Jobs that pay well, and don't require the poor to fuck their work/life balance or drive them to neglect/feel their kids as a burden.

Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states. If they can't afford, they can go bust, like with any other cost of doing business.

Cheap rents and affordable housing.

Protective nets for periods of illness/unemployment/etc.

School districts equally equipped, with good teachers.

Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college education if their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam.

Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.

High pay is great, but to a point, I place a higher value on the dignity that I enjoy in my employment.

> Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states.

I can't say I have a better idea here, but the whole concept of a minimum wage seems like a problem. It strongly implies that there are a large class of jobs where the employer has all of the power, and does not have to compete to attract employees. Also strongly implied is that minimum wage workers do not have an alternative means of supporting themselves.

Practically speaking, raising minimum wage regularly should help keep workers out of poverty. Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.

In practice, that's the case. I think that the idea that it isn't so, and people go to this or that employer out of "free choice", stems from a religious-like belief in "free market", than from real-life empirical evaluation of how desperate and poor people pick jobs - and what options are open to then.

>Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.

True. But at least they will make some more money will doing so - and might even afford to save a buck or too, and eventually look elsewhere.

Yeah, I hope so. Maybe someone will come up with a better idea later.

That is even true in cases where there is even balanced employment-employer availability due to other factors. My country should be more civilized by my dad got 6 years of pension payment reduced because the employer "failed to pay" but on every balance sheet his pay was added because "automatic" and nobody warned him, just the employer. Afterwards the lawyers told him to take the "I'll pay one year" deal of the employer because of the likelyhood of getting nothing due to limited liability companies protection. And this in Europe, not even the US. The balance is so far off it's not even remotely fair game.

The last 5-6 years has made me thing so much of _why_ this is the case is rooted in:

1. Race and how people are perceived--the rise of race issues in the referenced period is so confusing to me, as I thought we were getting past them, but it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US population is still have 19th century views on race.

2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled workers as machines to use up and throw away.

As for the "inflation-adjusted minimum wage" ... the argument used to be "small businesses will suffer" but strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW. It's so insane to me that we don't do this. Maybe that would give politicians an incentive to keep inflation low? (Because they want to keep the minimum wage as low as possible?)

I think it's clear that this is how it's portrayed. I'm not sure the portrayal is all that accurate, or even relevant in most of the cases being discussed.

No matter what, that money is paid, or the labor does not exist and or show up for work.

Your argument is one of merit, skill and market value.

This is exactly the wrong way to look at things. If we start from the cost of labor, and it does have a cost as I put above, whether to fund the labor boils down to the value said labor has for others, and that value can be traded on accordingly.

Fact is we need basic labors. Anyone can do them. There should be no shame in this work, and it should be valued as the massive time and effort savings to others that it really is. And automation holds few answers right now, and I would argue for a considerable time yet. People will be doing those labors.

Question really is how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!

That difference in value can very easily fund labors then. It's a perfectly acceptable basis, and it means we value labor differently and it means we recognize that guy digging the ditch, or making our shit disappear, or any number of basic things has the same waking hours any of us do, same basic needs any of us do, and may have a family as any of us do.

This idea of people being inherently worthless is very highly toxic and is doing a great harm to all of us. It's completely unacceptable given the quite obvious value even basic labors actually do have for us overall.

Humans aren't like ec2 servers that can be spun down when they're needed. The cost for that person is paid whether or not he's employed. I agree there's an additional cost to show up to work, but that's nowhere near the minimum wage in most places.

And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.

Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?

If they really cannot afford their labor, they are not a viable business.

Or, we all agree to not care, so we end all the fucking with people on assistance?

Which is it?

To be really clear, I'm OK either way here. What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance despite arguably too much labor otherwise.

I don't get it. Subsidizing someone's living is okay, but subsidizing someone's living, and then that person deciding to earn a little more money is not okay because profit is involved?

>And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.

Yes? If you don't want them to starve, then obviously somebody as to pay the cost to keep those people afloat.

>Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?

Would society be better off if those "Employed people, getting a subsidy" were unemployed instead? They'll still get the subsidy. If anything, they'll get more subsidy because welfare tends to be means tested. If anything the "for profit enterprise" has a negative effect on the amount of subsidy that needs to be paid.

> What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance

Underpaid? Maybe they're being paid fairly given the market conditions, and that prevailing wage isn't enough to sustain someone's first world existence so some sort of subsidy has to make up the rest.

> despite arguably too much labor otherwise.

can you reword this? I'm not understanding what you mean by this.

That is gaming the system, mooching off the public dime for profit.

Maybe that helps.

I am not going to respond on this topic again. It has been fun, but I do need to move on.

Employees are working yet still they need government assistance to offset the low wages. Walmart knows this and one might argue they incorporate in their business planning. Why pay employees to work full time, when you can pay them part time, reduce your labor costs and have the state pick up the rest of the expenses (i.e. medicare, Foodstamps)

Walmart executive's know this is a win/win for them, they get the labor they need and pay little for it. This is not something that just happened overnight. It's corporate greed on a massive scale that hurts everyone but no one cares because Wallstreet see's the profits rolling in.

Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all, and nothing is done about it. The tax breaks they receive are enabling this behavior.

End rant.

but the thing is, that person is going to be around regardless of he's working at walmart or not. unless you're okay with the guy starving to death because he's unemployed, you'll still need to pay foodstamps or whatever to keep him alive. I'm not sure why that person deciding to voluntarily work at walmart, suddenly makes the entirety of his living expenses walmart's problem.

Put another way, suppose someone is unemployed and living off government assistance. I learn about his predicament, and offer to pay him $10 (or whatever) to mow my lawn. What you basically want is for this transaction to be stopped, on the grounds that $10 isn't enough to keep him alive, and therefore I'm exploiting him. You'd rather the person stay unemployed, and have me keep that $10, even though that's worse off for everyone involved.

>Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all

I fail to see how anyone is being deceived here. I can see why you might think this is bad, because walmart has a duty to their employees or whatever, but not really deception.

What I did do is make an economic one, and suggest how we value things change. A whole bunch of Economics is rooted in a few basies that we all just take as givens. We don't have to.

I also didn't make an equal economic value argument, for that matter.

>"how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!"

What is the "expensive" assumption based on? Is it the opportunity cost? E.g., is the assumption that if I make $50/hr and I perform basic labor, I'm forgoing work that would otherwise be making money at that rate? Or is it that I don't have the skills for that basic labor and I would either have to get those skills or suffer the cost of doing the work unskillfully?

If it's the former, I think there's enough friction in markets to erode that argument. E.g., I can't just decide to get another $50 through my skilled labor once I hire someone to shovel snow in my driveway for an hour. If the latter case were true, it would be skilled labor by definition and generally command higher wages. Or is there another basis for the expense of performing basic labor that I'm not considering from your point?

Yes, and the basic assumption of free markets that competition drives prices to the minimum sellers are willing to accept (equal to opportunity cost of the units actually traded), and that this value per unit increases, so that the next unit must have an opportunity cost to the seller higher than the average of the prior units.

Our lives break down into thirds. One to work, one to sleep, one to do what we will and can as people.

If I must do those basic labors, they either consume my sleep or free time, and if not, carry an opportunity cost of $50 / hour.

My time is very valuable, both in a labor to income sense, and personally, in that I have plans for my time that must be balanced against basic labors being done.

Paying what it costs for laborers to exist and show up for work is a no brainer. Worth it to me, again based on my own costs.

There is "expensive"

We can always find cases where basic labors do not carry those costs, or are difficult to handle as a market. We do those ourselves.

However, making our own food, making our own shit and garbage dissappear, moving things, clean ups and all manner of basic labors combine to allow many of us the time freedom to earn more, do more.

The value in that is high enough to require enterprises fund their labor fully. This may mean their overall profit is less. It should be, they didn't earn it. They didn't fund the labor. We did!

Failure to do that comes with other costs, both real in the sense of the massive subsidies that end up unearned profit (our money goes into their bank account, funding labor they profit from on top of margin on goods and services rendered), and opportunity in that we see lower demand and that impacts many others who could earn more and or fund their labor as well.

Again, laborers have a cost to exist and show up for work, and when their labor does not pay enough for those things, someone else's labor does, or the labor does not exist and will not show up for work.

So which is it? Who pays and why?

How we value things can change those answers dramatically, which is the economic argument I made.

One last thing, and that is ignoring the cost of people for them to exist and show up for work, doesn't make those costs go away, it just hides them, and we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive. That's another way to look at this.

When a business does not make enough to fund its operation it closes, or dies in other words. The same is true for people. So not fully funding labor is expensive to literally everyone else except for the people not fully funding the labor they require.

This is the part I disagree with. The only time that is rated at $50/hr is the time you are producing something of economic value. Sleep and leisure do not warrant a $50/hr price tag in-and-of-themselves. In part, because of what I already mentioned: market friction prevents me from giving a 1-to-1 trade for sleep/leisure time to production. Just because I decide to wake up an hour early doesn't automatically mean an extra $50 worth of work is ready and waiting for me.

>we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive.

I completely agree with this and think it's the governments job to ensure markets price these externalities appropriately.

You are ignoring tons of labors saving you time and or providing a rich field in which to profit.

You are ignoring time value. I did not ever say 1:1 at whatever rate.

What I did, and continue to say is your work time would consume far more of your life sans basic labors you benefit from every day.

Cost it how you want, but when suddenly faced with half your personal time gone, having to choose less, or less sleep, or less income delivering work, and in all cases a lot more physical activity in your life will absolutely cost you far more than you are allowing for here.

Please elaborate.

I mean, the market is exactly how we price that time value. Whether I pay for basic labor or decide to do it myself is exactly based on the price I place on my free time minus how much I value learning something new minus the risk of a bad contractor. If you're not advocating the basic market pricing principles we already operate under, I'm not sure what you're advocating. Are you saying Tom Brady should pay his landscaper $175,000/hour simply because that's what the market has priced Tom Brady's personal economic differential value at?

I'd be curious how you'd expect that to happen in practice. Even though you don't come outright and say it, it's beginning to come across as a Marxist ideal of "to each according to his ability", which I'm sure you already understand all the problems that poses. In the end, all it seems like you're saying is to factor in the externalities to get at a fair market price. If that's the case, I already said we agree. But the same point can be said with a lot more brevity.

Making extreme claims does not bolster your points here.

Tom Brady can definitely pay their landscaper enough to exist and show up for work same as McDees can pay their people enough to exist and show up for work.

I made no Marxist argument.

I did argue we need to recognize the inherent cost of people and value labor in ways that account for those costs.

Or!

Say we don't. Then we accept a large number of us require assistance to make it, right?

Which is it?

And if we go the assistance route, then we also need to quit fucking with people simply doing as we compel them to do. Getting assistance while also laboring a reasonable time at a wage below what it costs to exist and show up for work should be an ordinary, accepted thing. No shame, no hassles, just ordinary and it's not.

What we currently do is push people off assistance hard, and frequently, while also underpaying them, expecting magic to happen and they suddenly are just doing OK when we know too many of them won't be.

Unacceptable.

We need either:

A floor for labor price

, or

Subsidies (assistance)

, or

We accept that some people are just not going to exist and or show up for work because they are not viable economically.

Which is it?

People laboring and getting enough to exist and show up for work can make skills and other arguments to further improve on their value, sell their labor, whatever.

This is about the nearly half of us who labor and do not receive enough to fund their labor, exist and show up for work basically.

