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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

#151

Post by malfist »

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…

I disagree.

There's only so much money to go around, if I chose to spend more money on preventing fraud than the fraud would cost, I'm prioritizing righteousness over helping people.

If you have funding for 500 people, and fraud would cost you funding for 10 people. If you spend the cost of funding 40 people on fraud prevention, you're harming the 30 people you can no longer fund to keep those 10 from undeserved funding.

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

#152

Post by Nasrudith »

notatoad wrote: post #83
gruez wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It prevents competition How does food stamps/medicaid prevent competition?

because small companies can't get away with paying poverty wages. amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring. companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for peo…

Why can't smaller companies get away with paying poverty wages? I don't quite see the connection.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

skhunted wrote: post #144
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.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by r14c »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #131
RIMR wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that government assistance should come universally. We should establish a minimum standard of living. Everyone should get food stamps - enough to survive. If you want, you can eat cheap store brand food for free year-round, or you can spend your entire balance at the beginning of each month at restaurants and artisan grocers because you make enough to afford to buy what you want with your own money when it's…

Wouldn’t this greatly increase inflation? Look at post Covid rise in the cost of literally every humdrum item.

there's significant evidence that this is due to corporate price gauging.

though it is fair to point out that this type of system does require a few other changes in the corporate incentive structure. shareholder primacy for one, would have to go. you can't really be a shareholder profit maximalist and provide a consistent standard of living for everyone in your society, because every possible penny is supposed to end up in the shareholders pocket. even if you could technically build more long-term wealth by investing in things like education, infrastructure, and affordable housing.

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

#155

Post by Noble6 »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #113

If a corporation is making strong profits and its workforce is on poverty level incomes and relying on public financial support to survive, kind of feels like it makes sense for the government to claw back those profits in higher taxation. Notion being that the corporation that is so severely under paying its work force isn't genuinely profitable and is falsely portraying itself as so.

Amazon Warehouse positions all pay well above minimum wage, in every state. They also offer benefits. Concluding Amazon isn’t paying enough, because a large portion of their workforce qualifies for food stamps, is the wrong conclusion.

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

#156

Post by malfist »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118
ilya_m wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! This is not informative. 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. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the…

> 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…

I love the idea of a UBI, but there is a real risk of the UBI being impacted like the minimum wage. When initially passed it's set to a barely reasonable level, and then not adjusted for decades.

Not saying it can't be solved, tie it to inflation or CPI, but I doubt that could pass.

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

#157

Post by undersuit »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118
ilya_m wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! This is not informative. 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. In other words, whether the current cost of means/asset testing is more than the current total fraud is irrelevant to the…

> 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…

I would argue progressive taxes are less complex than your proposed flat tax because you can load all the expenses on the high brackets who won't miss a meal if you set the value too high instead of trying to pick a single value that works for everyone.

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

#158

Post by malfist »

wkat4242 wrote: post #135

Being on public healthcare is not really a shame though. It's like totally normal here in Europe :P And pretty good too. I'm glad I don't have any worry about my healthcare, the risk of insane bills, that I might lose expensive cover if I get fired (which is in itself also a lot less likely as there's no "at will" here) etc. It's just a solved problem. Yeah it costs us some taxes but it's not as insanely expensive as…

> Food stamps though, that's not cool.

Why?

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

#159

Post by onion2k »

Nasrudith wrote: post #152
notatoad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because small companies can't get away with paying poverty wages. amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring. companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for peo…

Why can't smaller companies get away with paying poverty wages? I don't quite see the connection.

Poverty wages comes with the cost of constantly hiring, and hiring is a relatively expensive thing to do, mostly in terms of time, unless you're big enough to make it a fixed cost (eg an internal team and a job marketing budget).

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

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pc86 wrote: post #148
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It does not. The amount Amazon pays in taxes is independent of the proportion of their warehouse workers eligible for food stamps. This is entirely consistent with amount they pay in taxes also being independent of the amount of their taxes that go to fund the food stamp program in particular.
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