Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#171

Post by pydry » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #139

pydry wrote: post #4

And why does the author not support both? It's articles like this that make me wonder if the purpose of the basic income movement is to act as a sort of pipe dream spoiler for more realistic progressive policies - like a $15 minimum wage. Either that or a plan to make welfare "fairer" by ensuring that disabled veterans who can't work and tech millionaires get the same $ amount each month from the government. Especial…

A minimum wage is bad because there is work people want to do which isnt worth 15 an hour. UBI means people will be able to afford rent and food and engage in their choice of labor, even if it's not highly valuable work.

Is there any evidence for this?

Most sub 15 minimum wage work produces value far in excess of the wage. This value is then captured in profit margins and stock prices.

The minimum wage also doesn't prevent people from selling dolls on Etsy or something if they really want to.

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#172

Post by syshum » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

antonzabirko wrote: post #99

reader_mode wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very narrative driven world view. The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done, and if you set a guaranteed income for doing nothing the incentive for doing that job suddenly needs to be a lot higher to compete. Saying that it's just the capital owners is ridiculous - consider for eg. elderly care - good luck living in with your demented mother who needs assistance to perform even the basi…

On the flip side, UBI will increase the revenue from those jobs. The less desirable jobs will pay more simply due to supply and demand.

Pay like all goods on in a market are not infinitely elastic to just say the pay will simply increase because the supply of workers drop.

For example lets look at janitorial labor, that is a hard job to automate and it is required in every business. So many would think that an increase to say $15/hr would just mean all the companies would just pay the same number of workers $15/hr right? No, what you would find it maybe instead of daily trash pickup it goes to 2 times a week, or employee's are asked to take their office trash themselves to a common trash bin. Common area's are cleaned less frequently, other employee's are asked to pick up some slack, and the janitorial staff will go from 10 workers to 6 , with a responsibility of 4 floors vs 2, or other such adjustments to the "acceptable" level of janitorial services.

The business has a budget of X for janitorial, that will not change very much simply because UBI or Min Wage came into play, they will just have to accept less janitorial services for the same money (aka inflation)

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#173

Post by A12-B » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

reader_mode wrote: post #46

overton wrote: post #19

Authors like this frame the UBI/minimum wage debate as if we just haven't figured out the right policy mix to fix poverty or precarity -- as if it's a problem of ideas. I propose that it's in fact a question of power -- 1) who benefits from people being poor and how much 2) power do they have? 1) Owners of capital, who don't want to see their labour costs escalate and use firing/the poverty gun as a disciplinary tool…

That's a very narrative driven world view. The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done, and if you set a guaranteed income for doing nothing the incentive for doing that job suddenly needs to be a lot higher to compete. Saying that it's just the capital owners is ridiculous - consider for eg. elderly care - good luck living in with your demented mother who needs assistance to perform even the basi…

Why are jobs that are needed the most paid the least? That is some sort of manufactured contradiction. If they are paid low because they are easily replaceable, why are they the most needed jobs? If they are paid low because they aren't needed, then they aren't needed and shouldn't exist.

What could a third possibility be for these jobs being paid so low, i wonder? He said, facetiously knowing the answer

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#174

Post by david38 » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #105

SmokyBourbon wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew Yang: > I am a huge fan of a negative income tax, but I prefer a UBI for multiple reasons. It lowers the administrative burden because you don’t need to figure out how much I made last year. It removes any strange shenanigans in terms of trying to report a low income. It alleviates a payments timing issue — you’re not likely to get your negative income tax when you might need it. And politically, I think it’s…

>And politically, I think it’s more appealing to be able to say to everyone: You have intrinsic value. The universality of UBI is key to its political viability. Just look at the number of people who are against forgiving college debt because they have already paid off college or are past the stage in their life in which they are personally concerned about college debt. Most people still view "fairness" as everyone b…

There is no definition of fairness that a substantial majority agree on.

Equality of opportunity? Equality of outcome? Low penalty for failing? Low penalty for breaking the law? Eye for an eye?

