repair business, insurance and financing business, resale business and so on that generate more value in the country they operate as well.

So I find it likely that a well established car brand like Volvo generates more money that stays in the US than they generate money that is extracted out from the US.

And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted. While there is some modest surplus I hope people get from their job (e.g. they'd do the same job for less money), that surplus of excess wages over what people would accept will be lower than consumer surplus for almost any standard business.
>And taking the labor and time of the employees is a value extracted

That counts the value twice though. The value of the labour is precisely the payroll and the profits so it's accounted for.

Edit: So simply put, Volvo (or any other co with a factory in the US) operates a business that generates a lot of payroll and some profits, and the payroll remains in the US.