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A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

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Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#401

Post by yanilkr »

ambicapter wrote: post #384
yanilkr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Basically you want to punish people's kids if their parents aren't up to your standard. True meritocracy, that.

just like you want to reward stupid people having kids. true idiocracy.

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#402

Post by RivieraKid »

mmanfrin wrote: post #283
RivieraKid wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equavalent to basic income with a specific tax system. But the whole system would be harder to understand and have 1 redundant parameter.

NIC would be harder to understand, or BI would? If the latter, I wholeheartedly disagree. Normal taxes would remain, the only difference is that you get BI as well.

I meant that BI would be harder to understand... It would take more thinking to answer questions such as "what's the effective tax rate for net contributors?", "what's the level at which you're a net contributor", "if we switch to BI, will I become richer or poorer?".

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#403

Post by aninhumer »

home_boi wrote: post #236
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most restaurants derive most of their cost from labor. With basic income in and minimum wage out, you can pay people much less than you had to before. Yes, you may pay more in taxes, but that's from profit after everything else has been taken care of. So if you end up with less total profit than before, it sucks, but your control over the situation is far more variable than if you had to simply suck it up and plan to…

It's the opposite. The utility of money decreases as the amount of money owned/earned goes up. $9/hr to a person without basic income is worth more than $9/hr to a person with basic income. Now people need more money to gain the same utility as they could have previously gained without basic income. Why would people wash dishes if they didn't need to pay the bills?

I think there's a lot of untapped utility in better quality jobs, that doesn't get explored at the moment because people's first priority is getting enough money to survive.

Maybe no one wants to wash dishes (so buy a machine), but I imagine quite a lot of people actually enjoy being waiters, since you get to be directly helpful to a lot of people every day.

And now you're not afraid of being fired, you can even start to negotiate about the parts that suck. Obnoxious customers? Hey that restaurant down the street pays a bit less, but they're also willing to throw people out for being jerks. Maybe not going home upset once a month is worth a lot more to you than a new TV.

Things like this might not even cost the business very much, but they've never considered them because people take what they're given.

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#404

Post by BurningFrog »

firethief wrote: post #325
BurningFrog wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the minimum wage context, the advantages are pretty clear. Mostly bringing people outside of productive society inside it. Homeless, unemployed, addicts etc. This is not about making middle class college graduate parents work more.

As GP was saying, employment doesn't help with homelessness or addiction; income and sense of purpose do. Employment does help with unemployment, but that's kind of begging the question.

I completely disagree.

Going daily to a workplace, helping out as part of a team and being useful are essential to becoming a productive member of society.

This is hard for us college educated middle class people to grasp, but many people have grown up without knowing anyone with a regular job and need to get eased into the basics.

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#405

Post by ap22213 »

Nogwater wrote: post #125
kough wrote: post #29

> No one wants to hire them at a high minimum wage, especially when locals are readily available The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially increases the cost of labor, to the point where it's no longer worth it to an employer to hire a low-output employee. I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal, but an increased minimum wage actually hinders progress on that front. As the m…

> I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal I don't agree, and I'm not sure why people would see employment for its own sake would be a good thing. I want to increase some of the things that employments brings (purchasing power, a sense of purpose, etc...) and not others (loss of time, feeling trapped, etc...).

Agreed. I read threads like this one, and all I wonder why all of these amazingly smart, creative, and talented people aren't banding together to put an end to this thing called work.

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#406

Post by rskar »

ikeboy wrote: post #357
dredmorbius wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Smith. "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him." https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_... An enterprise which cannot pay the full cost of its inputs isn't an economically viable activity. It's a charity benefiting its owner.

Doesn't that argument apply to any government spending? If my enterprise relies on roads existing, and I cannot pay the full costs of maintaining the roads, say. (Ah, but roads benefit others, and we should only calculate your share! But welfare benefits others as well, it's a collective funding, so the same applies.)

Interesting what you've given us to consider, in regards to "charity benefiting its owner", to suggest these two things as comparable:

    (1) insufficient wages (per Adam Smith) as set by private enterprise

    (2) private enterprise usage of services/infrastructure as provided by government above and beyond their share of taxes
Walmart was in the news recently enough (http://www.msnbc.com/martin-bashir/mcdonalds-employee-resour... and http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-13/how-mcdonal...) about their low wages and their advice to employees to avail themselves of government assistance programs (a.k.a. "handouts" - that's not a mean word, is it? http://dailysignal.com/2011/03/18/welfare-reform-self-relian...).

So, between Walmart (or MacDonald's, etc.) and such employees, who is the beneficiary of charity here (at least in the Adam Smith sense)?

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#407

Post by dinkumthinkum »

merpnderp wrote: post #82
a3n wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It keeps people who want to work from working. People who would be willing to work at less than the minimum wage. Subsiding on government relief can lead to depression, loss of social status, load term mental illness. Not having a job is a very unhealthy thing for most people.

I don't really follow. They must not want to work that bad if they would choose not to work ...

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#408

Post by ap22213 »

Someday soon we will have cures for cancers, technology to repair aging, colonies on Mars, unlimited clean power, and maybe even some strong AI. Yet, Humans will still be debating economics, taxes, and the morality of work.

Can I ask you amazingly brilliant, creative and tenacious thinkers to put 'ending work' up in that list somewhere? My kids and grandkids really shouldn't have to work 70-80 hour weeks, should they?

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#409

Post by fucking_tragedy »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #275
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you care if someone spends it on alcohol? Where does this paternal instinct to tell someone else how to spend money come from?

I don't much care where people spend their own money. But welfare money isn't the same as their own money.

It is the recipient's money once it's in their name.

Where does this attitude towards how someone spends their income come from? Is it the assumption that someone who receives aid is incompetent? Is it the assumption that you can handle someone else's finances better?

How does disability, illness or losing your job warrant being micromanaged by the state?

UBI proposes to do away with monitoring/restrictions on recipients of such income because it's inefficient and based on the assumption that someone else knows how to allot another's limited funds better than that person.

You are caring hard about how someone spends their pennies and it leaves me here wondering, why? Aren't there bigger fish to fry?

Re: A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage

#410

Post by fucking_tragedy »

knodi123 wrote: post #202
ThomPete wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets not assume that the definition of an alcoholic is well defined. To most americans, Danes would be considered raging alcoholics , yet nothing make them less rational than their american counterparts.

Fine, but we were discussing someone talking about how it's rational to blow your UBI on alcohol in order to deal with the stress of running a business. Drinking your entire basic income away is not a rational decision, no matter how stressed you are.

How much money and red tape do you propose we print and roll out to ensure welfare recipients only drink an acceptable amount of alcohol?
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