321–330 of 669 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But even w/o these levels we get inflation? How could we compare it to the recent inflation which has been labelled as "greed-flation" and "shrink-flation" ?
Inflation is not an on/off switch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Both parties may feel that complying with tax and labor laws is too much of a burden. That's - a way - to phrase: - facilitate an effective 7.5% pay cut (employer paid Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid tax) - avoid being properly compensated for overtime (assuming non exempt salary), - and make claiming unemployment, disability benefits more difficult When you refer to both, can you emphasize a specific burden…
You may have been downvoted because you seem be ignoring the point gp post. By working under the table, the nanny or gardener or handyman can (often fraudulently) qualify for government healthcare and welfare programs as well as other low income assistance. In my opinion those programs are of a greater benefit than the ones you listed.
Suppose the employer avoids paying Medicare tax and unemployment insurance, but gives some of this money to the employee, who also avoids paying Medicare tax. This is, of course, illegal, but it isn't inherently the case that the employee is getting the worse of it outside of the risk of being prosecuted for tax evasion.
Unemployment insurance in particular generally screws anyone who maintains stable employment because the net beneficiaries are the people who collect benefits every other year, not the people who pay premiums their whole lives and only collect benefits once if at all. The latter would come out ahead to receive even half the premiums as money they could save and collect interest on and then have in reserve in the event they become unemployed. (In general mandatory insurance of this kind is a net economic loss and a source of benefits fraud that only gets passed by alleging it gets paid for by employers rather than employees, but who pays for something on paper and who is affected by the economic effects of the cost are different things.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter. If quitting your jo…
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all. That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games. I don'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it as all the human essentials are covered without work (sufficiently nutritious food, safe, clean, shelter with sufficient heating and water for basic needs, basic healthcare, basic internet, and a small extra for discretionary spending) with the assumption that most people will happily do some work to upgrade their circumstances and get more fun and interesting food/entertainment/shelter. If quitting your jo…
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all. That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games. I don'…
Yes, teenagers can be lazy and get stuck in unproductive situations. Some adults even can! That doesn't mean that's what the majority of people want to do, and there are more effective ways of getting people unstuck than turning off their power and evicting them!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is the goal to get people to quit their jobs and get a nice apartment? Isn't it supposed to be a minimum base level of support? Why do we keep moving the goal posts? And if everyone quits their job and lives in a nice apartment, where is this money going to come from? The problem with welfare today is that its a disincentive to work. Start working, you lose your transfer payments. A lot of people are stuck in thi…
Back in my college speech class, a woman gave a presentation basically supporting the "welfare today is a disincentive to work" myth, with emphasis on "today" (or current), while totally destroying the notion that welfare recipients don't "want" to work. She was a stay-at-home mom with 2 kids, her husband commit suicide after serving in Iraq and then being pushed out of the military (this was the 90s when the US mili…
Your use of the word myth here, without scare quotes, made your comment unnecessarily confusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn’t a problem really with welfare, but a problem with implementing welfare in the dumbest way possible. In general, no policy, like none at all, should be designed to suddenly come into effect when you hit a constant. All functions should be smooth.
When you really peel back the layers, you'll find that voters' instincts are that any means-tested program should come with a hefty punishment for using it. While they aren't exactly against helping, they definitely think the priorities are 1) Spending as little taxpayer dollars as possible, 2) Punishing any recipient of help enough to be a warning to others, and then, distantly, 3) Helping.
So the plan that passes is the one that claims to help people (appeasing the first group) while also costing the minimum amount of money (appeasing the second group). The proposal with evolutionary fitness in politics is then to create a system that helps people on paper but actually limits eligibility for the system to a minimum number of people or otherwise makes use of it more arduous to deter usage so it costs less. Extra points for making it so complicated that people don't realize what's really happening so they don't object if it doesn't really do what they wanted.
But there is also a level of incompetence/inefficiency here, because the complex and overlapping systems that pass as a result often have high overhead that waste tax dollars, or create bad incentives because nobody thought them through and those incentives create deadweight economic losses adverse to the interests of even the people who want to minimize taxes. As the obvious example, if you create a system with welfare cliffs and then people have the incentive to stay on welfare instead of taking a job, you now have more government expense and lower tax revenue than a system that doesn't do this.
At which point there is a Pareto-optimal improvement on the table if you can get the bill passed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a mindset that I often run into with IRL discussions that revolves around the premise that if a person has some minimal essentials met by doing nothing, then they will have no motivation to ever improve their situation at all. That if a person can afford to accomplish nothing but still have enough money to smoke weed and play video games, then all anyone will ever do is smoke weed and play video games. I don'…
One thing that I haven't seen discussed is retirement. When you have a high paying job, you can retire early and still maintain your desired standard of living (and most people do, because most people don't enjoy their job and that is why we call it work). So a pretty uninspiring job like plumbing would end up paying a very high salary. Or stressful jobs like nurse or doctor. What happens when people doing these crit…
And then, if you have proof of another habitable residence, you can get the cash value of all that instead.
The tricky part is that the austerity absolutely cannot reduce anyone below the minimum actual needs to live a full human life. You absolutely need to be giving them enough and healthy enough food, and water. The apartment can be claustrophobic, but it needs ventilation and sound insulation so people can actually sleep. The bed can be boring, but tall people can't be literally cramped when they sleep, and it needs to actually support their weight so people don't get back injuries. Health care needs to be fully adequate. Basically, minimum needs are 100% covered, so that if anyone ever wants to get working they don't have any immediate barriers. Don't take away anything that will make it harder for people to work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd adjust marginal rates so the poor would (net) benefit, the middle class would about break even, and the rich would pay more. Napkin math on that isn't that bad, especially if you chop a bunch of other welfare payments (and the associated expensive means-testing and administration). No one serious is suggesting "everyone gets $1000/month and literally nothing else changes".
Which welfare plans are you cutting? Social Security? Nope, because the average payout is 50% higher than $1000/m. Same with SSI/disability. You certainly couldn't replace any of the medical plans (Medicaid/Medicare) with anywhere near that amount. The welfare plans that might be subject to being replaced only amount to a few percent of the federal budget. The bulk of the budget is those plans above, which would resu…
Medicaid and Medicare being wholly replaced by a truly universal plan unrelated to UBI is probably a prerequisite for a UBI for a bunch of reasons. Social security would probably be unaffected, at least initially, and SSI/disability would likely either be reduced or gradually phased out, depending on the amounts.
I know the other various benefits aren't huge in the budget, but they add significant bureaucratic burden to both the state and the individual. Eliminating that would be a big benefit of UBI.
If you were to hand out $1k a month to everyone in my area an immediate result would likely be that rents would increase by somewhere close to $1k a month. Everyone needs somewhere to live. Everyone wants to live closer to where they work and where there friends and family are. Housing is in limited supply. If everyone had more purchasing power, then everyone's going to collectively bid up what they're willing to pay…
This is the basic uncertainty I have about UBI, and I've never heard an argument against it that went step by step and explained how that wouldn't happen. It seems intuitively like it would. In response, I've hear the equivalent of "don't worry, they've thought of that already, and the math still works". Maybe, but I'd feel a lot better if somebody could walk me through it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have different definitions of UBI, but in my mind 'basic' doesn't translate to quitting your job and not working. People in a functioning society still have to work.
> People in a functioning society still have to work Why?
I agree it would be nice to weight 300 pounds and float around on a levitating lounge all day doing nothing but sadly we're just not at that point yet.