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#175

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #168

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to do income tax would be that if you get paid $60,000 then your employer gives you $60,000 and at the end of the year you have to cut a check to the IRS for e.g. $18,000. The problem with this is that if you give people $60,000 then a lot of them spend all $60,000 and come tax time they don't have the tax money and you need to start having tax debtors prisons or something. The analogous thing for a UBI would…

> There is no reason in principle that they couldn't do this as soon as you fill out the paperwork, i.e. on March 1st the instant you lose your other job and become a sole proprietor with no income. But you won't really know if March is going to be income-less until it is over. On March 1st I may still be hopeful that tomorrow will be a better day. Soon it is the 31st and I realize I didn't make anything. You're stil…

> But you won't really know if March is going to be income-less until it is over. On March 1st I may still be hopeful that tomorrow will be a better day. Soon it is the 31st and I realize I didn't make anything. You're still dependent on hindsight, no?

You can specify how much withholding you want. There are just penalties if you end up owing too much in the end, because otherwise people would specify none all the time and we'd be back to tax debtors prisons when they didn't have the money at the end of the year.

So you can say on March 1st that you want the $1000 now. Then on March 3rd when you find a new job, you immediately go back and specify a different withholding amount which claws it back so you don't have to pay the penalty for not withholding enough now that you're making more money again.

> And reporting daily is a huge amount of overhead for someone.

Not if you're only reporting changes in your withholding amount. Then there is only something to file when your job status changes. You lose your job, you file a status change, money is immediately transferred into your account. You get a new job, you file again. At any other time there is nothing you have to do.

> The logic is exactly the same if you report every second or only once per year.

Other than the immense practical difference between having to wait for money for one year and having to wait for money for one second.

And even that doesn't exist because filing doesn't have to happen after the fact at all. If it's February 15th and your employer says you're laid off in two weeks, you can change your filing status before March 1st and get the money at exactly the same time.

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#176

Post by danShumway » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

reader_mode wrote: post #46

overton wrote: post #19

Authors like this frame the UBI/minimum wage debate as if we just haven't figured out the right policy mix to fix poverty or precarity -- as if it's a problem of ideas. I propose that it's in fact a question of power -- 1) who benefits from people being poor and how much 2) power do they have? 1) Owners of capital, who don't want to see their labour costs escalate and use firing/the poverty gun as a disciplinary tool…

That's a very narrative driven world view. The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done, and if you set a guaranteed income for doing nothing the incentive for doing that job suddenly needs to be a lot higher to compete. Saying that it's just the capital owners is ridiculous - consider for eg. elderly care - good luck living in with your demented mother who needs assistance to perform even the basi…

> The problem with UBI is that some jobs suck but need to be done

I'm somewhat skeptical of the UBI train, but this particular objection has always rubbed me the wrong way. Those jobs should cost more.

If the only thing keeping people in a job is the threat of poverty, and they're not being paid enough otherwise to incentivize them to do the work, then that's not a free market. It's not really significantly different from holding a gun to their head or coercing them into doing the work.

What's going to happen if the people stuck in dead-end jobs retrain to work at better jobs? What's going to happen if the economy improves and suddenly they have more opportunities? The problem with underpaying essential jobs is that it forces people to think of those market outcomes as undesirable. I don't like the framing that says that if elderly-care workers retrain and have a choice whether or not to work in nursing homes, that's a bad thing. That seems very, very counter to how we should think about a healthy jobs market.

I don't want a framing that tells me that the economy becoming too good or people having too many job opportunities is a problem because those people need to be financially pressured into working underpaid jobs. To me, that's a very anti-free-market way of thinking about the economy. Jobs that are difficult or undesirable should have more compensation because they have less demand. That is the entire basis of the jobs market and of supply/demand, we shouldn't be trying to undermine those principles.

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#177

Post by danShumway » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

reader_mode wrote: post #163

true_religion wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went through my mothers health failing and then subsequent death. If I didn’t have to work, I absolutely would have cared for her myself. However, there is no way I could have quit working and keep the house in a relatively expensive area that I bought to be close to job opportunities. UBI changes the calculus dramatically. Suddenly you can just do things for yourself .

Unless your job is pointless - you quitting your job to take care of your mother is a net loss for the economy and again makes things less accessible for everyone - nursing homes are an optimisation. It sounds nice to give people the option but your argument is exactly why substantial UBI is a dangerous concept.

> Unless your job is pointless - you quitting your job to take care of your mother is a net loss for the economy and again makes things less accessible for everyone

Some people prefer to live at home rather than go to a nursing home. What's worthless about giving those people better care that more closely aligns with their preferences?

