That isn't how a NIT/UBI works. There is no making up the difference, everyone gets the same amount from the government in all cases.

Moreover, the frame you're using is that the employer owes the employee a living wage. It assumes that if the employer can't stay in business paying $16.09 then the employee will get the higher wage regardless. But if that alternative was available, why wouldn't they have taken the other, higher paying job to begin with? And if the alternative is instead unemployment, you are obviously doing no one any favors by prohibiting them from making some money rather than none.

Meanwhile it doesn't take into account the cost differences inherent in different forms of employment. If you work across the street from where you live, you have no commuting expense. If you work 60 miles away, at $.59/mile you have >$70/day in commuting expense, equivalent to $8.85/hour in wages. After taxes. And you lose two hours a day to sitting in traffic. It would be totally rational for someone to prefer the job across the street for $7.50/hour to the one 60 miles away for $16.09/hour, but your position is that they should be prohibited from taking that job even though it would be better for both them and society.

Now, I understand you think these are all things that, as a matter of decency, our citizens should have. That's great! Then pay for it, and stop saddling everyone else with the costs of your morality.

For what it's worth when I reviewed their methodology, as I suggest you do, I didn't see a line-item for "biannual iPhone upgrade." [1] And re: medical care, I'm sure you know someone making $12/hr can't afford to set foot in a hospital in America. For a single-income household of 2 parents and a child, the threshold for Medicaid eligibility is $15/hr.

As a taxpayer, I retort, stop saddling me with the bill for the employees time you're consuming but refusing to pay for. If their services are that important to you, I'm sure you can pay what it costs without forcing me to split it with you. As a fine upstanding participant in this nation's economy, I'm confident you'll find a way. Maybe forego that biannual iPhone upgrade ;)

[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...

If society wants to mandate a $16.09/hr wage, then it will have to accept that jobs that are not worth $16.09/hr will disappear, and we'll have more people with no income at all to deal with.

I am quite sure someone else will be willing to step up and get that work done.

Can't afford often means unwilling to pay, not unable to pay.

Where there is demand for that work, there is also strong incentive to make money getting that work done.

Someone will. And they will do it differently, take a lower margin, bundle it with other work to bring the value up, increase their pricing, etc...

Yup. Robots. Can’t wait.

The hard truth is the investment is huge! And general automation, sufficient to replace basic labors on a meaningful scale is still in development.

May happen some day. It will be a long while though. Plenty long enough for this discussion to remain relevant.

Secondly, say we arrive at that point.

What changes?

People have costs to exist and be humans.

I put this in another comment: if we truly do not pay those costs, people die and or do not show up for work.

Lots of dead people is not helpful or desirable.

So what do we expect them to do?

There's plenty of stuff at the margins. Labor is getting expensive, so McDonald's has machines to fill drink orders now. Some places have robots mopping the floors, etc. Self-checkout is more and more available.

We're not going to see McDonald's or wherever fully automated anytime soon, but the number of people needed to run the restaurant will decrease.

McDees freeing up labor makes available elsewhere.

We are not currently funding our labor needs and are seeing decaying infrastructure, just as one example out of many.

One other question we should be asking is why labor is getting more expensive when the promise of tech advancement and automation was to make it cheaper to live.

Cost and risk exposure continues to rise.

Current automation does not appear to be helping.

This is where you run into flawed premises. A very hefty chunk of automation, in fact, does not make it either cheaper or easier to live. Particularly now that many firms are reaching the limits of actual innovation, and are turning to transaction facilitation and fee extraction as their primary profit taking mechanism.

When the innovators are innovating on being middle-men where previously no middle-men could exist, you've got issues.

Example:

Electronic bill payment service. In order to avoid the hassle of a stamp, envelope, and check, pay $2 on top of your bill to do it from a convenience store.

Not only are you paying more over and above your bill, you get a false gain of value. You just go to the store right? But what if the service goes under? What if servers go down? So on, and so forth.

Arguably, a great deal of automation that exists today strikes me as a regression from 40 years ago. Fewer people actually have a clue now about how value flows through the system, yet resources centralize far more easily than ever before.

Indeed, and I would put health care increases into the pile of things wiping out gains too.

Crap like this is giving us the motivation for finding solutions and getting closer.

Just like the danger of starvation is giving people the motivation to get off their asses and get to work and improve themselves.

We're pretty simple energy conservation machines otherwise. Give me a small stipend for weed, games and porn and I’d still be living in my parents basement.

That's not crap. It is reality.

Both the cost and capability of automation tech needs very significant improvement before we can talk realistically about it actually replacing basic labors. I have experience with these things. We have come far. There is far to go. I am not being negative here, just brutally realistic.

About as brutal and real as the problems related to low wage employment.

And as I said above, whether we have that available as a meaningful component in the discussion changes nothing.

One other argument is all our innovation and increased productivity was supposed to be associated with it being far cheaper to live. Increased automation augments that promise.

Fact is Americans face ever higher cost and risk exposure relative to their income despite much progress on those fronts.

We are not seeing it get cheaper to live so far.

Will we?

Fair question.

We will need to see that happen, or automation changes nothing about the basic discussion we are having here, and that is people have costs to exist and show up for work.

And at some point, we can also say, if there is work to show up for, but we do not have to say that today, and for a reasonable future given where we are and the current pace of advancement.

There is a lot of work to do, that we need to do, and we might as well employ people respectably and invest in them to get those works done, in addition to the massive value basic labors already add to our lives.