I don't care how we solve this, and proposed one idea where we value things differently, change the basies the economy depends on. We could do that, it may be a great idea, and it would eliminate a big problem with the overly simple supply / demand theory of labor value in play today.

Say we do agree to a subsidy. Great! Then we also need to agree people need that and quit fucking with them about getting it too. No shame, etc... just an ordinary condition where we don't value their labor high enough, yet we need them economically viable, able to exist, show up for work, etc...

Re: Free time

Right now, one third of my life, approximately, coupled with another third for sleep, together provide for "my" remaining third which is the third where I get to do what I want.

I may invest some of that third. Did for many years, which made my labor third a hell of a lot more valuable. Not everyone can do this. We don't even have the jobs available if everyone were to do this!

I may fuck that third right off too. Rest, play, fuck, whatever right? No worries, as adults, it's our third! Yay!

Now, when I must eat into that third to exist and show up for work?

Nope. That's extremely high value time.

Here's one cost, investment. If one's labor does not fund existing and showing up for work, the solution is often more labor, right? Well, now that eats into either sleep, or our personal third of time. Often both.

That costs a person investment time! That investment time is extremely high value time. I would be worth one hell of a lot less had I repeated how I lived my life in the labor markets today. Seriously. Not sure I would make it in the same way. Some of my kids really struggle in ways I did not.

Same root cause: Labor failing to deliver enough income to exist and show up for work.

I tossed some dollar figure out there when I probably should not have. This is another way to get at that value.

And finally, food for thought:

What defines wealth?

The basic definition involves time. Wealthy people can self purpose far more of their time. This speaks right to what I'm getting at, and it's subtle!

A person making a ton of money, yet who is enslaved to it, unable to purpose their time, is as poor as someone laboring a ton, lacking income needed to even purpose their time. Both cannot make use of their time beyond labor, and or sleep.

A trust fund baby, or someone who just sold a company, having fuck you money is quite wealthy in the time sense. So is the person living lean, requiring very little to live and do what they will.

Hope this helps. I'm not going to respond on this further, and thanks to those of you being good discussion partners. I enjoyed this.

>Which is it?

Right now, in the U.S., it's a mixture of the first two. We have a minimum wage covering #1 and a host of social safety nets that effectively subsidize living standards covering #2. There's certainly room to argue the best levels for each. Personally, I think there's room for improvement so taxpayers aren't essentially subsidizing the profits of companies who pay a wage low enough that require workers to rely on a safety net while the companies simultaneously post ever increasing profit margins.

Yes. These companies are keeping too much for themselves. There isn't any nicer way to say it. At the same time, the labor creating all that wealth isn't able to keep enough of it to continue to exist and show up for work without someone, somewhere paying for those things to happen.

Re: The mix

#2 is a problem in that we don't just grant the subsidy. It comes with a lot of hassles, checks to limit qualifications, more checks to reduce it should the laborer make a little extra here and there, and of course, a LOT of blame and shame.

Somehow, we've arrived at a place where important, basic labor is seen as a negative, despite the fact that someone is definitely going to be doing it, and we need those people doing that work! This does not sit well with me at all.

Those people have families (well, large numbers of them do), needs, and are in general people same as any of us are, and should be doing that work with the basic dignity and respect any of us would expect when doing our work.

And there is the moral argument you suggested I was making, made here now.

I am making it now because it does tend to complicate the overall discussion. This negativity biases the value perception of both the work and the people doing it away from the objective value it clearly has when one views our society, sans that labor being done for hire. What does getting it done even look like?

We are still somewhere apart on the economic argument.

I said this basic labor could be valued differently, and suggested we value it in terms of what that work being done is worth to others who hold other stations in life, often at higher, can be very considerably higher income. Doing it that way does suggest Tom Brady could pay his basic labor at a very high rate, creating a basic problem you identified easily. Fair enough.

But that really was not my intent. After some thought, maybe this gets at my intent better:

Who pays for the laborer to exist and show up for work?

And by exist, I mean the laborer has a reasonable, though spartan place to live, can see the doctor, has food, and can afford to get to work somehow, and the amount of labor leaves them free to follow other pursuits as any of us may be inclined to do with our leisure time. Put simply, a modest, reasonable, respectable life. And we avoid the live to work, work to live case for the unreasonable life it is.

Having set that up, just because Brady could pay that amount does not mean he should. And that's not really inclusive. We all benefit from the basic labors being done all the time.

The value comes from the fact that when we do have people performing these labors, others do not have to do them, and given labor is valued in a way that provides for life to be broken down into thirds as I suggested earlier in the discussion, this dynamic allows for our leisure third to be ours, generally speaking.

One third is for sleep. One third is for whatever labor we do for income and together that provides the machinery of society to exist and operate as it does today. The remaining third is our time. Family, hobbies, research, whatever we want to do, are inclined to do, and can afford to do.

At another point in the discussion, I also took a look at wealth:

Anthropologists define wealth in terms of time. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them, with slavery being an extreme example of profound poverty. Ordinary people of modest means generally live by the thirds I talked about here, and wealthy people can purpose the majority of their time as they please.

Someone can have a lot of money and it may occupy the majority of their time. The demands related to having or earning that large amount of money can be stiff, largely directing their time. Put simply, they do not purpose much of their time and are living in poverty, despite having considerable spending power.

The same thing is true for someone who makes so little that they basically work to live, and live to work. They purpose very little of their time as well.

An example of a wealthy person might be one who requires little, labors a little to meet those needs, and can purpose a majority of their time. Another example might be someone who has inherited income, or is in possession of a resource of some kind such that it takes very little of their time to labor, and they too can purpose a majority of their time how they please.

And just for shits and giggles, "labor" is generally time spent that is purposed by someone else other than the person doing labor.

People who love to work do present confusion, and that's related to the basic idea of loving what one does for work so that more of life is pleasurable, and or self purposable in that the labor is the purpose... I am just going to ignore this and keep to the basic definition of labor and leisure.

Leisure time is time one can purpose any way they want to. Hobbies, laying out in nature, art, whatever.

When we have many basic labors performed for us, our wealth as a people is very considerably improved! This is why there is wealth in numbers, generally speaking. As there are more of us, so can the basic labors needed to live a life and have a society be well distributed, creating more leisure time. Such an arrangement does provide for advancement in technology, the arts and more, due to some people choosing to invest their time in these ways.

And there is the value I suggested expressed in a way largely ignoring money.

To that end, what is required is basic labors yield enough economically to allow those performing basic labors to live a reasonable, modest life of thirds as I've defined above.

So, who pays?

We could continue subsidies. And if we took this route more formally, recognizing the value backing that idea as defined above, we should also then eliminate the blame and shame. Getting that subsidy should be a rather ordinary, common transaction and those doing the labor should feel no shame related to their contributions to society and the value those have.

Personally, I feel that's something like UBI, and I feel it could work, depending. I dislike the idea of the likes of Walmart and McDees banking billions when they could very clearly afford to pay their labor well enough to live that modest and reasonable life of thirds and still put billions in the bank, just fewer billions. And I would suggest, enough billions with obvious expansions and innovations able to increase the billions they find it possible to bank every year.

For anything like these kinds of value changes to really stick and transform market dynamics, we've got to use law. The likes of Dan Price can successfully model what things can look like, and that's great, but likely seen as a threat and expensive (to them) way to move the discussion forward.

Requiring employers fully fund their labor is an option.

Allowing for that mix, subsidy and employer wages.

We could require neither of those be true, and basically turn charity into a sort of tax with real teeth. (this would be undesirable state of affairs, if you ask me)

Or, nobody pays, and we accept that people will just cease to exist and or show up for work where the costs of doing that simply are not paid.

Who pays?

What basis do they use for understanding whether their people are able to make it?

Finally, I don't have complete answers here. Am just really trying to suggest how we value things could be done differently and provide a basis for ending poverty and or ending the negatives associated with it as we face it today.

I also doubt that empirical evidence supports that assertion. How many people are really being priced out of work because they are only worth $6/hr, not $7.25/hr? In my experience people on the low end are either worth at least what you're paying them, or they're basically not worth hiring at all, at any wage point, because they disrupt others in the work environment, cause accidents, are not amenable to working in groups nor amenable to working alone, report to work too unreliably to make effective use of, or whatever issue they have that makes them count among the ranks of the "least skilled."

Sure, your argument holds given some value of MW, $20/hr? $25/hr? But in real world practice I think the number of people harmed by living out of their car or in shelters @ $7.25/hr vastly exceeds the number of people who but for the minimum wage would easily find relaxing side work at $2/hr sweeping gutters.

And in theory the MW could be tailored to mitigate any adverse impact. It could be restricted to employers grossing over $1 million/yr or in excess of 10 employees. It could be augmented with an earned income tax credit, which has been done to considerable success. There could be a separate under-21 MW. Etc. In practice, though, movement seems to be going in the other direction: about half of US states have minimum wages higher than the Federal level, even places like Florida and Missouri which are not liberal strongholds.

Don’t worry, these companies view high-skilled workers the same way.

This probably says more about the breadth of your sources than anything else. If you aren't hearing the case against a minimum wage (and it's a strong one) you aren't reading widely enough.

Long term, if you have MW as a key minimum support measure, you want it to keep pace or better with inflation, but over the short term you want it to be countercyclical with inflation, rising most rapidly when inflation is low, and least when it is high.

And this leaves out discussion of the problems of a minimum wage as a basic support mechanism, which are also significant.

That's not much of an issue in practice: to even get a few those ideas implemented already requires voter vigilance and strong societal push.

If you have those then a reliable CPI is just another thing this vigilance/push should cover.

If you don't have them, you wont get far with those proposals either.

So it's not like we can get the proposals into laws, but the CPI will be the issue making them ineffective. It's all or nothing.

Raising taxes and cutting Social Security without getting caught is the third rail of politics. The amount of pressure to find ways to do this is immense.

This is the level of corruption you are dealing with. We are not even on a path from "here" to a place where the CPI is an actual fair estimation of inflation. Most people don't even know this is a problem. It's too complicated for regular folks to even deal with and all the establishment political figures are in on it, so they obviously won't draw attention to it.

1. Starting a business that generally pays minimum wage and attempting to pay their employees more

2. Buying property and renting it out at below market rates

3. Supporting, training or helping people who are unemployed.

4. Going to work as teachers in underserved school districts.

5. Offering university level education for free

6. Buying USA made only

Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world? I think everyone wants the things you mention but for some reason we are unable to execute on them and a convenient scape goat is that the government should solve it or that “the other party” is getting in the way. Where is the “You must be the change you seek” crowd these days?

Wouldn’t trying to make a small change in your community have more impact than all the comments posted in this thread?

Money, markets - the cost of things regulates behavior, more money = more permissive behavior

Physics - the rules of the world regulate behavior, and the better our understanding, the more lax this regulation is

Norms - mutually agreed upon and generally, widely enforced "rules" that are not laws, but do impose rewards and consequences for behavior.

Laws - like norms, but more formal, and with real teeth beyond being shunned or praised.

Norms and laws act post fact. They do not actually prevent behavior, but can reward for it, or punish for it.

Physics and markets, money do inhibit behaviors. The rules of the world are the rules. Violations = failure. Inability to bear costs = failure.

A few entities trying to set new norms, and play against the generally running market, can do that to some degree, but money and markets are very strong forces compared to norms. And what Dan Price is doing with his $70K minimum wage at Gravity Payments is an excellent example. Price is establishing a norm. Weak sauce in the scheme of what regulates behavior.

Law needs to bolster those ideas and it's law and norms that can change how we value things and with those changes come real market dynamic changes, IMHO.

