111–120 of 268 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, no NI is not hypothecated. Welfare and healthcare are run by different govt departments.
They still are paid from the same source though.
But my point stands: I'm not including the NHS budget in mine, for this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly do you come up with that? I understand the concept, agree with it to a point (it is rather exaggerated) and I am no facist and do not have enough power, percieved or monetary, to be able to be an effective elitist. I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm. People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs'. I take the notion and look…
> I'm anti-huge power lobby, unless you can find one that does much more good than harm This is the core of the thinking behind a dictatorship > People are under pressure to be sheep already if you work one of these 'jobs' What pressure? People are asked to work in exchange of money. Which means this system, however imperfect, still sees people as useful and productive and, thus, still gives them a chance And it's el…
Asked to work? Most of us Have to. At the bottom rungs, keep your mouth shut, dress like the accepted average, and fit in with the company's culture. No creativity or input actually needed. And no questions trying to learn things. You don't need to know what the management knows. This isn't pressure? How many 32 year olds working in fast food views their job as useful or productive?
Using the 32 year old with the fast food as an example... do they feel they are valued? Likely not. Fake job, but it is a job. I somehow doubt this would change much.
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True for all national currencies but hardly for the world-reserve-currency. Here you have the following reality instead: > generally as the supply of dollars goes up, the price of a loaf of bread goes hardly up in any noticable way, financial assets / Silicon Valley valuations / houses go up significantly (so the country thinks they got "wealthier"), and bread-loaf prices in USD-aligned weak-currency/underdeveloped/p…
Not really, since there was no historical time when USD were being printed with wild abandon
Interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
I think there's several separate issues: Krugman correctly points out that work disincentives are different from job destruction. However there are different kind of work disincentives: it is certainly hard to view people working _just_ for healthcare (as opposed to switching jobs, retiring early, or starting their own business) as something positive. By all means, disentangling healthcare from employment is at least…
Why it is hard to view working "just for healthcare" as positive? Is it hard to view working "just for money" as positive? I.e. suppose that one works only because one needs money and otherwise he would spend his time playing Tetris, walking on the beach and reading medieval poetry. Why is it negative that he still works and not lives off other's money and other's work, involuntary taken? If this is not negative, the…
The ACA is apparently not perfect (I, like most people haven't read the law:) ) but I think anything that keeps people from becoming serfs is a good thing.
Your argument about healthcare being money in a different form is flawed. You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people. I am sure not too many people would want to go back to serfdom because after all a roof over your head is another form of being paid.
> A world in which a healthy adult has the reasonable expectation of earning a decent living while working full-time at a market wage is absolutely a world in which the dignity of work is a useful social value to cultivate. In a world in which that is not a reasonable expectation, the dignity of work can be a harmful concept. Interesting times ahead. It's going to be painful getting there, if we get there at all, but…
On the other hand full employment through monetary policy is pretty much science fact. Yet neither the United States nor the EU even pretend to pursue it. (China pretty much does, however. It works pretty well for them.)
It's not like providing a decent living for near everyone is this unsolved problem which, if could only we find the correct technocratic solution, we could just roll up our sleeves and implement.
The problem is that a lot of people are against doing it. At all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why it is hard to view working "just for healthcare" as positive? Is it hard to view working "just for money" as positive? I.e. suppose that one works only because one needs money and otherwise he would spend his time playing Tetris, walking on the beach and reading medieval poetry. Why is it negative that he still works and not lives off other's money and other's work, involuntary taken? If this is not negative, the…
I think the difference is that prior to the ACA, you didn't have much of a marketplace for the self insured, so you were artificially tied to your employer for the group insurance coverage. The ACA is apparently not perfect (I, like most people haven't read the law:) ) but I think anything that keeps people from becoming serfs is a good thing. Your argument about healthcare being money in a different form is flawed.…
>>> You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people.
When and where there was such time? If you refer to real slaves or serfs - they couldn't own property not because it wasn't affordable but because they did not have rights to own anything, being property themselves. Nobody argues for that. However, earning one's own housing or food or clothing or healthcare is in no way serfdom - it is a natural state of a person, the alternative being somebody else earning them and you just take them because you're too good to work, unlike that other guy. But what if that other guy thinks the same? If nobody has to work to earn their own living - who'll be supplying all these nice things you feel so entitled to enjoy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In switzerland it was voted down because it doesn't make economic sense. Look at the numbers, they don't work.
Okay, now I am 100% that you're just trolling indiscriminately. There have been at least a couple real-world experiments done, have you even had the decency to look it up on Google? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=basic+income+experiment