If we really wanted to put more money in people's pockets and have a more progressive tax code we should, at the very least, start chipping away at taxing incomes. A good start would be to make any cost of necessities (shelter, food, healthcare, transportation) should be tax deductible.
Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
471–480 of 685 posts
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of what you're saying rings true to me. There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life. Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing. I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly America…
> But housing - [...] The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals. Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.
In the US, we've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the creation of new Missing Middle Housing. This trend likely was worse in 2012 than in 1990.
We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.
It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#473> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living No, what we must absolutely do away with is the specious notion that when you take from the productive and give to the unproductive, the productive will keep producing out of the goodness of their hearts. Every attempt at forming a collectivist utopia fails, and that's because collectivism runs contrary to human nature. All atte…
This isn't true. People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Also, right now, we have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to the unproductive (shareholders) - so please chose wisely which argument you want to make.
Compassion and taxation for redistribution are so much different because the first is the will of the person, the second is by coercion. No idea why you put them side by side in your comment, they are opposites.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m not talking about service jobs. This thread is about low wage workers. > I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”
>>Why, because you don’t understand what they do? I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why. Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario: I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms…
So instead of just eliminating the 2 bullshit jobs, they created another one (yours) to analyze the situation...
A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century. > have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to t…
> Profit is not a sin. What work do shareholders actually do within the confines of the company? If you gave a poor unemployed person the investment capital that shareholders have, then from the company's perspective, how do you distinguish them from other shareholders? That was the parent poster's point. > Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with few…
They put their hard earned and taxed money into a company to produce something. To build a nail factory you need workers, but you also need the plant; who pays for the plant? Not the workers. Without one of the components, there is no nail plant, you have either unemployed people or an empty building.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I so hate the phrase "war on poverty." It tends to de facto turn poor people into The Enemy in the mind's of far too many people.
That would be another way of lowering the percentage of people living in poverty.
Yes, please, just take us all out and shoot us for our war crimes of failing to be as wildly successful as we would like to be.
(Please don't tell me this needs a sarcasm tag. If you can't tell in this case, then I think it's utterly hopeless.)
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.
But the thing is if the markets really couldn't find any value in the output of nearly everyone, we shouldn't see this high percentage of employment -- not unless one also believes that employers in a decentralised way are implementing their own informal UBI, perhaps out of consensus on political theory or moral values. One might say a simpler explanation is that employee output is still interesting, and that what's…
Most companies operate within a market, but don’t, themselves, operate like a market (internally). Have you really not heard any duck and cover stories from corporate America? It absolutely is easy for incompetent people to remain employed. Talented people tend to job hop to realize their increased utility (not always, but mostly), while incompetence gets promoted at the 50% of companies that cannot compete in the labor market.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.
LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America. https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504 "The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!" If that's not winning, I don't know what is.
That's the beauty (to some) and problem (to others) with the definition of poverty: we keep moving the goalposts/standards.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#479We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because,…
Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else). Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work.…
I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.
Re: Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Why, because you don’t understand what they do? I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why. Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario: I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms…
So instead of just eliminating the 2 bullshit jobs, they created another one (yours) to analyze the situation... A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.
I should have clarified: they hired my company to find out these types of problems. I was assigned to the project. After we gave the final presentation, they eliminated the redundant positions I mentioned (along with a host of others across the enterprise) and saved a boatload of money.