And this is why "be the change you seek" has limited power and cred. In the niche Price is in, it's possible, and he's doing that and arguably doing it at what others who do not value things like he does, would say he's doing it at a very significant opportunity cost.

And given the current state of affairs, they are RIGHT!!

This does not invalidate an effort like Price is making, nor the ideas, nor the potential for things to operate differently and to a much different overall effect for the population and it's elite members. Not to mention Price himself valuing things in ways that clearly make it all worth it for him to operate how he is. He talks about this all the time too.

But, scope and motivation are sharply limited. It's hard advocacy, and again as the opponents of Price would argue, very, very expensive advocacy.

But "go it at alone, and hope it catches on" is not how this would (or should) work.

It should be made as automatic to do, as paying your taxes, getting police to arrest a thief, or passing a sanity inspection to open a restaurant.

That's how society progresses as a society, when it makes what it wants the future to be either law or an custom/ethical thing that doing otherwise is frowned upon.

Not when things are merely left up to each individual's goodwill to set an example.

Doing it the formal way also e.g. makes it easier for an employeer to pay a good minimum wage AND still compete with other businesses of the same sector: since they all have to pay the same, it's a cost of doing business for everybody, not just for the "good heart" that opted to enforce it on its own (and is driven out of business by others undercutting him and paying worse).

>Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world?

I don't know.

For example, from my understanding of Us history, it took a whole civil war, riots, and federal laws accompanied with police intervention to e.g. force the end of slavery and deseggregation. Some good white souls going out and doing it on their own didn't manage to get far...

Probably plenty doing 1. I do this.

2 through 4 is basically asking to be exploited and undervalued, and very few mentally-well people could keep it up for more than a couple of years.

Plenty of us probably doing 5 in some way (I personally designed low-cost electronics lab gear, I'm sure plenty of others make cheap/free online courses and tutorials of a high standard), but it doesn't matter because employers are only looking for the credentials. I'd even go so far to state that many degrees aren't actually indicators of a particular valuable skillset, but indicators of class.

6 doesn't make sense in the broader scope. If everyone in every country did this, it would hurt the global economy more than it helps it.

No.

Some problems are rightly solved at the government level and anything that serves to distract from that is propaganda.

Waiting for the government to step in when you could do something right now is just hypocritical.

You can lay the blame on individuals all you want, but you're just going to be attacking symptoms, not the the problem.

I'm sick of this notion that having the government "step in" is a bad thing. There is no purpose to government if not to be used to act in public's benefit.

Sitting comfortably behind a computer claiming someone else should fix a problem is easy. Actually doing something (no matter how small) isn’t.

How does this help, exactly? If the businesses who can't afford to pay at the standard you want go bust, you can't just assume there will be others who can. If the unit of labor a person can provide is worth less than its state mandated cost, that unit of labor will go unemployed. People don't buy things for more than their value to them.

But the poor shareholders would be very sad with that, they don't deserve such a misfortune. It's better and easier to just underpay their employees, they don't need to make a living anyway.

I'd be very pissed off if dividends or bond yields from across the industry dropped 50% overnight.

Of the largest shareholders of major corporations are mutual funds, pension funds and such that fund people who are completely dependent on investment income to live. A policy that causes a 50% change in profits would be a massive shock to those people.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/commentary/let-data-speak-truth-behind-...

But is it good for the laborers themselves? Or for society at large?

Do minimum wage laws or lack thereof correlate with broader measures of wellness and prosperity? How do countries with and without minimum wages compare on life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity rates, cancer rates, median disposable income, median wealth or net worth, suicide rates, divorce rates, accident rates, vacation time or leisure time, levels of pollution? How about harder to quantify stuff such as happiness, contentment, and stress levels?

The market exists to serve human needs and wants. "GDP go up" is not the point of all this effort.

Those people cost money to exist and show up for work. How are those costs being paid?

Same way farmers get paid. Why don't we worry about the price of corn going to $0 a bushel and nobody wanting to plant corn? The market will find a price point where supply meets demand.

supply and demand applies the same way.

> And we subsidize them too.

the same supply/demand dynamics apply to non-subsidized goods/services

Which is it?

We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them

, or

We subsidize them?

If we agree to the latter, then we need to make sure all that makes sense and there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.

Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively, and we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.

Again, which is it?

>Which is it?

>We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them

>, or

>We subsidize them?

We're already doing the latter, because if it's really the case that they're not "economically viable", the people would have starved to death long time ago.

>there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.

>[...] we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.

I'm not against society subsidizing the lifestyle of people who are not productive enough to afford it, but judging by your other comments, you seem to be against companies hiring the very same people for extra money.

>Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively

that's not a contradiction. Civilization is "massively" dependent on clean drinking water, yet you can get it from the tap for pennies a gallon.

In your case, the great comments... ah well. Happens. Nicely done.

It's OK that they have an agenda. In fact, everyone does! Bias is everywhere. It's for sure present on the cable newscycle. To avoid it is very difficult, time consuming and expensive! It takes large numbers of us considerable periods of time to produce objective material, if it's possible to produce at all.

A lot of people tend to respond to entities with agendas they do not like, for whatever reason --does not matter why, by marginalizing them, or ignoring them, rebutting them (the best of poor options IMHO), and so on.

In most cases, those responses do more harm than good. What happens there is your own biases get amplified, or resonate in ways that you may also feel pretty good about, despite the harm being done; namely, the loss in your ability to make good use of the otherwise fairly high general information value out there being high on the list of subtle harms.

With me so far? Let's take it just a bit farther. Humor me for a moment please. It's worth it. Promise.

A much better response is to evaluate that agenda, or bias, as well as the overall clarity of the presentation.

Biases work two basic ways, one being the entity under examination is truthful, clear and accurate about their biases, whatever they may be. The other way is simply not accurate, or unclear. Bear in mind FOX took a case to court where they won a case where they forced journalists to basically lie. They could do the lie, keep their job, or take a walk. Simple as that. The big players do this. All of them do it. It's legal for them to do. Ethics? I sure don't find any of it ethical at all, but I'm not in charge, nor running a media giant either.

Clarity boils down to whether someone using the information can accurately and consistently and EASILY differentiate fact from opinion. This is the primary factor in play, and it is the one more people understand more poorly, or haven't considered it at all. The secondary way clarity works, and this is far more widely understood and is generally well considered, is whether the language conveys the ideas in high fidelity. Low clarity information generally is a mashup of fact and opinion that is difficult to sort out, and whether it's sorted or not, the whole thing is written with dubious language, making it difficult to understand on a basic level.

Rather than avoid bias, which is generally futile for reasons I've given above, embrace it! Bias is OK. Seriously!

It's also largely unavoidable, and it's only a core problem when it's unknown and or unclear, or deliberately misrepresented. Otherwise, that bias can help put whatever info you are considering into a greater context and that's a value add straight up. Worth it.

You are not wrong to be wary of the data!

I see your comment in grey, meaning some of us balked on the idea of that and who knows why? Maybe they think highly of Cato, or maybe they feel the whole statement is more judgement than value, whatever... It really doesn't matter much, beyond the reduction in value that happens on HN with that sort of thing going on.

But, I wrote this because you aren't wrong to be wary of that data, and some information on why that is has high value. In fact, you should be wary of most any data coming out of think tanks, fast news cycles, and in general anyone not working from original documents and or not linking to them for whatever reason. Sometimes those originals are unavailable, or paywalled, or obtuse, and other times it's nefarious, or low value, in that they are available, but it's simply not done.

Sorry, this ended up being a bit long. I didn't intend for that. Stuff happens. For what it's worth, I didn't just ramble. And I'm not judging or telling you what to do either. Just putting some perspective and my own hard won insight here for consideration.

There are other factors too, like disclosure and how it can hide important conflicts of interest. An easy example might be getting your facts on net neutrality and or opinion on policy about it from mainstream big company media owned by a handful of people. The conflict is easy and obvious, and we've all had great discussions about that topic here, which may get a few minutes when it's peak interest, and nothing at all otherwise. From their point of view, a neutral net carries with it costs and risks as well as enables competition those media giants have spent decades pushing away from their media empires right along with shutting down, owning, marginalizing indie shops all over the place, and I digress! Sorry about that.

Suffice it to say disclosure is a big deal, it's not being done to the degree it should and the problem is widespread and chronic. Conflicts of interest as well as understanding who might be a competing source are both problems we all deal with on a regular basis and there is very little discussion on it, certainly not discussion on par with the importance and scale of the problem.

I tend to lump all this under clarity, just to keep it all simple.

What you want is to understand their biases, ownership, and how clear that all is. Ever wonder about the multiple talking heads deal done all the time, Sunday shows, prime time "news" and other productions being easy examples. They do this for a ton of reasons, but a big one is reduced clarity so that facts and opinion get mangled together leading people to conclusions they are likely to have not arrived at given a higher degree of clarity. These productions can be clear, and sometimes are. You can sort it out by asking yourself whether you found fact and opinion easy to differentiate.

Having thought about these things, sorting fact from opinion, biases become important as context and all that can be framed up and used more effectively in your own reasoning and potential communication!

You can then find other sources and or entertain discussion being far better informed and able to participate in those adding more value than you would generally add otherwise.

From there?

You come to your own conclusions. No joke.

At first, working through these things is a slog. Takes time, energy, isn't always compelling, and we all know the list of reasons why we might avoid doing those things.

...which comes down to trust. Just trusting is a lot easier, and it's why so many of us do that so often.

Your statement implied a low degree of trust related to Cato. Fair enough. I don't trust them either. But, whether we trust them or not isn't the point as much as WHO YOU / WE DO TRUST!

I suggest not doing that to the degree you probably are. Verify more, compare / contrast more. This too takes a bit of work at first, but if you do that work, soon it becomes just part of your process and you won't notice it, but you will notice your own clarity, ability to participate in discussions, and just understand and benefit from whatever information sources you prefer improves considerably.

To that end, humor me just a bit more please!

Let's talk about those sources you do trust. For whatever reason!

I want to challenge that and get you thinking a bit differently. For your benefit. Overall, mine and others too. Start looking for these two concepts:

"there is always two sides to every story."

Nope! There are the facts and there is opinion as to what we think those facts mean. Could be what others think they mean, what you think, me, anyone really. The most common abuse of this idea is to put a reputable source alongside a full bat shit one and then have a debate... That is more entertainment than it is informative.

High clarity sources make the facts easily differentiated from their own editorial / advocacy. They do this so you can take those facts, consider them yourself, consider what they want you to, and when using other sources, see the facts there, find missing ones and in general get informed to a degree beyond whatever intent may be at hand otherwise. Being informed means understanding the facts as well as the various schools of thought out there as to what those facts may mean.

When I was a kid in primary school, my school actually taught this stuff! Identifying bias, clarity, fact, opinion, and we were asked to collect sources, compare, contrast, and talk about what we learned and why it mattered.

This hasn't been done very well for most of us, and a whole lot of us simply do not even get introduced to the topic. My kids didn't see this kind of education, and my grandkids are not either. I've had to do it, and will be doing it again soon once my grandkids are ready for it.

"Always two sides to every story" is toxic.

There are facts, and there are a lot of opinions and frankly, the only reason we see two sides more than not is the media consolidation has also resulted in message consolidation and the highly polarized discussion centered on our two parties.

The other concept to be watching for is whether the bias is truthfully communicated or not.

