Someone working basic job in a nursing home isn't necessarily poor - in the sense they can afford some standard of living on their income. If you add the option for them to receive 1/2 or even 1/3 of income but have to do nothing - now doing the job they would do previously to avoid poverty would probably take more money to do. And the people who get screwed are the ones who were barely able to afford their services before.

Every job I needed to do in my early life sucked and I would do none of them if someone gave me 1/3 of the income and stay at home with my parents and play video games and code for leasure. I would probably never even take that level of job (factory line work, industrial work, farm work, entry level sales shit). Multiply that by a huge fraction of the population and you seriously destabilise the economy.

Some jobs can be outsourced (like manufacturing) so it's not that big of a deal - but some jobs like for eg. elderly care, etc. are labor intensive and not easily outsourced. And everyone needs them.

There are also bottom rung jobs that beginners with no job skills can enter. Think about people with no language skills, don't they deserve a chance to be productive?

Even some of the lowest paid workers take pride in their work. Some of the savoir-esque rhetoric here borders on condescension.

Where did you get that from? I really think the opposite is true.

Have you ever worked in a factory, on a farm, etc. on bottom level positions ? Most people would take the money and do nothing without blinking. Hell even a bunch of my college friends would skip years of their life playing games and acquiring 0 life experience if someone gave them this option the only thing that forced them to go out in the world was existential need (as demonstrated by two guys I know who are well off and their parents allowed them to do nothing - one guy has 0 days working experience at 30, he was a top tier COD gamer)

Hint: The difference is within "shity" Hint: Jobs don't have to be shity

I understand money is used for supporting yourself, but do you honestly work for free after-hours? Everyone has better things to do than work. Travel the world, make businesses, and spend time with family. You'd rather work?

I'm somewhat skeptical of the UBI train, but this particular objection has always rubbed me the wrong way. Those jobs should cost more.

If the only thing keeping people in a job is the threat of poverty, and they're not being paid enough otherwise to incentivize them to do the work, then that's not a free market. It's not really significantly different from holding a gun to their head or coercing them into doing the work.

What's going to happen if the people stuck in dead-end jobs retrain to work at better jobs? What's going to happen if the economy improves and suddenly they have more opportunities? The problem with underpaying essential jobs is that it forces people to think of those market outcomes as undesirable. I don't like the framing that says that if elderly-care workers retrain and have a choice whether or not to work in nursing homes, that's a bad thing. That seems very, very counter to how we should think about a healthy jobs market.

I don't want a framing that tells me that the economy becoming too good or people having too many job opportunities is a problem because those people need to be financially pressured into working underpaid jobs. To me, that's a very anti-free-market way of thinking about the economy. Jobs that are difficult or undesirable should have more compensation because they have less demand. That is the entire basis of the jobs market and of supply/demand, we shouldn't be trying to undermine those principles.

How were you able to determine this from across the Internet?

Who told you my source is the internet? :) we all live irl and discuss with people. I never heard a low-paid worker throw this argument. It always comes from people who have better jobs and more stable income

I grew up in dirt poor family of 6 in a post civil war country and my mother is a nurse - I'm very familiar with the realities of these jobs. I just know for a fact that if a nurse would start making 2x her salary a lot of people would suddenly not have access to assisted care. It's a shitty situation - but supply of cheap labor solves the problems of poor people - if you can't see that you're out of touch.

Rich and well off people will always have access - they already pay more anyway for quality.

While the actual thread appears to be about incentives.

There are many who have worked entry level jobs who would object to UBI or minimum wage price fixing on purely economic terms.

There are also those who are unable to afford the current cost of living or gain employment due to interventions in the market. It wouldn't be difficult to unfairly characterize interventionists as insensitive to the plight of the poor.

First, I didn't make such a generalization and second, even if I did, you would have inverted the logic.

I said argument X comes only from people of category R, who are not affected by a problem.

This doesn't mean all people in R agree with argument X. It means That I've never heard argument X from people outside R

For example lets look at janitorial labor, that is a hard job to automate and it is required in every business. So many would think that an increase to say $15/hr would just mean all the companies would just pay the same number of workers $15/hr right? No, what you would find it maybe instead of daily trash pickup it goes to 2 times a week, or employee's are asked to take their office trash themselves to a common trash bin. Common area's are cleaned less frequently, other employee's are asked to pick up some slack, and the janitorial staff will go from 10 workers to 6 , with a responsibility of 4 floors vs 2, or other such adjustments to the "acceptable" level of janitorial services.