I don't know about you, but my time is worth a lot! There is a great chance we both can do work that isn't basic too.

Those people doing basic labor enable us to do that which we do.

How much is that worth?

I would suggest it is worth enough for them to make it and show up for work, same as us. (I am not suggesting they get a wage same as ours, just one that allows for a reasonable, modest, dignified life, and that they get it because what they do is necessary.)

Up thread I posed a question, "which is it?"

Corporations fully funding their labor, or government insuring that and corporations pay what they feel they can or should pay?

Someone has to pay, or they die and don't show up for work.

I don't care which. I do care that we continue to refuse to discuss which way it should be and instead treat all this like some problem the people doing basic labors for us should solve on their own, despite their contributions having good value and being necessary.

Just saying.

The US is wealthy enough to provide everyone in it a basic standard of life (shelter, food, healthcare, entertainment, transport) as a right.

Is it though? I know USA borrows heavily and spends a lot of its money on luxury items like a fearsome army and the most expensive health care (per capita) in the world.

Also the way USA is making that money is by heavily taxing its value creating people who are highly motivated to do their best work by a lack of safety net and other niceties. Now I wonder if you provide them all shelter, food, healthcare, entertainment and transport, who would be motivated to work anymore?!

The idea that we can't afford to feed and shelter our people is patently absurd.

Of course we can afford to feed and shelter our people, we do it already. But we have to work for it. And we do. Which just makes me wonder what happens if we don’t...

Homelessness is on the rise. Every year, pandemic or not, more people fall into real economic trouble and that has been going on for decades now.

A majority are impacted today, and that was true before the pandemic.

I am not saying a majority are without food and shelter, though those numbers are a lot higher than they should and could be. I am saying the struggling majority face costs and risks that generally exceed their income.

Living paycheck to paycheck, one accident, illness, emergency event away from real, material loss.

This is all going on while a few make a lot of money, even during a pandemic, and?

It is entirely unnecessary.

The first thing people say is something along the lines of being unwilling and or unable to pay to remedy things because [judgement of some sort.]

Lazy, their fault, whatever it is.

I have A / B tested this for years too.

Another hard fact is a great many people are willing to pay more in their own lives to avoid paying for what they see as personal failings of some sort or other.

That judgement again.

Again, pre pandemic, there were not enough jobs that pay people enough to exist and show up for work.

That is still true and it is all worse now because of the pandemic.

Is there any wonder at the trends, given the harsh realities?

Not really, but there is all that judgement too.

They deserve it for [reasons]

And none of that speaks to the fact that it is simply not necessary.

Up thread I posed a question:

Working people should make enough from their labor to exist reasonably and show up for work and huge numbers of them don't.

Either we require companies to fully fund their labor, or we have government do that, or somehow we need people to be able to live much lower cost, lower risk lives.

Which is it?

Fact is we need a lot of basic labors done and will need that for the foreseeable future.

That means some of us will be doing those labors, those labors will be necessary, will benefit all of us in that our own time is more available to do what we do too.

If a big employer does not pay the labor enough, and government fills the gap, how come we judge those people so poorly? How come we make it as painful as we can to get that help?

How come we fail to see the massive demand for basic labor being met and the resulting high value it adds to our lives ignored?

Take your shit. My shit, for example.

I really do value all the labor involved in making my shit disappear. I assume you do too.

Doesn't everyone?

What if we had to do that ourselves? It stinks, where do we put it? How do we transport it? To whom? And for how much?

Now, think about all of us having to manage that directly, how inefficient it is, how much time we lose having to deal with it?

That would be crazy, right? Huge opportunity. Someone would start up, and handle our shit and we would pay them and they would profit by consolidating efforts...

My point here is people will work. It makes a lot of sense.

What does not make any sense is seeing basic labors in such a negative way, like a failure, or lousy people getting work they deserve and all the other garbage seen and heard day in and day out.

Here is another way to see it all.

When my wife was sick, and we had to give up our home for lack of health care coverage (ugly story, not our fault), suddenly I was a home maker in addition to the breadwinner.

Life breaks down into thirds. One to work one to be humans, do what we want to do, and one to sleep.

Asking people who do not get enough from their labor to exist reasonably and show up for work to work more only goes so far.

When life is nothing but sleep and work, other alternatives start to look more attractive. Crime? Mooching off others? Living in a camp? Drugs to escape the brutality and pain of it all?

Maybe drugs to keep sleep at bay started and became chronic?

This is going on all over the place too.

And then one more brutal part:

All those negatives. Basically valuing basic, necessary labor, that generally adds a lot of value to our lives, as low as possible doesn't really help motivate people, does it?

Is there any wonder you wonder as you do and suggest the harsh conditions are necessary as you did?

None at all! You are not alone.

And no judgement from me either. None implied, intended.

I am just trying to suggest we are doing ourselves no real good this way.

There are real problems brewing and we, as a nation, are not having anywhere clise to a healthy conversation about how to get past them, improve and in general run the place better than we are currently running it into the ground.

What it comes down to is our social order is a choice, and we are not choosing wisely or creating the efficiencies necessary in our society to move forward. Maybe this is a facet of human nature, but that's not the end of the conversation. We need to understand how to overcome these ideologies that are obstacles to a more equitable and innovative "Star Trek Future".

After all, "nature" has never stopped us before.

Cheers!