FOX runs with "Fair and Balanced", or we see others like, "Lean Forward", "News You Can Trust", and so on. None of that crap actually means a damn thing, and it's focus grouped to the nines all intended to imply positives while not actually communicating bias in a concrete way. A great parallel to understand what I mean here is something like the Arco gas company "No Gas Gets Better Mileage" slogan. Of course! No other gas gets worse either, because we've regulated what gas actually is!

Cato sometimes produced great info. They will do it again. They often produce pieces that are clear and appear to have high information value. And they might, but there is usually some bit left out, or a dubious source, or whatever subtle device made sense to them at the time too.

Any of that seem familiar?

Well, we can have this same discussion about CNN, FOX, or MSNBC and arrive at very similar conclusions, and if we did that we would not be wrong about it! Just like bias is everywhere, these basic ideas are in play everywhere.

It's hard to trust right now.

Our mainstream media environment isn't all that reputable by time tested, global standards related to this kind of thing. And we aren't alone. Australia, Europe have similar struggles, and the one thing they have we don't is a multi-party government that makes it all a bit harder to pull off to the degree seen here. One thing that does stand out is media from other nations can often present the same stories with better clarity and a different take because their point of view, bias, is also different, given their position in the world overall forces that kind of thing. I found this out after travelling some to see the world. I was quite surprised to see our politics and news covered very well, while our news here rarely covers foreign news and politics to the same degree.

My advice?

Don't trust so much.

If you find yourself really invested in a narrative, or story, or even some facts, take a little time, seek original documents where you can, try a few different sources, and even a foreign one or two. Just doing that will broaden how you see media and improve your process and that's a big win.

None of us have this stuff right. We all have biases. We all have our faves in the media scene too. That's OK. One of our best tools is simple discussion among peers. Just put it out there and see what others think.

When we can talk among ourselves without judgement, without hating, and just exchange thoughts, we benefit.

If nothing else, that's why I wrote this. Ended up in a place where all this kind of bubbled up with unusual clarity. In my experience, that's always a good time to put down some words and get the value of it all out there for others to consider and benefit from. That's all this is.

Again, you aren't wrong. The why of it may not be as expected. No big deal there. Maybe this helps drag some of the subtle bits out into the light where you can take a look at it all and benefit. Hope so, and I hope you do.

That is what I did intend.

Have a great week.

A business that cannot fully fund it's labor is not a business. Who wants to pay a subsidy, which is exactly what happens when labor is underfunded, just so someone can mooch for profit? I don't.

The answer to your question is we simply do that labor ourselves.

This takes commerce as a given. Another outcome is that those that cannot cease to exist and are replaced by nothing, leading to more poverty. That has been a common failure mode of that policy.

It dies.

Same is true for people who are required to labor for more than it costs them to labor.

It just so happens we will fund people who cannot exist otherwise, right?

And there is the problem. We have many companies perfectly happy to underpay their labor, mooch off the public, and bank that for profit. The likes of McDees, Walmart and many others can and should be fully funding their labor and they don't.

The balance of power between labor and employers is different in those nations, which works to reduce the need for minimums. The ones I have looked at also have assistance / subsidy policy that is lower friction and generally not associated with the near constant blame and shame seen here. That's a big deal frankly. Having robust norms well aligned with human quality of life basics is necessary for the help to work as intended.

Labor law is a contributor to that balance of power too. "At will" type policies, "right to work for less" policies are examples where the lack of labor protections very significantly bias labor negotiation power toward employers, who tend to get a better deal. Implications here should be obvious.

I tend to use business and labor dying when they are not funded well enough to exist as a strong rhetorical tool. This meta discussion is one negative artifact of that. No easy answers, IMHO.

No, because those positions pay the same as what they're currently getting, but not how much they would pay with a higher minimum wage. The context is that a person's current position is unprofitable under a higher minimum wage, but other positions would not be, thus their wage ends up boosted even if it means getting a new position.

Furthermore, targeted automation has tended to increase employment in other industries, historically.

I have no problem with a higher minimum wage, but that's rather like giving someone who has lost a lot of blood, a blood transfusion. It's good, but it's a stopgap measure that is ignoring a more fundamental problem, and if you're not stitching up the wound you're not doing much good.

If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a job. Higher minimum wage, ok, but it can't be done in isolation or you've replaced "low wages" with "no wages".

As far as I know, the economic literature is pretty clear that this is not the case in the US. Even regional changes, where an employer can reasonably relocate outside the e.g. city boundary without much difficulty, don't show job losses.

Automation and self service (like in European cafeterias) is largely the response when services become too uneconomical to be done manually. Those elevator operators aren’t coming back to the USA.

And people often wave the automation threat around - but why hasn't it happened yet? In concrete studies of minimum wage increases that actually occurred, we do not find job losses.

But this is just the government being conservative, actual significant increases that affect more than one percent of the population will have an affect.

Not widespread yet, but neither were cars nor computers in their early days. The ratio of robots to humans in kitchens is likely to grow in the future. From its current very low value to something more meaningful.

[0] https://singularityhub.com/2020/11/06/flippy-the-fast-food-r...

Just as income inequality is bringing a new wave of app-based delivery servants.

I can tell you absolutely that is my response. I'm not going to eat some automated thing that nobody's checking, or has poorly maintained for the least dollars.

Besides, nothing about that automation actually changes the funding labor problem.

I have always found it tough to sell a robot a good meal too.

There will be basic labors we need doing and a lot of people doing them for the foreseeable future.

And robots don't need a good movie, a night out, a good meal, or any of those things, so whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.

And those people do have costs, unless we simply allow them to cease to exist and not show up for work anymore.

We might need some qualifiers to understand exactly what you mean. Most automation is readily within reach if the job is rote and the economic differential is there. (FWIW, I used to build and program assembly line robuts).

>whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.

I think this is the intent. Call it UBI, Freedom Dividend, or whatever, but the goal is to fund the societal base that has the actual need for whatever automation (or humans) will produce.

As for rote... look, automation is expensive to establish, adapt transport and maintain, and need infrastructure to support it all.

People, at their real cost, are a GREAT deal and that will be true for a very long time yet.

Go work through a few cases. I have experience in automation. It is the little things that cost a lot.

We are more likely to succeed with augmented labor, and already do. Better tools = labor multipliers.

Yep. I am not anti automation. Cars, for example. Great use case, as you say.

Scale there, appetite for capital investment there, ability to weather high maintenance, change costs all there.

There is an opposite end of the scale, and it is that end we are a very long away from.

Also, the likes of FANUC do have dark running facilities that use robots to build robots.

I do have experience too. That stuff is expensive, complex, and very rigid. Not applicable, at this time, to the vast majority of basic labors we depend on every day.

Finally, one can automate workers away, or automation can free them to do more things.

The latter is a lot more sustainable, but a lot less sexy, and not so well aligned with the dominant business justifications used to sell initial automation.

This was my latter point. Automation is often augmented, to use your words. This is more true the higher you get in skills. A Da Vinci robot does not replace a surgeon. But lower level skills are where the difficulty is at. A fork-lift driver may be automated away completely by a parts-picking robot. This is where unions are beneficial in my view. They can ensure at least a relatively soft landing with retraining, replacement, etc.

Amazon did find a niche, the package movement, where everything aligns nicely in a fashion not too unlike the cars. IMHO, the big difference is more dynamic decisions are needed for the packages, where the cars require more complexity, but are very consistent otherwise. Software innovation got Amazon where they wanted to be, and it's a good, genuine innovation that did expand the automation space.

Similar levels of effort are necessary for all those basic labors. This is why I maintain we just won't be there for a considerable time, despite successes like Amazon out there. Scale, and dynamic locations, terrain and decisions are huge barriers to entry. So many cases... and mechanisms / processes that can address them, and or minimize them.

Costs on all that are off the charts, as is maintenance, simple acquisition of the machinery.

More people centric augmentation will happen sooner. Mostly, this will preserve people from wearing out and or increase their throughput more than anything else. It may be we extend capabilities in a more transparent way too. That's going on now, of course, but maybe some of that will scale, get cheap, someone finds another niche...

All good stuff really.

But, "the robots are coming" really does not apply for a solid majority of the basic labors out there we depend on. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't be automating. We will, and it's a good thing regardless of how we sort out the humans economically, which was your point, and one I agree with.

Cheers! Good discussion. Have a great week.

That is a raw subsidy, and it's US paying so big players get a bigger profit.

We should not pay a dime, and they make a smaller one, but they also earned it fair and square too, not mooching on the public dime.

I disagree here. Global poverty is at its lowest point in human history, in large part due to jobs being exported to poor countries.

Let's see (only what I have answers to):

Cheap rents and affordable housing.

Allow more vertical building.

Protective nets for periods of illness/unemployment/etc.

I and my employers pay a fund that covers it.

School districts equally equipped, with good teachers.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive.

Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college education if their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive if you only pay the smartest ones.

Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.

Well, that's income, but I disagree. Just forbid making any business with tyrants. I know, I know...

The rest maybe, but this is a core issue. And I don't know how you can read that quote and go "that's increased spending".

I don't share all the points of the originator of the thread (was it coldtea?), you might find interesting which ones I didn't mention, but some of them are a good idea even from the point of view of more affluent people.

If anything I’d argue that transit puts poor people at a disadvantage. My wife’s family comes from rural poverty (like reliant on hunting for meat). Access to cars is never the problem. And cars mean that if someone loses their job or their housing, they can pick up and move to a different town where there might be opportunities.

The transit-dependent urban poor are completely dependent on what opportunities might exist near the transit lines. That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.

Making cars easier to afford and maintain would benefit the South and Midwest a lot more.

In regards to your "often live without" statement, I met very few people in the South who didn't have cars. For the reasons I stated above, they're practically a necessity. Data also doesn't indicate that people are often going without cars except in major, wealthy cities: https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

That’s much higher than say Arlington, Virginia at 13.4% which is connected to one of the best public transportation networks in the US.

A handful of places on that list sat at 2% without cars, but most of the south was over 5% without cars largely due to poverty.

PS: Not that I think the data is very accurate Murrieta, California seemingly went from 3.5% (2015) down to 0.7% (2016) which seems extremely unlikely for a single year. The poor are often missed in official statistics like census unless significant effort is used to track them.

Edit: the whole point of my reply was to say that mass transit is effective in dense, wealthy cities. In the Midwest and South those same sentiments will not work because our highest density is in the middle of the city. The farther you go out is quickly drops off. Given that, it makes sense to make cars cheaper and easier to maintain for people there, while focusing on mass transit in areas where it will work. Unfortunately, in areas like SF (where I currently live) it's NIMBYs who get in the way and waste everyone's time while acting like they support mass transit expansion.

Dallas Texas where 10.2% of households live without cars has a 18.9% poverty rate, median income of $52,580, so it’s larger, wealthier, and denser yet has significantly more cars.

Also, 20% is unusually high. Nationwide it’s about 8.7% and that’s heavily influenced by NYC. Excluding just NYC and that number falls closer to 7%.

PS: It’s really region specific but in general the wealthy are more likely to own a car in their area but different areas don’t have anything close to the same breakdown. https://slate.com/business/2019/05/maps-car-ownership-income.... Just look at El Paso vs San Jose on the bottom graph.

Are you suggesting that when poor people get cars, they are better able to drive to work, then make more money? Because that is my take-away from this

So, I am suggesting a car is considered a luxury or unaffordable by large segments of the poor population outside of the largest and richest cities.

Poor people who can’t currently afford a car are hardly going to buy a new one, so at best you might start to change things for them a decade from now. Improving transit doesn’t have that delay or all the knock on affects around new car regulations.

