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True Rate of Unemployment

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Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#101

Post by ElProlactin »

alex43578 wrote: post #88
ElProlactin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...you can live a pretty decent life on $50k in most of the US. Where? And what's the size of the household? It's one thing to make $50,000/year as a single young person sharing an apartment with 2 other people. It's another to be a family of 4. > Don’t exaggerate what is required for a decent quality of life in America. It doesn’t benefit anyone. "Decent" is subjective, but we can look at hard numbers. After taxes…

Sure sounds like they can’t afford a family of 4 on that income. They have control over both variables in that situation.

Of course two people with low incomes shouldn't have two kids. But (as detailed in my other comment) you need a 4 person household with 2 kids to get tax negative at $50,000/year. Even a 3 person household with 1 kid isn't tax negative in most of the US at $50,000/year.

So the other poster's argument that $50,000/year isn't so bad because of transfers, tax credits, subsidies, etc. doesn't hold up to real-world examples.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#103

Post by ElProlactin »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #100
ElProlactin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NO. WRONG. Yelling doesn't prove your point, and you conveniently avoided answering the most important questions, like where and what household size? First, there is no credit that offsets payroll tax. A single person with $50,000/year income is not negative. They'd have about ~$34,000 in taxable income and pay ~$3,800 in federal income tax. A 2 person household filing jointly with no kids would still pay about $1,…

Poor people pay payroll taxes, which usually is flat and doesn’t have a big deduction. At $50k, a single person is paying just as much if not slightly more in payroll as they are in income tax.

> Poor people pay payroll taxes...

Exactly. Only a few small groups are exempt from FICA.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#104

Post by afpx »

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?

I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.

I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.

The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?

The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.

The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.

And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.

So what do people actually do?

[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#105

Post by brailsafe »

globalnode wrote: post #53
jaredklewis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A land value tax would fix rich people parking money in real estate. A wealth tax or capital gains tax would not.

better off taxing people that own more than 1 property and leave people just trying to live alone.

I'd like to see both an automatically adjusting dynamic tax on owning more than one property in the same municipal or arbitrarily useful region, as well as dynamically banning the ownership of more than one. Everytime I mention this, I get "blah blah we have a democracy blah blah freedom" etc.. but it's no such a democracy if one particular age-range dor demographic of people owns all the assets and politically protects them from diminishing in value or facing competition. Pending presumably complex implementation details, but a healthy system that prevents generational fiefdoms would probably adjust to severely disincentivise even the possibility of acquiring more than one of the most important finite resources in urban areas.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#106

Post by DaSHacka »

testing22321 wrote: post #97
runako wrote: post #11

Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on. That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries. For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever. Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.

> So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.

Yeah, though the problem in the U.S. is we have a constant influx of workers perfectly happy to serve as scabs, and no mainstream political party is willing to address the problem in any meaningful way.

Turns out supply and demand also applies to labor, and artificially restricting the supply increases the demand for your own labor, allowing you to live a better life at the expense of large corporations having to pay more for salaries than executive bonuses. Whoda thunk.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#107

Post by FpUser »

01100011 wrote: post #52
xbmcuser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.

I have had this sneaking suspicion for years now that most of the money needs to be locked up because if we actually gave it to the masses to spend we'd see massive inflation and/or environmental catastrophe (worse than the current one). I don't mean to defend the wealth gap, and I'm not trying to make a statement on how things should be. I just think there may be an unfortunate reality that we need most of the world…

[flagged]

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#108

Post by ElProlactin »

Aurornis wrote: post #90
ElProlactin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Have shelter and food" is surviving. That's the point. And speaking of food, the USDA says that over 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household in 2024. That's 1 in 7 people. In the world's richest country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity.

> 47 million Americans lived in a food insecure household This statistic looked suspect so I had to look it up. The study defined multiple levels of food insecurity. The big 47 million number included mostly households where eating patterns were not disrupted and people did not reduce their food intake. So most “food insecure households” actually had enough food and maintained their normal eating patterns. That’s not…

Food insecure is defined as "lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet".

In the wealthiest country in the world.

I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long because the idea that Americans would say "actually, it's not really that bad because they're technically not starving" shows just how far the country has fallen.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#109

Post by anotherhue »

afpx wrote: post #104

Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost…

Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.

That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.

So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.

Re: True Rate of Unemployment

#110

Post by esseph »

teiferer wrote: post #86
floro wrote: post #44

Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative. I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.

Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them. It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.

Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.

I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...

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