The business has a budget of X for janitorial, that will not change very much simply because UBI or Min Wage came into play, they will just have to accept less janitorial services for the same money (aka inflation)

What could a third possibility be for these jobs being paid so low, i wonder? He said, facetiously knowing the answer

However, there is no way I could have quit working and keep the house in a relatively expensive area that I bought to be close to job opportunities.

UBI changes the calculus dramatically. Suddenly you can just do things for yourself .

For the 50% of american paying paying taxes, this means 1,000 less a month.

It sounds nice to give people the option but your argument is exactly why substantial UBI is a dangerous concept.

Some people prefer to live at home rather than go to a nursing home. What's worthless about giving those people better care that more closely aligns with their preferences?

> is a net loss for the economy

This is such a weird way of thinking about activity that happens outside the market. Should I feel guilty about cooking my own meals because I haven't payed a restaurant worker to do it?

Sometimes people do things outside of the market, and that's OK, they don't have to feel guilty about that. The market exists to help us live our lives, not the other way around. Whether GP watches their parents on their own or hires someone else to do it, the parents are still getting watched, and somebody is still doing that as part of their "job". That's the important part.

You're concerned about prices going up, but what GP is describing would be vastly cheaper than paying for assisted living on the market today. It's making in-home assisted living more available than it currently is on the market. Why would that be a bad thing?

If UBI isn't high enough to ensure that welfare as we currently know it isn't needed anymore, then why have UBI at all? It just adds complexity to the system for no apparent gain. On the other hand if UBI is high enough to go by without working there's a lot of things that just won't get done anymore.

The continuation of poverty in most of the developed world is a choice, and one that people keep voting for. As long as people keep voting to maintain poverty, it's a relatively pointless academic discussion.

But I think it's important for people go to beyond "That's not the problem. This is the problem" and on to "But here's something we might think about that could work toward a solution."

All I ever see on HN is the same talking points I've heard regurgitated in the dozen or so union halls I've been in from coast to coast over the last 30 years. Everyone gets a lot of practice shouting the right keywords, but nobody ever says anything new, or even tip-toes near a solution.

It's not that hard to build a system where everyone benefits. However, it's even easier to build a system where special interests benefit the most because they are the ones who are in charge after all.

3) Politicians who view the poor as a voting bloc, who endlessly promise solutions that they never really deliver.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25800127

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622642

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604801

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22221660

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21880344

... and you've only kept doing it. You've done it repeatedly in recent days, even in the last few minutes. This really needs to stop.

I don't want to ban you, because you also post good comments and that's great. But when an account keeps breaking the site guidelines and repeatedly flouts our requests to stop doing that, obviously that's where that ends up.

After living and working in the US, and Canada, and Australia, I genuinely don't understand why the US can't learn from other countries to improve itself. Honestly, I'm not trying to post flamebait, I simply don't understand, and I've never heard a good explanation.

My friends here in Canadian healthcare regularly compare and contrast the system to Australia/UK/Scandanavian systems and point out the pros and cons and how the Canadian system is adopting ideas/techniques from other places that have seen good outcomes.

Other countries do this regularly. Honestly - why doesn't the US?

EDIT: And here I am criticizing Canada (the country I live in, and hope to become a citizen of) just a minute ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972362

I believe criticism and pointing out problems/weak points is the first step to improving a situation - after all, there can be no improvement until a problem is acknowledged.

The very fact this article and thread exist suggests there is some kind of problem / or something can be improved upon with regards to paid employment.

The issue is that you have a long pattern of nationalistic swipes in your posts to HN (to the point where I brace myself when I see your username, because I expect to run into yet another). It's not ok, it's against the guidelines, we ban accounts that do it, and we need you to stop. You've done this many times about topics other than healthcare, so this isn't just about healthcare (though, separately, repeating the same points over and over about a classic flamewar topic is also against both the site guidelines and the intended spirit of HN).

I don't mean to pick on you personally and I hope that's clear. The same rule holds for every user, regardless of which country anyone has a problem with.

There's a pretty broad assertion buried in your confusion.

Like for healthcare, the issue isn't that we can't look at other systems and see that there are advantages, it's that there is widespread resistance to moving away from the existing system. There isn't any single reason for it (lots of people like that they are making lots of money, other people have ideological concerns, etc, etc). Trying to reduce that down to "US can't learn" isn't really very interesting, as that isn't the problem.

Is there really a huge difference or are you just subject to a lot of confirmation bias. Canada and Australia are far from solving poverty.