Mass transit meanwhile can actually solve the root problem even in rural areas. Hell, America already has mass transit driving past almost every home in America 2 or more commonly 4 times every weekday day for most of the year, their called school busses and they don’t charge their users or cost that much to operate. I am not suggesting we should have free public transit to every home, but it does suggest far more is possible than is currently being done.

It very much does cost several thousand. My insurance alone was almost $1K per year. Gas was about $100 per week, but, in rural areas, that's probably $50 per week. That's about $2,500 per year.

In addition, most poor families have ONE, and only one, car. Putting it in for maintenance not only costs money for the maintenance but also money for alternate transportation.

I had a 20 year old Honda and a 20 year old Pontiac. It cost me about $2K per year for maintenance on each (I calculated that if it reached $5K per year it was time to get a new car). However, because I had two, I could put one in the shop and use the other without thinking. This is a luxury that the poor do not have.

And it is even terrible for well-off healthy adults whenever something happens to their car (say, engine trouble).

Not to mention, car accidents are a significant cause of injury and death, and being habitually sedentary leaves a high proportion of people in horrible physical shape and is a leading cause of ballooning healthcare costs, poor quality of life, and preventable deaths.

It is a tremendously exclusionary, resource inefficient, fragile, and environmentally destructive form of transportation and social organization.

My impression is that car-centric suburbs full of wealthy white people have the fewest multigenerational households.

The elderly are much less independent in a car-centric society, which makes them more likely to end up spending longer in an assisted living facility where families can afford it.

If living in a transit-dependent city with kids and elderly people was so convenient, the immigration pipeline wouldn’t involve people moving to Texas as soon as they can. But that’s exactly what happens. New York City has a huge internal out migration—it would be shrinking without international immigration.

As an aside, most suburbs aren’t full of “wealthy white people.” In the DC area, the places where you’re most likely to encounter multigenerational households is the Virginia suburbs where there are lots of Hispanics and Muslims. DC itself has some of the lowest fertility rates in the country, for both white people and Black people.

People with kids who move from the city to the suburbs/exurbs are doing their kids a disservice (all else equal; obviously there are some compensating advantages in moving from say a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3-bedroom house on a large lot). The kids generally end up dependent, immobile, and isolated.

Land is certainly much cheaper though, and a lot of the material waste involved is subsidized by the federal government or borrowed from future local taxpayers, and there is no price put on a wide range of negative externalities. Sustainably and accurately pricing the full range of costs and harms from suburbia would render it unaffordable for most.

Unfortunately national, state, and local policy in the USA is substantially organized around entrenching and extending car dependency. The places where people can easily live without cars tend to have high housing prices and generally higher cost of living. In other parts of the world, there is not such a steep price premium for housing density and walkable neighborhoods.

LOL. My kid was incredibly isolated when we lived in DC because there were no other families.

Just because you were living in a neighborhood full of 20-something yuppies or retirees or whoever, that doesn’t mean there are no kids in the city.

Or maybe you just felt culturally alienated from the families with kids in DC, most of whom are less wealthy than yourself?

I recognize those towns are not universal. Then again, the situation of your wife's family is not universal either. Which is the crux of the problem with discussions such as this one: people like to reach for generalities that reflect their own life experiences or observations, when the reality is that those perspectives represents a narrow worldview. Heck, even the people who study poverty for a living cannot come up with a consistent narrative (as demonstrated by the opening paragraphs of the article) since it will be influenced by the questions they ask and how they conduct their research.

To take the bus you get ready and wait by 9am. Get to the place at 9:30am, wait until 10:00am for the appointment, and hopefully it doesn’t run late and let’s you take the 12:00pm bus to get home by 12:30. There goes 4 hours for a 90 minute appointment. With a car this same round trip could be done in 2.5hours ish, and you could make other stops along the way.

Granularity is important, and some places are coincidentally structured to be more difficult to survive in, the poorer you are.

I can. I'm not sure why you can't. Maybe because you're not in Sweden? If it's not an emergency, you have a choice of times. If it's an emergency, you can just go now. The only difficult case is with rare specialists which have a first-come-first-serve queue system, but you can still either let them know when you're available or just wait longer. It's trivial and free to reschedule.

> you cannot choose to be diagnosed by a private doctor instead of accepting the time given by the subsidized service, and so on, moving out is not possible because you can't pay to move your stuff

I've never needed a private doctor for anything, but this was never a problem for the private dentist or optometrist that I use. It's pretty affordable and flexible here, even for the poorest. If you really cant't afford it and could prove that, the kommun ("county") would just give you money to cover it anyway, including your moving expensive if you need to move for some reason.

> Poverty traps you in ways you will only understand once you experience it.

Grew up poor in the US and am currently in the second to lowest income bracket here due to disability.

Maybe you just aren't aware of how much better things can be.

Good that you could walk everywhere. I can't, my knees hurt walking more than a mile or so. If I have no car and can't afford cab for everything, not sure how I would be better off.

Cheap motorbikes need to be more widely available and utilized by any one who is cycling out of necessity in areas not intended for it.

Bicycles should absolute be relegated to specialized infrastructure of which we should build more, but cyclists within regular vehicle traffic is mostly done for enjoyment and only inspires hatred and annoyance at bicycles in general which creates a feedback loop resulting in less support for bicycle infrastructure.

Having to slow down traffic and wait to pass a bicycle only to have them filter back to the front at the next red light and make everyone slow down and pass them again repeatedly is a real contributor to gridlock.

Zoning and land use significantly impact how people and goods get around.

Poor people historically were worse off in myriad ways. Wanting options for people is trying to throw out the bathwater, not the baby.

I'm not looking to take cars away from anyone. I'm just looking to restore access to some essentials that I grew up with and that I know can be real, even with cars remaining popular and common.

I'm not some extremist looking to eliminate cars. I'm not trying to insist that anyone who can drive and prefers to drive be denied that possibility.

You only have to look to other developed countries to see how fast, cheap, and efficient public transit is not only a major and driving force in the economy, but also a critical part of the social safety net. Just because America's public transit systems have been hobbled by the oil-industry doesn't mean we shouldn't be improving it for everyone's benefit.

Yes, they are, which is why you build more infrastructure...

Poor people in Europe can easily hop a train to get to another town or village if needed. In the case of a really rural community, they will have buses to the nearest train station.

> That also makes them tremendously reliant on the city central planners, who are often incompetent.

Aka America’s self fulfilling destiny.

Not completely true, there are many rural regions where the train or bus service is very irregular, if not discontinued outright.

One of the reasons why the Yellow Vests in France were so forceful: French countryside is seriously underserved by public transport and living there without a car or with very expensive fuel is hard.

Because they have no choice, and are constantly forced to dump money into it to keep it on the road. This is absolutely pertinent to this discussion. Public transit systems are restricting because they are so poorly implemented.

I live in a small town, but when I was looking into taking the bus to work in the morning, it would have taken two hours each way, every day. That's extremely poor public transit and creates a huge amount of pressure to buy a car instead.

Since we already asked you more than once to stop posting flamewar comments, I've banned the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30194767

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29997431

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Like France, where transit lines work to confine immigrants to suburban ghettos with limited opportunities?

> makes car ownership very expensive

How much more expensive are we talking? If we say it's say $600/month to operate a beater, shouldn't the better job opportunities that are now available compensate for that? And if they don't - I mean, it's only $450/month more - how much better are these jobs anyway?

But hey, I don't know, maybe you're an expert on immigrant urban issues in France. Maybe you have in-depth knowledge that tells you that it's solely the availability of transit, and absolutely nothing else whatsoever, that has led to the current state of things.

A payment on a random economy subcompact that gets 40mpg would probably be cheaper because I only get ~22mpg.

>That's way more than any transit pass I know of

You are unaware of the cost of the various commuter rail passes that anyone not already living in the "inner ring" well served by bus any or subway needs to use to get into that inner ring.

It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail (and take longer too). I used to pay it when I worked downtown. The prices don't go down that much for living farther in.

Your numbers simply don't add up. Assuming a 5-day work week, 48 weeks of work/year, and $2.50/gal gas (pretty cheap), you're spending $227/mo just on gas. You really only spend $23/mo on insurance, oil changes, brake pads and everything else?

I think you're seriously underestimating how much your car actually costs you.

And again, the paid-off beater is the absolute best case scenario. A financed new or new-ish used car (which is the more typical case) has additional insurance, registration, interest, and depreciation costs.

I'm not anti-car. I own a car and I think cars are great, for a wide range of use cases. I am anti-"favoring transit over cars hurts poor people" lies. Because they are lies.

This actually wouldn't surprise me, too much.

Insurance is the most expensive of these, and I've heard of Liability-only rates of $30/mo

Also, $30/mo just on insurance (which, again, to me is not credible) is way more than $23/mo on insurance, registration, and maintenance. Registration is usually $5-10/mo. Maintenance on a car driven 2x the national average is going cost a pretty penny.

The NYC subway is $127/mo.[2]

Caltrain's most expensive pass, which covers 6 zones, is $400. But at a minimum that's a commute from Morgan Hill to San Bruno, which is a 120-mile round trip. It's going to cost at least $20/day to drive that commute.

> It would cost me $380/mo to commute via rail...when I worked downtown

Was parking free in downtown?

> and take longer too

If it was both more expensive, and took longer, why didn't you drive? Why take public transit at all? My guess is that it was still cheaper than driving, after considering all the costs.

1. https://www.sfmta.com/fares/monthly-adult-ages-19-64

2. https://new.mta.info/fares

3. https://www.caltrain.com/stations/systemmap.html

Transit lines are not used to confine them to the suburbs, they're the only thing allowing them to actually have any opportunities.

As a poor student I lived in a rich Parisian neighborhood and I also lived in a very poor suburb. I definitely preferred living in comfortable housing with a 40min commute than in a closet with a 10min commute.

There is some places where there is actually no opportunities because of the LACK of public transportation, like in some neighbors in the north of Marseille where there is 80% unemployment.

Part of the problem in North America is that there's not adequate public transportation from airports to city centres (whether it's a train terminal or frequent buses), not enough trains from city centres to suburbs/outskirts and not enough buses in between or from town to town.

I recently went from Paris -> Prague as an example. So I walked from the hotel in St. Germain to a metro station, took the metro to the airport, hopped on a plane, landed in Prague, then took a bus to a metro terminal and the metro to downtown Prague. That's what it looks like. You could have the same in the US... I haven't spend a ton of time there but the airport I'm familiar with in Canada, YYC (Calgary) has terrible access to/from the airport. The cab industry basically has convinced the city to not run a train line to the airport, nor to have a proper bus schedule. You need a taxi or ride for no good reason.

Philly, DC, NYC, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, South Florida, LA, and the Bay area I've done entirely public transit trips many times to the major areas and that's covering a population larger than any EU country.

In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train leaves btw, no waiting)

It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries....

No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form of travel that meets those criteria is high speed electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. For various reasons, passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).

You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite inexpensive.

Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only took two world wars and innumerable smaller wars before that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h" trains.</sarcasm>

BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on a bike.

As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?). I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility" comes to mind as a topic.

Through some dense urban states, yes, but most of the sparsely populated rural states would see them barely used and lots of additional habitat disruption.

We have industrial train tracks near us. Literally noone is clamoring for residential trains here. Even within the nearest city, a 20 minute drive from one popular destination to another becomes an hour and a half excursion if you wanted to take light rail instead.

Cars and planes are an ecological disaster, I don't know a single place on earth where the ecological impact of public transportation is worse than the impact of cars and planes.