> is a net loss for the economy

This is such a weird way of thinking about activity that happens outside the market. Should I feel guilty about cooking my own meals because I haven't payed a restaurant worker to do it?

Sometimes people do things outside of the market, and that's OK, they don't have to feel guilty about that. The market exists to help us live our lives, not the other way around. Whether GP watches their parents on their own or hires someone else to do it, the parents are still getting watched, and somebody is still doing that as part of their "job". That's the important part.

You're concerned about prices going up, but what GP is describing would be vastly cheaper than paying for assisted living on the market today. It's making in-home assisted living more available than it currently is on the market. Why would that be a bad thing?

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#178

Post by dang » Sun, Jan 31, 2021, 8:39 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #71

dang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a long history of posting nationalistic flamebait to HN. We've warned you many times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25800127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21880344 ... and you've only kept doing it. You've done it repeatedly in recent days, even in the last f…

I'll stop, though it would be preferable if we could have discussions around topics, rather than just banning them. After living and working in the US, and Canada, and Australia, I genuinely don't understand why the US can't learn from other countries to improve itself. Honestly, I'm not trying to post flamebait, I simply don't understand , and I've never heard a good explanation. My friends here in Canadian healthca…

No one is banning any topics. Nationalistic swipes are not a topic.

The issue is that you have a long pattern of nationalistic swipes in your posts to HN (to the point where I brace myself when I see your username, because I expect to run into yet another). It's not ok, it's against the guidelines, we ban accounts that do it, and we need you to stop. You've done this many times about topics other than healthcare, so this isn't just about healthcare (though, separately, repeating the same points over and over about a classic flamewar topic is also against both the site guidelines and the intended spirit of HN).

I don't mean to pick on you personally and I hope that's clear. The same rule holds for every user, regardless of which country anyone has a problem with.

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#179

Post by erik_seaberg » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 12:53 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #167

erik_seaberg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've mostly run out of things for horses to do, which is why we don't see so many anymore. Automation took longer but it's getting pretty close for a lot of simple jobs at the same time.

You appear to be just repeating the claim I'm challenging. We've automated away all the simple jobs many times over. Almost all of agriculture, for example. Almost any job in the first industrial revolution. Practically any job that is embedded in a last name: Smith, Potter, Cooper, Mason, Taylor, Wright, Fletcher, Ward, Weaver, Chandler. But again, look around you: is this a world with nothing left to do?

When we invented machines that did many of the jobs horses did, we did not find other jobs for those horses to do. Now for the first time we are inventing cost-effective machines that can see and move things and apply tools without close supervision, which is all that people are doing in a lot of jobs. I’m not confident we’re going to find a similar amount of useful work that only a person could do.

Re: Universal Basic Income Is Superior to a $15 Minimum Wage (2019)

#180

Post by wpietri » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

erik_seaberg wrote: post #179

wpietri wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be just repeating the claim I'm challenging. We've automated away all the simple jobs many times over. Almost all of agriculture, for example. Almost any job in the first industrial revolution. Practically any job that is embedded in a last name: Smith, Potter, Cooper, Mason, Taylor, Wright, Fletcher, Ward, Weaver, Chandler. But again, look around you: is this a world with nothing left to do?

When we invented machines that did many of the jobs horses did, we did not find other jobs for those horses to do. Now for the first time we are inventing cost-effective machines that can see and move things and apply tools without close supervision, which is all that people are doing in a lot of jobs. I’m not confident we’re going to find a similar amount of useful work that only a person could do.

We didn't find other jobs for horses to do because horses were capital goods. That's like saying we haven't found new jobs for spinning jennies or steamboats.

As to the other bit I'm not sure if that's "OMG machines will ruin us" or "OMG robots will ruin us", but the former is multiple centuries old, while the latter just turned 100.

I get that you have personal fears here, but people have had personal fears about insufficient replacement work because machines since the Industrial Revolution. If you want people to take those fears seriously, you'll have to do better than "animals are people, probably".

If you'd like to see it differently, try naming problems in people's lives and in the broader society. How many of those could be improved with the application of human time and attention? Lots, I say. It'll be a long time before we run out of things for people to do.