341–350 of 498 posts
To give everyone in the US a basic income of $500 a month would cost ~$2 trillion dollars. Plus the cost of the inevitably humongous bureaucracy that will be necessary to administer it.
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I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. If your "low skills Americans" were more attractive to employers than low skills workers, they would replace those workers regardless of the wage. Increasing the minimum wage will incentivize employers to hire more effectively (because the cost of a worker goes up), which means that only those workers who are productive enough to be worth being paid the new, higher, minimum wage…
At 10/hr many people on Snap will not enter workforce because their benefits get reduced. At 15/hr the increase in wage more than offsets decrease in Snap and will attract more workers into the workforce pool. Two low skilled Americans have an advantage in English language skills and for a significant portion of foreign workers, work eligibility.
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If you read precisely past the point where you stopped quoting, you see their reasoning why this bad, the answer to your "And?" Whether or not you agree with that answer, shouldn't that answer be the part you respond to, instead of deliberately misrepresenting what the poster you were responding to was saying?
My objection was to the word "artificial," (which is why I didn't quote further) as if mandating a minimum wage is somehow different from everything else we do with the economy. The "natural" economy doesn't exist, except insofar as the adjusted economy we have is the natural economy. Making changes from what is to what someone wants is entirely normal.
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So the alcoholic takes their entire check and blows it on booze? Don't care. I specifically have to not care, so as to not erect a gigantic, wasteful government program designed to protect someone from their own short-sightedness (in my high-and-mighty opinion). In order for UBI to work, we have to give up substantially all notions of controlling what other people spend THEIR money on. That's the most appealing aspec…
Yes, but what about when the alcoholic's wife and adorable child show up on the news because they're starving and don't have heat? Or when someone's grandma gets scammed and ends up living on the street? Most people are not willing to tell them "tough luck." So you're back to having all social programs that try to prevent people from doing stupid, short-sighted things.
There's a non-obvious danger for basic income: rent-seeking behavior. Landlords charge whatever the market will bear, so there's a huge risk of funneling money through the recipients without improving their quality of life. And it isn't just landlords that hold that kind of rentier position - universities, for instance, would also extract more out of their position as employment gatekeepers. Attacking rent-seeking be…
It's not safe to create a financial safety net without an interpersonal social safety net. People, especially those who can't easily protect themselves, need both.
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> The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially increases the cost of labor, And? Why is that artificial increase a problem. Every law on the books is an artificial act. I don't see many people wringing their hands over the mortgage interest deduction, another of those artificial changes to the economy.
And borders are just imaginary lines. They are however a based around the underlying reality of geographical, cultural, and political factors. We could make a law that all airplanes must slow down to 50 miles per hour over crowed areas but that doesn't matter if most planes can't fly any slower than 120mph without falling out of the sky. Laws do have to take into account things like physics and economics. The latter…
Economics is not even remotely similar to physics in any respect.
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The counter argument is that human labor has an actual cost. That is the cost to keep a human alive and in some level of comfort. Government benefits of many different types have "artificially" lowered this cost. Where employees refuse to pay enough for a human to live on, the government picks up the slack. Raising the minimum wage may be "artificial," but its not the first control placed on some otherwise natural la…
Sure, but it's a low paying job vs no job. Minimum wage is stupid - if you need people to get a higher income than the value they can output, you need to supply that additional income through social grants. Forcing them out of work by allowing robots to undercut them is idiotic when they are willing to work.
Just so I can understand your argument better, can you elaborate this a bit more? How do you measure their output? How do you arrive at the dollar value?
> Besides, Sweden has one of the rich world's biggest gaps between native and immigrant employment rates. Youth joblessness is 70 percent higher among the foreign-born than among Swedes. Lowering the minimum wage could draw more of the new, mainly Middle Eastern population, into the workforce and reduce social and ethnic tension. A minimum wage is simply not moral. It prevents me and you from entering into an employm…
A minimum wage is moral. It ensure that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. The government as third party is ensuring we have minimum amount of fairness in our interaction. The right-wing philosophy of wage bargaining is ironically hurting the workers of their countries. The reality is that first-world nations have predatory labor practices because citizens are sys…
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Citizens are not some helpless victims. They make their life choices and they should by exercising personal responsibility. The same benefits also applies to non-value creators who want to avoid tedium of work and the incentivizes to not do anything and takes risks goes away. There is a natural Darwinism involved in influencing who wants to have kids. If someone is already struggling in their life, why should they ge…
People have kids outside of financial consideration. The desire for having children is an enormous natural force for many (not all). That's not even including all the children as result of youthful mistakes or just plain happenstance. Technocrats are quick to frame having children as some sort of result of rational decision making, like buying a car. Since it's obviously not, this viewpoint readily becomes a normativ…
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Teenagers don't need to live on this wage, but their parents need to have sufficient margin in their wages to support that.
Yes, but the alternative is that the teen sits around all summer causing trouble instead of having a job because the minimum wage is too high.