No.

We build millions of cars every year, they still consume fuel everyday, they still have to be repaired, they still crash and kill a lot more often than any mean of public transportation.

A few farmers using cars is not a problem, but cities like Austin needing that many cars is outrageous.

> In my home country I could go anywhere in a 50km radius for 50$/month via public transportation.

> Anywhere in the country via high speed train for 100$/month.

That literally isn't feasible to do with a low impact unless your definition of "anywhere" is a handful of major cities, especially since cars aren't going away.

New York City has a population density of 27,000 people per square mile. Statewide is 420, though NYC metro brings that up. Austin is 3,000.

If you want "anywhere", you also need to think about places like Montana, with a population density of less than 7 people per square mile.

Trains make sense for metro areas, not rural areas, and there is a lot of rural area to cover.

The 2020 census proposes using "385 housing units per square mile as the primary criterion for determining whether a census block qualifies for inclusion in an urban area". Previously it was 1000 people per square mile (or equivalent to the above with 2.6 persons per household).

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/19/2021-03...

So it isn't the case that rural public transportation simply can't work.

Even if they don't need a car, they often choose to own one (the cheapest one they can find that is vaguely reliable).

Of course there are use-cases for cars, nobody suggested that there aren't. The problem is that the United States in particular has assumed that every transportation issue is best solved with cars.

There are studies showing that travel has actually gone down in areas like Mexico with the addition of modern Highways. The poor just can't participate.

More likely the poor used the highway once - to get out of the country and to the city. It isn't that they "can't participate", it's that they are gone.

A solution doesn't need to be 100% perfect for every situation in order for it to still be worthwhile.

Or how do astronauts get to the ISS? Checkmate. Transportation infrastructure bad.

A Universal Basic Income would be a good start.

If the people are being poorly educated, poorly trained, poorly policed, and the culture is rotting, and then you dump an enormous amount of loose money on that garbage fire, what do you expect to get as a return result? It's exceptionally obvious what would happen.

For example the biggest problem the US has in healthcare (and education) is cost, not lack of spending. If our costs were more in line with other affluent nations, you could expand Medicaid to cover 40-45% of the population with little additional expenditure. Nobody with a prominent position is brave enough to say it much less attempt to do anything about it (which would involve smashing incomes and jobs in the healthcare field). Some pretend we can spend our way to universal healthcare, ignoring the $1.2+ trillion in costs that have to be slashed before it can be implemented (which is why California can't implement it, they can't come close to affording it without cutting healthcare costs first). That's typical of what goes on in the US, it's a hyper irrational nation, incapable of even basic reasoning + action when it comes to solving big problems.

Start by fixing the broken, corrupt institutions. But that's a super hard problem that will take two generations of grinding persistent effort, whereas printing money is easy, which is why so many people love the fantasy of universal basic income.

Right: UBI together with any reasonable funding mechanism is a structural force working against economic inequality.

I also would characterize it as the absolute opposite of a UBI: it is paid only to people who are working; and is more rooted in the history of offsetting increasing FICA taxes for low-income households than in the NIT experiments.

Obviously it's hard to prognosticate about the future, but right now the "more left" of the parties with credible possibilities of election success in the U.S. has chosen $400,000 as the income level above which taxes can increase. There's simply no way you can create a UBI on that basis.

$200/month UBI, while obviously not a full, mature UBI, would approximately equal the maximum benefit of general assistance (means tested welfare for adults without dependents) in most of the US, and could probably be done with net tax increases in only that range (though the increases would need to go beyond just “regular” income tax and also include things like ending the favorable tax treatment of capital over labor income.)

But, in any case, there is very likely a sea change coming in the Democratic Party, which is currently led by Boomers (and some Silents) who came into their political prime during and before the 1990s neoliberal consensus; the Boomer demographic wave is crashing and the Millennials (Gen X is both smaller and more Republican than the Millenials, so less relevant to the future direction of the Democrats) have a rather different understanding of political possibility not grounded in nostalgia for a bipartisan era that has long passed.

What the OP said was that education was once thought to be the magic bullet against poverty, much like UBI is now.

People always dream of solving complicated problems with "one weird trick". If it fails, another one will appear.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

We find that increases in institution-specific subsidized (unsubsidized) loan maximums lead to a sticker- price increase of about 60 (40) cents on the dollar.

---

It is basic supply and demand. How could universities charge so much if no one could pay for it? They would have to lower prices.

The entire system is predatory and cancelling student debt is not the solution because it just means the lenders make all their profits off the backs of taxpayers. The real solution is to make student loans dischargable and for lenders to bear the risk of debt again. Then the markets will return back to normal.

[0] https://www.tateesq.com/learn/student-loan-bankruptcy-law-hi....

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Education_Act_of_1965

Also, you normally cannot get very much with such low income and cherry on top, they have awful interest rates which range from about 6% to 36%. The APR on loans for borrowers with excellent credit is around 12%; it's about 29% for bad credit borrowers which students with no credit are likely to be.

Edit: If you work at target for 2 8 hour days on the weekend making 15 an hour and with a 36% debt-to-income ratio limit, you could afford a payment of $374.4 a month. $15,000 punched in a 30 year repayment at 29% interest rate equals a $362.57 payment with $0.07 interest. So you might be able to do it but it would hate to be working every single day between weekend work and weekly school.

Bill Clinton’s first federal office was the Presidency, and he was sworn in in 1993.

The federal law that made student loans non- (well, actually, less) dischargeable was passed in 1976, 17 years before that, while he was running what would become his first successful electoral campaign, for Attorney-General of Arkansas.

What I don't get is why more people trapped by student loans don't just leave the country and set up life elsewhere. Debt is country specific. If you're in debt in country A, you can move to country B and start anew.

Undischargeable debt is only an encumbrance on income earned in the country in which you owe the debt.

Immigrating elsewhere is also not easy if you’re in a less in demand profession. Of course these are the ones where it’s most likely to have unsupportable amounts of debt.

If you’re a US citizen, you are still required to pay taxes on your global income no matter where you live in the world. If you ever get a tax refund, it can be garnished for federal student loans that are in default.

The first 108 000 dollars that you make elsewhere are exempt. You can live quite comfortably in most of Europe on 108 000 dollars brutto.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30403200

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=average+cost+university+of+c...

[*] In theory, education makes a society produce more on an absolute level -- but only in theory.

Giving people UBI is completely different. UBI is in itself a direct cure to poverty. The people receiving UBI are no longer poor at all. UBI abolishes poverty. You no longer have the issue of "the poor" anymore, as it's a category that does not exist.

UBI is like giving food to a starving person. It directly cures the starvation. It reverses the very condition of starvation itself.

Unlike the indirect approach to addressing poverty, there's no question about whether it would work. The remaining question is whether our economy depends on poverty as a negative incentive much like it depends on prison.

"Money is just a relative advantage in the market."

If everybody has $x, then competitive products/services will increase by $x in cost! (By "competitive" I mean those than cannot be easily scaled, like housing, education, medicine.)

But then UBI won't be needed, as all these will be dirt cheap, like phones ($50 Motorola, not $1500 iPhone).

Not true. Every single software team I have worked on wanted to hire more workers but when they are paying me $350K a year, it limits how many people they can hire. If you doubled the supply of SWEs, you'd probably have 2 175k jobs instead of the one.

UBI would work ceteris paribus, but I am with Georgism on this one: the entire UBI would be eaten by landlords.

This is literally part of Georgism philosophy.

[0] My main reason: there are countries such as Persian Gulf oil sheikhdoms where the citizens get free money or a least well paid jobs-just-in-name that someone else is actually doing, but there wasn't any explosion of personal freedom, social progress or artistic creativity there; a lot of the free money is sunk into drugs and conspicuous consumption.

[1] My next reason: you would have to exclude freshly arrived people, because if any place in the world becomes known for giving significant money to anyone for free, it will become a target of worldwide UBI tourism on an unsustainable scale. Already the people smugglers in Libya etc. are very good at presenting themselves as the "bridges" towards life in the richest parts of Europe.

The coin would use smart contracts to tax all transactions but the tax rate is less for those who hodl less money (have less in savings) and for those who spend more per month (basically giving a leg up to those who spend like the poor, i.e. spend most of their money monthly...

if you combined this w/ govt georgist LVTs I think a fair system could be devised that still has people who are wealthy, but maybe 50 million is the cap, and maybe it goes up to 60 million when the average amount of monthly carryover in accounts is 10k, or something...encouraging more money to flow down, so the caps can go up... Something like this would need to figure out something else for business accounts to get ecommerce flowing and moving in/out of the system, since businesses can easily spend a billion a day or bring more than that in...

Haven't thought that far ahead. I'm also not a blockchain dev...so outside my wheelhouse..

The obsession with sending everyone to college was based on a correlation/causation mistake with college degrees and income levels.

More tax doesn't fix widespread, rampant, government corruption. The US takes in enough tax to have plenty of nice things. For citizens to see any benefit the military industrial complex needs to be defanged with prejudice, the US needs to pull out of all foreign police actions, etc.

The highways and roads I drive on are terrible. Let's start there. Why is that in such a poor state with me paying 35% marginal tax? Where is my money going? Yep that's right, "social justice consultants" and the military industrial complex.

On the UBI note it would never work out anyway. Yang's numbers were several order of magnitudes off similar to Bernie's healthcare numbers. We'd have to collect far more money than we could even with a progressive tax system and that's if we only offered it to actual naturalized citizens. If we offered to everyone who exists in America there's absolutely no way it would work simply by the numbers. These programs work in countries with defined borders, strong citizenship laws, homogenous cultures, and populations 1/10th the size of America. We are different. We need different solutions.

People here love using buzzwords lately like "woke" as a nonsensical bogeyman for anything they don't like.

Say you have a home you live in that's 300k. You also have a guest house you airbnb and make 50k/year on. There's considered 0 'value' in a primary residence, however you're making 50k/year value off your additional rent. So you'd pay tax on that, above and beyond any other tax.

If you have commercial or other real estate rentals you'd pay as well. The key is that you'd need to somehow peg the tax rate with inflation, and housing prices, etc...to basically make it a self-organized check-system to keep rents from rising, because rising rents means higher taxes.

Perhaps you actually tie the LVT to census data on homeless in a region, less homeless = less taxes, therefore creating solutions to that problem actually is a win:win...

I don't see why. You just appropriately set the amount paid out and the tax tier at which you cross into the red and are paying back into it. Are you suggesting that this threshold is barely above the poverty line? Because that's the only way it wouldn't actually work.

I’m all for a flat tax with no tax loopholes but to increase my taxes more than I’m already paying is something I will never vote for.

Not to mention, there is no way in which a worker can make a contribution to society that is literally billions of times greater than another. So, the fact the someone like Jeff Bezos can literally earn billions while others make pennies needs to be corrected theough a progressive tax rate - probably close to 95 cents on the dollar for every dollar over a few tens of million per year, like it used to be in America's golden age.

First of all, nobody makes billions of times more than anybody else. Bezos doesn’t even make a million times more than the average earner.

Second, sure it’s possible for one person’s impact to be thousands or tens of thousands of times higher than someone else’s.

Third, the point of taxes is not to change people’s income to better match the magnitude of their contribution to society.

The point of taxes is to provide a society where the guillotine doesn't come out. When it does it won't be the Musks and Bezos' of the world that the masses stop at.

Peasants' revolts are another story, but too far back in history to be an useful analogy for today. They were also beaten to bloody pulp most of the time.

