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One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

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Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#141

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gruez wrote: post #127
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correct comparison would be of the marginal cost of eligibility testing (both in terms of false positives and false negatives) vs the marginal cost of fraud. There is a much better way to do this, because the way we do it is entirely asinine. On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the oth…

>On the one hand we say that people who make more money should pay higher marginal tax rates, and set marginal rates on lower income people to low or zero rates. On the other hand we demand means testing at lower income rates, which is equivalent to a tax on marginal income. Isn't this already the case? It's true that you need to means testing to get access to additional benefits, but the tax rate itself is already p…

Means testing does the opposite of progressive marginal tax rates. It cancels them out by increasing the marginal tax rate on people who make less money, by the amount of the benefit phase out. There is no point in incurring the complexity of doing both at the same time just to have them delete each other.

Another way of saying this is that a flat marginal tax rate combined with a fixed-amount universal tax credit (UBI) is a progressive tax system. But it's a much simpler progressive tax system which is harder to game and doesn't result in unintended nonsense like phase out cliffs or higher marginal rates on lower income people than higher income people.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#142

Post by pc86 »

no_wizard wrote: post #73
mountainb wrote: post #35

This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would other…

>The government subsidizes corporate low wage work But importantly only the lowest of the low wages There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc. Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealt…

This is exactly what Mitt Romney was referring to during the 2012 election when he said he wasn't worried about the very rich, and he wasn't worried about the very poor. The truth is if you are making $20k/yr in income you're likely in a better position day-to-day than someone making $40k/yr, especially if you're raising a family and especially if you live in a city with functioning social services. He was excoriated in the press for saying he didn't care about poor people, which isn't exactly what he said and isn't at all what he meant.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#143

Post by vlovich123 »

gruez wrote: post #125
no_wizard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The government subsidizes corporate low wage work But importantly only the lowest of the low wages There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc. Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealt…

>To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! The point of means testing isn't to fight fraud, it's to better divert a limited pool of resources to the neediest people. If you have a pool of money to distribute, only giving it to the poorest 25% (ie. means testing) means the recipients can get 4x the money compared to giving it to everyone. Sure, there…

The problem is that means testing programs often have a cliff where you go from qualifying to not qualifying instead of being a gradual ramp-off. In other words, earning $1 more can remove $100 in support from the government instead of something more reasonable like only removing 10c at the beginning and up to $0.9 if you’re already on your way out.

The common criticism of means testing is that more money is spent on the bureaucracy implementing the testing than if you just took the money you otherwise spent on bureaucracy and gave it directly without means testing.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#144

Post by skhunted »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #129

Here's the thing. This is going to happen to everyone, as in, no person will be valuable enough via the contribution of their labor to survive without subsidies. At the level of automation we've reached in society, low-skilled labor is worth, per hour, a very small amount. As AI and automation improve, the majority of people will have negligible economic utility. The only way around this is to let those people starve…

I believe labor is worth whatever the employer can get away with. As such the value of the cheapest labor is what society allows companies to get away with. An employee's wages should be high enough to live off of and this should be enforced by having high labor standards.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#145

Post by marcusverus »

_ache_ wrote: post #114
devd00d wrote: post #64

People should take a history lesson from France. Let them eat cake.

Can you elaborate? What did France do exactly? Apart from having a minimal (but working) welfare system. For several decades, liberal policies have been driving down the welfare system and the minimum wage. Macron is definitively trying to put a end to the french social welfare system.

He's suggesting that we break out the guillotines and murder the rich.

That worked out great for the French, after all.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#146

Post by brnaftr361 »

mountainb wrote: post #35

This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would other…

No, people should shoulder the burden and when a business model is untenable, there should be a correction which is instantiated by a lack of labor. It's neither the company nor the governments responsibility to dictate what the market will bear, only follow the optimization curve that the charter is architected to. A lot of the problems we see in the modern market are a product of well-intentioned interventions, namely things like welfare that allow for low-wage workers to sustain a long term position at a job that underpays them which is ultimately zero-sum to those individuals which it is supposed to support.

Where interventions need applied to companies, namely conglomerates, they are not and virtually nobody seems to want to discuss this, but it's the bull in the China shop because these monoliths have a unidirectional charter toward profit and infinite coffers by which to affect policy change and ensure that margins can remain relatively extreme without regard to consequences which either the individual or the society in which they operate suffer.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#147

Post by frumper »

ilya_m wrote: post #128
bombcar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised, many people qualify for SNAP and may not realize it. It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children. Some states you can get it if you're pregnant no matter what . (It can often be a strategic thing to get if you can, because large numbers of other programs that require applications will declare you automatically qualify if you get SNAP.) M…

> It's based on income, and handled by the states, and the income limit climbs based on number of children. SNAP also require asset limits, which is $2,750 per _household_. Given that rent for a large family may easily be in the ~$1,500-2,500 range, it leaves pretty much no money in the bank for any other expenses.

That isn't the case for most of the country. Page 5 of the following link shows it by state.

https://www.clasp.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018/...

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#148

Post by pc86 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109
mountainb wrote: post #35

This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, truly the most wonderful people ever to have graced the earth. The circuitous redistribution is a feature and not a bug of the system. It prevents competition, which makes shareholders happy. It also provides a minimum standard of care for workers, who would other…

> Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? It would be fairer and more just, but words about justice are cheap and power is expensive. But how is this related to the subject? There is an article lamenting that a third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps. Now suppose that Amazon paid more taxes and correspondingly provided more funding for the food stamp program. The next week a third of Amazon war…

This implies that government expenditures are based on actual revenues, and that $x in additional revenue is divided proportionally to all government services. Neither of these is true.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#149

Post by Aunche »

Not sure how this economic illiterate Twitter post has nearly 100 upvotes within an hour. This is not how a subsidy works. I'm sure Amazon execs would be happy for the government to end their "subsidy", which would increase the demand for employment and downwardly pressure wages. Just because Jeff Bezo's company is primarily a retail company with lower margins than Dan Price's higher margin B2B company doesn't mean that Bezos is any more responsible for people's welfare than Dan Price is.

The problem of these bad economic takes is that they make the assumption that if only these greedy companies paid employees more money, all of society's problems would be fixed. We already know that this isn't true. Americans already has the highest incomes in the world. The San Francisco residents have highest incomes in America, but continue to have the worst rates of homelessness in America. Throwing more money won't solve fundamentally broken healthcare and housing systems.

Re: One-third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps or Medicaid

#150

Post by tootie »

I get the point, but this is a terrible goalpost to be using. Medicaid and SNAP have both expanded enrollment by making it easier to qualify. Being on government assistance is neither here nor there. I realize it's being used a proxy for poverty, but that's not going to be very accurate. There are multiple ways to qualify for these programs. Being a sold bread-winner for a family of 5 is a different scenario to a secondary breadwinner for a family of 2. We have enough direct data to compare their compensation levels that don't involve shaming people for needing help.

Also, this guy has no citations.

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