451–460 of 498 posts
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There is very little empirical evidence to support this point of view in non-monopsony situations.
http://i.imgur.com/PFSjZXC.png
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"As with any tax increase, the middle class is always the ones that bear the brunt of it" because we continually keep talking about taxing income instead of wealth. Tax wealth more and income less. WHAT?!?!?!! People say? Well that really fancy and expensive military we are paying for.. it's not just protecting your income. It's protecting your wealth. Pay your fair proportional share for security of your assets...
Huh? As I said, it would take the combined wealth of the top 1000 wealthiest Americans to pay for the federal budget for one year. Pretty quickly you run out of people whose money you can take without getting to the middle class. No matter how you slice it, the real money is in the middle class.
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I can imagine many things, I just think taxation is the most obvious solution to the inevitable inequality that results from allowing people to accumulate capital. And I tend to find that libertarians cling just as hard to the hammer they call "property rights".
There are similar number of people who are raising above their class and similar number of people falling below their economic class. The income inequality will probably exist no matter what we do because not everyone of us are born with same calibre and America is a huge country. In America there is equality of opportunity but you want to give equality of outcomes which is almost impossible to do without crossing mo…
My problem is with the kind of compounding inequality that arises when you start allowing people to accumulate capital, because those who already own capital are more able to earn money than those without.
In order to avoid this, without abandoning the benefits of capitalism entirely, we introduce a slow constant rate of wealth redistribution. This gives those without capital a chance to acquire some, and potentially do an even better job with it.
>In America there is equality of opportunity
Do you really believe this? Do you really believe the child of a poor family is equally able to learn the skills to succeed as a child raised in a rich one?
>but you want to give equality of outcomes
No, I just think extreme and consistent disparity of outcomes is evidence of a systematic problem.
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Playing devil's advocate, what happens to businesses in the presence of an even higher regulatory and tax environment and what will the impact of increased taxes be on employment and business viability as well as the cost of living? For the sake of argument, think about businesses with razor thin margins like restaurants. In the presence of increased taxes, their margins significantly diminish, if not vanish, and it…
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…
Labor, in the service industry, is already handled like a variable cost. If you expect a rush, you increase the number of people on the shift and if you don't, you schedule the bar minimum. If there's mismatch between staffing and projected work - and say schedule too many people for what turns out to be a dead shift - they get sent home. Changing the minimum wage from $9/hr to $15/hr reduces the number of people you can run per shift and keep your costs the same (assuming all other inputs continue to cost the same). I.E. It costs me $30/hr to keep two waiters when I could run 3 for $27/hr so I cut back one waiter per shift.
Where the business gets in trouble, in terms of survival, is the price of fixed inputs. They need to buy goods and services that will fluctuate in price and if the cost of doing business goes up due to higher fixed costs in the form of taxes, those costs will reverberate through the chain. The food supplier will raise prices, the restaurant will need to raise its prices to afford the food, which will impact their ability to attract customers which impacts their ability to derive revenue to pay the food supplier, their tax bill, and so forth.
Similarly, if businesses are having to charge higher prices and wages are depressed due to UBI + , will people have the money to afford goods and services at the higher rate?
It makes sense if-and-only-if that basic income isn't being doled out by the same organization which also runs the military-industrial or prison-industrial worlds. As an American, I think it's safe to say our federal government can't be trusted to not turn into a tyranny if it's everyone's primary employer. We would get even more massive corruption almost instantly. For example, some people would lobby to get those t…
In some respects, wouldn't a UBI also decrease corruption? There is no more pandering to special interests on either fringe of the social spectrum. There is a much smaller bureaucracy. And on the personal level, you don't have poor citizens trading food credits for drugs - they just buy whatever they want.
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Critical omission on your part: not everyone needs to live on this wage. Think about high school kids trying to get a summer job. They don't need to survive on this wage, they simply need something productive to do over the summer. Should my business be required to shell out $15/hr for a high school kid, when the value of his/her labor is way less than that?
It's worth noting that the average age of a minimum wage worker is 35, and the majority are women [0]. Middle-aged women, not teenagers, are the demographic which the minimum wage affects the most. [0] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.htm...
"People at or below the federal minimum are:
Disproportionately young: 50.4% are ages 16 to 24;
24% are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
Mostly (77%) white; nearly half are white women.
Largely part-time workers (64% of the total)."
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-mi...
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There is very little empirical evidence to support this point of view in non-monopsony situations.
http://i.imgur.com/PFSjZXC.png
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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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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.
Well part of the point is that they won't be quite so stressed because their needs are met. But more importantly, what exactly is the alternative? Do you think alcoholics are going to magically get better when we take their money away? They need treatment.
No shit. I think maybe you imagined I was saying something that I was not. My comment was very specific and narrow. Drinking away your money is not a rational decision, period, full stop, end of point. If you think that's a pretty obvious point, then I agree, too. I felt it was the appropriate response to the comment I was responding to.
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Well part of the point is that they won't be quite so stressed because their needs are met. But more importantly, what exactly is the alternative? Do you think alcoholics are going to magically get better when we take their money away? They need treatment.
> They need treatment. No shit. I think maybe you imagined I was saying something that I was not. My comment was very specific and narrow. Drinking away your money is not a rational decision, period, full stop, end of point. If you think that's a pretty obvious point, then I agree, too. I felt it was the appropriate response to the comment I was responding to.
Nonetheless, I don't think the post you originally replied to was suggesting that spending your entire income on booze is rational, just some of it.