No flat tax, but a simplified progressive tax would do great things for the country.

[0] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

How much do you think we could reduce taxes on middle and upper middle earners by increasing taxes on the ultra-rich?

In Sweden the labour share of GDP is 55%, however taxes on wages are 60% of the total government income, and a large remaining fraction of the taxes on work income. Another 30% is from VAT. Let's assume arbitrarily that half the VAT is paid by workers and not with income from capital.

Under this assumption, workers receive 55% of GDP in compensation before taxes, but pay 70% of all taxes.

If taxes on income were the same for workers as for capital then workers would pay 55% instead of 70%, so taxes would be 18% lower than they are now.

[0]: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

Federal income tax goes back at least as far as 1861: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861

Maybe don't think of it as "the government" getting your money, rather that you're investing into a fund of your nation's future. The key is making sure that investment is well utilized, and that requires us to all be properly invested.

Where the government does investment activity it does a shockingly poor job, education being the clearest example.

I am always amazed by such statements. Are you sure you have thought this through? What do mean with “asymptotically flat”?

As with the poorly understood correlation/causation relationship in statistics, there are many common misconceptions about how absolute and relative amounts influence the result of mathematical calculations.

The following example may highlight this: Let’s say a person’s minimum financial need to simply stay alive and sane is $X. Now, take two almost identical people that only differ in their income: A’s income is bigger than B’s.

If you tax them both at a flat 15% (or any other rate), the richer will always benefit more from this than the poorer! The reason is because living, eating, and taking part in a society do not come for free.

Surprisingly, this is commonly not well understood and it also seems there are proclivities by some fellow rich and comfortable folk to intentionally avoid understanding this.

Proof by example: Let’s see what their effective tax is after all the cost to stay alive has been deducted.

Excess Income = Income * (1 - 15%) - X

Let’s say A’s income is $150k and B’s is $40k, and the minimum amount X required to simply stay alive (not being homeless and having health insurance included) would be $25k. These figures are obviously simplified but anyone can feel free to use their own numbers and repeat the calculation. The general result will remain similar.

Then, A’s excess income will be $102.5k and B’s $9k. Relatively speaking, A will have made almost 11.5 times the amount of excess income than B, despite making not even four times as much as B (3.75 to be exact).

Excess income will be the only thing both of them can use to save and invest, purchase a house, or use it for all kinds of safety-net building and stress-reducing things.

I think CEO pay should be pegged to average salaries too, and their tax bracket pegged to the differential between average salary in their company and some universally accepted "happiness" wage ...(like 70k I heard a few years back, but is probably closer to 80k now)..

If the average salary in your company is 50k, then you need to pay 30% extra in taxes. There also should be some sort of conversion from stocks to assumed 'income', so that the rich can't just use stocks to subvert paying taxes...

If you're advocating a policy of "screw the rich to help the poor", you've probably never been poor. I have and let me tell you the least of my concerns was what rich people in general were up to with their money (except for the specific rich people that were keeping me employed)

Not sure I follow. I get the first order effects, but I'm hesitant to agree without an explanation of the second-order and systemic-level effects of such a policy.

What are those?

If you don't understand why arraignments for minor violations are awful for the working poor, you've probably never been poor. When I was poor I was lucky enough to not be hurt by arraignments (flexible work hours), but boy did I have sympathy for those people who were relentlessly fucked by that system. There was always at least one of them whenever I had to show up at court, and it wasn't hard to figure out how they got into those situations.

https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

The top 1% take out of the economy a LOT more than they put in. Anything that limits their ability to "earn" is benefiting the rest of society. It is also benefiting the environment & future generations' resource availability.

Are you able to point to some sources for both answers? From an economics PoV I'm genuinely interested, yet haven't seen any resources take those two problems together seriously.

e.g. "our oil industry will pay for it", but then who would work the oil rigs?

https://www.covidmoneytracker.org

b) Who will do the work? All the automation will do the work. They have kiosks up in McDonalds right now that mean they only need one person needs to be at a register. But as far as it disincentivizes work..nit has been show it does not, but still people cannot believe this.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/no-strings-attac...

"Overall, the programs analyzed suggest either no effect on labor market supply or a slight reduction in work and earnings. The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force when provided with unconditional cash, even when the transfer is large."

We did that on a one-off basis responding to an unprecedented-within-generations public health emergency. No-one is seriously talking about that as investment; most every source that I have read suggests that the spending was poorly and indiscriminately targeted because it was done in such a headlong rush.

Nor do we "have the money". Deficit spending tripled from 2019 to 2020 and was only down from that level by 12% into 2021. This is the definition of "not having the money".

Even a "large" transfer in this s context is not nearly as much as UBI. The Alaska oil dividend was less than $1000 last year. The Gulf oil nations are the only ones that give enough free money for citizens to live off of, and in these countries are extremely dependent on cheap foreign labor.

They are not "dependent" on cheap labor. They can afford to buy cheap labor with no sacrifice to their own people. This is a benefit of UBI in a world that does not have universal UBI.

Saudi Arabia literally butchered a major journalist. They have frequent public beatings and executions if actual citizens for minor infractions.

The modern Arab world's treatment of their imported SE Asian workforce is absolutely horrendous.

The official figure is that 6500 workers have died building the Qatar world cup stadiums. Applying a 10x multiple to that may still be low balling.

Ok, that's fair. So the average income earner won't stop working. But what about the bottom end of the spectrum i.e someone just above UBI but who has to get up early and travel two hours each way to get to work, or who is just working to put food on the table - with UBI they now have a great reason to stay home.

So... what happens if a good chunk of people earning just above UBI rates just stops working because it's just not worth the ROI. You've ended up creating a vacuum which has to be filled. And how do you fill it? Traditionally you either import cheap labor or raise pay to incentivise applicants. Congratulations, you've just started the inflation engine.

Australia already has this - you can earn up to (somewhere around) $18k per year and you won't get taxed. This applies to everyone. Is this what you're talking about? Because as far as I can see, there are still people under the poverty line here.

But if you're not talking about that, and you're saying that ALL should get $18k (for example) no questions asked, when someone earned $19k before UBI, do they now do the same hours for $1k, or do they keep their whole $19k? If the former, why bother working, but if the latter, you've now just given them $36k not $18k.

These are all just talking points.

> The evidence does not suggest an average worker will drop out of the labor force

That's for the average worker. Show me what happens at the lower scale. Sorry, I'm not going to read a 25 page report right now, but as this does interest me, I am going to put this in my TOREAD list - genuinely, thanks for the link.

Edit: if you want evidence of disincentivising workers when there's no-questions-asked government handouts, look at food aid programs in Africa. There's no point to be a farmer when Free is your competition.

https://cals.arizona.edu/classes/arec514/groupproject/does%2...

b) Who pays for the jobs that are entirely parasitic and remove value - and add friction - today?

I don't think UBI implements a particularly good safety net without other measures - at the very least open education at all levels, open healthcare, open culture, open media, and open democracy.

But if you're implying that money exists to force people to work I'd consider the possibility that you're describing what is essentially a form of slavery. Or at least extreme political control.

It stops being slavery when people are free to choose what to do with their talents, abilities, ambitions, and interests, and when job markets value that contribution instead of - quite literally - attempting to minimise its value.

The fundamental difference is between finding and promoting people who are good at inventing and organising the future, and finding and promoting people who are good at controlling everyone else's time for their own personal benefit.

The latter is what we have now, and it's showing very clear signs of making far less sense as a stable system with a future than some UBI-adjacent scheme would be.

Bingo. Many people do =not realize that calling money for labor "wage slavery" was a term used in the 1700's and was common even into the 1940's. It was even uttered by Hiddy in the 1940's movie "His Girl Friday".

-- Hildy Johnson : The next time you see me, I shall be riding in a Rolls Royce giving interviews on success.

Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger , Endicott : Goodbye.

Hildy Johnson : So long, you wage slaves.

Murphy , McCue, reporter , Wilson, reporter , Bensinger , Endicott : Bye.

Hildy Johnson : Well, when you're climbing up fire escapes and getting kicked out of front doors and eating Christmas dinners at one-arm joints - don't forget your pal, Hildy Johnson. --

So are people who do not want UBI are pro slavery? That is a good question. If you think about the one common complaint that UBI will mean people will not work, just this about that in the terms of a plantation owner talking about his slaves.

https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&...

"Because slaves had no direct incentive to work hard, slaveowners combined harsh penalties with positive incentives. Some masters denied passes to disobedient slaves. Others confined recalcitrant slaves to private jails."

They even tried instilling a "positive mindset" in the slave!

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2716797

How is this that much different than our current system?

A system is a function of its output. If the the enforcement of law represent the denial of physical access under threat of violence, markets represent the denial of economic access under threat of labor. In some ways this is more insidious, but less overtly violent and many parallel constructions hold. The simultaneous creation of race, and the theological justification for chattel slavery mirrors the creation of capital and the economic justification for wage slavery. The supporters of each alienate their involvement and perpetuation as "the natural order" when in fact it is a social system constantly recreated and socially reproduced.

You can start to see the same patterns play out in the digital space. Human agency is exported to computers in a way that builds systems that re-enforce this dynamic. "Computer says, 'No'"[1], is a perfect summation of this disavowment of human agency and human empaty from the systems we build.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFl6p4D59AA

UBI is dead in the water.

Also, the massive death toll of the pandemic, combined with singinificant behavior changes caused by fear of the same death toll, have left many industries reeling and redistributed wealth allocations in many people's budgets (away from dining out and tourism and into other places like gaming or real-estate), which had hard to measure outcomes.

Not to mention, prices for most goods are currently controlled by a handful of companies like Amazon and Walmart, who are in a perfect position to silently collaborate on increasing prices instead of taking a hit on profits like they would normally be forced to if they were in tight competition.

I think I know the intent of why this is on your list, but, honestly, my family members who are in a cycle of poverty are there in no small part because of a cycle of debt. And I'm not talking about unavoidable debt like from a medical condition, but rather from debt from buying depreciating assets they cannot afford (cars, tvs, etc.) Widely available credit, IMO, makes the situation worse.

I grew up extremely poor so I end up doing a lot of annoying things myself and a lot of my colleagues ask things like "why don't you just pay someone to fix your washing machine".

Or like your example of driving tests. I let my license lapse when I first started working from home and had to retest to get it. If I hadn't been able to pay $300 for a private driving test I'd have had to take time off work to do it - and a poor person generally can't afford time off work, that goes unpaid for an hourly job.

I grew up in poverty and faced homelessness many times, and my experience anytime a public/government program was offered to help people like me specifically, it only made things worse, either directly or indirectly. Every single time.

Extra policing meant more poor people pulled over in their raggedy cars and ticketed for vain things. Food assistance meant lots of forms being filled out, and the risk that your inconsistent income might go just above the threshold next month and kick you off for the whole year when your income drops immediately thereafter. Healthcare assistance meant even more forms, confusing jargon, and always started with "don't worry, we'll take care of it" and ended with "you now owe $5000". I could write posts full of examples.

Even worse, once I identified this, I could then be labeled "too stupid to know what was best for me" or "just sticking up for the rich" when I expressed my concern for this around (mostly more privileged) friends.

Naturally I tend toward libertarian hands-off opinions on things like this now as a result, but not because I don't think food assistance or satiation of basic healthcare needs could be helpful. Quite the contrary, they could make a huge difference if done in the right balance and the right way.

But given the realities of how these things work, and have worked my entire life, the institutions creating and promoting these things are either incompetent or corrupt, or both. If all of these caring researchers and think tanks put more effort into retrospectively finding out what is going wrong with these programs as they exist today, and found a way to restore competence and trust to the programs and the institutions behind them -- if everyone could be honest about the actual results of their efforts rather than just patting themselves on the back for doing what felt good while ignoring the people they caused to suffer -- then I'd likely feel differently.

It makes me wonder if my problem growing up weren't the supposed "safety nets" that blew up in my face each time, but rather the institutions behind them, and that they should be the first problem solved before we move on to the assistance itself.

Successful social programs help everyone, and let the poor benefit implicitly more. All old people benefit from the existence of Medicare for example, even if they are personally wealthy enough to afford alternatives, so Medicare is relatively simple to access and almost universally loved. No one is going to win elections campaigning on slashing medicare, and no one is in danger of losing their Medicare status if they fill out a form wrong.

Many were bait-and-switches. "This program will cover all of your costs for {x}", and then months later, "sorry, the program actually doesn't cover {x.1} or {x.2}, so you owe money and penalties now".

Other programs were of the more indirect, but still very consequential, "we're incentivizing or mandating people to do {x} to help those without means" only for the businesses with means to easily absorb the costs or penalties while the freelancers (as I was at one time) or people working for small businesses (as I did and continue to do) are put in situations in which they cannot.

Whether its healthcare mandates or regulations, used car or appliance buy-back programs, mortgage assistance programs, aggressive minimum insurance liabilities, they are all sold on the notion of helping the less fortunate at the expense of the more fortunate, yet I can trace so many of them to situations that directly impacted my family and lead us to facing homelessness multiple times.

If I gave the impression that means testing was the core impediment, then I can say it was only but one of many.

That said, I agree that means testing just adds a burden to the recipient and a means manipulating the recipient. I don't view this as partisan, though, and there are plenty on the left happy to use assistance as a form of social behavior manipulation as well.

To do this honestly and properly, we would need to remove ALL means testing.

Unless you you murder someone how do you even get fired as an incompetent corrupt bureaucrat administering program 456-B-1. You don't you collect your money and try to grow your staff and budget. People you are supposed to help are an inconvenience as they tend to want you to do your job. Of course they have no recourse.. so they can be safely ignored.

There is no metric of success, no metric for failure.

This would sound much more honest if we didn't just have 6-12 months of mainly left-wing people calling for healthcare discrimination of the unvaccinated.

That in itself is IMO a good enough reason to oppose nationalized medicine.

If one aspect is education and mindset, but the other aspect is having the financial empowerment required for the education and mindset to be fruitful, then giving assistance that takes away the burden of "getting by" while still empowering the recipient to make her own choices (along with proper education to do so) seems like a great melding of solutions.

They unequivocally made my life worse off than without them, and I know I'm not alone.

Us both being willing to accept that our respective experiences are polar opposites, but still valid and worth consideration, is key to making sure neither you nor I are so dedicated to supporting something for the sake of supporting it that we lose sight of why we're supporting it.

Just because it helped you doesn't mean something similar that you're supporting today can't also harm others. Likewise, just because I was harmed by something doesn't mean I should be closed off to the notion that something similar could help others.

If we can keep this in mind when dealing with people of opposing viewpoints, and acknowledge how individual experiences of otherwise similar things can be very different, then I think we'd reach better, less judgmental and vitriolic conclusions on how to solve these problems.

I think that most pragmatic people understand that they have to do something to help the poor. Even the most callous people still understand that doing nothing may affect them negatively (unless, perhaps, they're rich enough to flee to New Zealand). The thing at issue is how much to give to the poor and how best to administer it.

Because I'm a success story, I will continue to support the programs that supported me. However, I would gladly welcome improvements that make those programs more effective and efficient.

There’s a lot of scope for service design in government, and human-centered design. Of course, there are also lobbyists at every turn trying to hobble the process because there are profits to be made.

It would be amazing to see an America where its culture of innovation was laser focused on making life better for everyone. I wish we were there today.

Their solution? Go get a job and make more money, then she could qualify for unemployment. Gee thanks, I wish I had thought of that plan.

Source: Did.

They can be done the right way, but aren't because politicians deliberately sabotage them. Every confusing and unnecessary form that is put in the way of getting assistance is put there deliberately to make the institution less effective and punish the people who need it. This is not an accident or some emergent, inevitable quality of government. It's not that the government just happens to hire incompetent or callous people to run these programs. It is sabotage by elected officials who oppose helping poor people. We DO have a handful of institutions that are still competent and effective. This also is not an accident--they're the ones not being deliberately hamstrung by Congress.

The solution is not to throw one's hands up and declare "Government doesn't work, I'm a libertarian now!" The solution is to stop electing asshats whose purpose in life is to dismantle institutions and hurt the poor. It's not like these politicians are hiding their views. They proudly talk about things like "means testing" and "promoting market-based solutions (transparent code for sabotaging institutions)". Astonishingly, in many States, the poor tend to favor this team and vote for them, (presumably) knowing they are voting for politicians who are against the very things that would help them.

That's the fun thing, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both! And I would moreover argue that if a government scheme can be sabotaged like this in the first place, the government scheme is itself at fault given its obviously lacking transparency, and a "libertarian" response is all the more appropriate.

This is the weirdest argument. I mean, you seem to be arguing for some kind of government that's not answerable to elected leaders or voters? I mean, how else would you be able to run a program that couldn't be shut down by the leadership of an organization - public or private?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This reads a lot like the kind of condescension I mentioned receiving from my wealthier friends and family growing up. Well intentioned, but people usually privileged enough to only know what they knew about poverty and assistance programs from magazines, research journals and politicians selling compassion. Rarely were they the people who experienced the consequences of what they were advocating for themselves, giving them a comfortable perch from which to preach what felt helpful and moral, but never knowing what it meant to be wrong about the results firsthand.

If it's true that these programs can be done the right way and are being deliberately sabotaged (with which I tend to agree), then they are being sabotaged by more than just the "means testing" and "market-based solutions" crowd. I know firsthand, because some of the most destructive of these initiatives in my life have come directly from undivided Congresses made of the politicians telling us that "we can't afford not to go all in".

But somehow when one of the supposedly non-hamstrung programs still comes with impossible red tape, unintended consequences, or otherwise leaves the recipient worse off than when she started, even the "all in" programs that make it through via unchallenged bills or executive action, somehow end up being criticized in retrospect for not being "all in" enough. "We just didn't commit enough. We need to double down."

Failing that, it's always the fault of "those other politicians" and when all other excuses fail, then it always falls back to victim blaming. "They just don't know what's good for them" or "they just don't know how these things work". Yes, both the "change your attitude and work ethic" crowd and the "government assistance" crowd blame the victim, if you know how to spot it.

I'm certainly not arguing that you're wrong in the assertion that many of these institutions are designed to fail, but I do think, for anyone committed to actually solving problems, that taking honest account of how these institutions are failing beyond just "they need more money and fewer restrictions" is among the necessary first steps.

Confronting the problem by dedicating yourself to the results rather than dedicating yourself to the politicians who say nice things and then shrug their shoulders when their solutions don't work, even (especially?) when that means coming to the uncomfortable conclusion that the "team" you trust may not have earned that trust beyond words.

Or the uncomfortable conclusion that the people supporting the other "team" are doing so not out of ignorance or deception but out of a reaction informed by genuine personal experience that you may not have had. That those people, still in need of solutions not being provided by either team, are turning to the devil they know and can manage, rather than the one they cannot.

The good news is that these first steps are unifying and results oriented. The bad news is that it requires people to confront their own biases that they think of as mutually exclusive postulates to be accepted and instead turn them into non-absolute theories to be tested and refined. It likely means realizing that our "teams" don't matter so much, and that spotting the good from the bad on both sides is harder than it seems.

To me, it's unfortunate that the notion of different levels of capability has been transmuted into some kind of social ill that "must" be solved. It'd be like reading articles about why not everyone can run a 5 minute mile and what can be done about it. Not everyone can run a 5 minute mile! It's not fixable!

Minimum wage hikes are counterproductive - it’s a ban on jobs for people whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage, which are the poorest people who need the jobs most.

It’s a terrible thing to say to someone - “The best you can do is $6/hr, so we as a society have decided you’re not allowed to work to support or feed yourself.”

But we can make our society more functional to penalise poor people less. The people who can only run a 10 minute mile shouldn’t be forced to do it with a weighted vest. The people who can only run a 15 minute mile shouldn’t be banned from running at all.

If a job is worth $10/hr to get done, nobody will ever pay anyone $15 to do it. They will just not do it at all - so that’s 10/hr somebody could’ve earned that is just burned.

You have to think of it like that: congressman standing in front of poor single mother, telling her “you’re not allowed to have this job, it’s for your own good”, and then lighting 60% of her desired salary on fire as she looks on in dismay.

Eventually somebody will invent a robot or outsourcing solution that gets the job done for $10/hr.

At no point was any of this ever helpful to that person who was willing to do the job.

So you assert labor demand is completely inflexible. Is this supported by evidence? Perhaps $15 is really too much, I don't know, but to help decide by now we should have hundred year worth of data no?

We should want mothers to have some time and energy left to care for children when they come home. Are there any such $5-$10/hour jobs?

The argument is that the janitor, the fast food worker, the cashier deserve a livable wage. They don't deserve to have decades slashed off their life expectancy because they're poor. They shouldn't have to ration insulin because they're poor. They shouldn't have to commute for 2 hours because they're poor.

Is a "market wage", supplemented by payments from public money to reach decent living standards, acceptable? That's what UBI would be, in theory at least.

https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...

poverty isn't simply about money or possessions, but rather is fundamentally about opportunity and esteem, to meaningful work and fair wages first and foremost. that means, most importantly, lower profits and a radically different economic dynamic that doesn't place capital on a singular pinnacle.

this is the elephant in the room that no politician really wants to address around poverty, because it'd directly oppose all of their wealthy backers in one fell swoop. it's exactly why we never get any movement, except hair-brained policies, like UBI, that are meant to surreptitiously funnel public funds into greedy private hands and make things worse for the poor in the long run.

> that means, most importantly, lower profits and a radically different economic dynamic that doesn't place capital on a singular pinnacle

Capitalism has been the most effective vehicle to reduce poverty in the 20th and 21st century. Communism, socialism and most hybrid attempts have been outright failures in comparison.

That politicians don't want to embrace some other economic model isn't some conspiracy. It's just plain sense.

capitalism isn't some miracle that created the current american politicoeconomic environment. the single biggest (but not sole) factor (i.e., luck) in that was geographic: it just so happened 2 huge oceans separated us from the biggest war in history.

cheerleading for capitalism is at best a non sequitur.

This isn't the case just for the US but also for the UK and our fellow Europeans who also practiced Capitalism - even the ones who had to endure the great wars.

You are welcome to suggest an alternative but you will have to support it. The choice of Capitalism seems critically important, along with the choice of some sort of Democracy.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...

11% is a fucking travesty for the richest nations in history whose overabundance is downright, shockingly monumental. we should have exactly zero people who don't have secure food, shelter, and a modicum of dignity. that's squarely on capitalism along with (republican[0]) democracy.

[0]: not the political party; republics centralize power in the hands of representative 'elites', because we all know the msases are too stupid to know what's good for them.

I mean it's great to stand on mountains and tell everyone they're doing it wrong - but talk is free. You want to do better than 11%? Do it.

You don't even need to get on a plane. Go talk to your local homeless community. Share your ideas about how you're going to put them all in homes. You can make sandwiches and distribute them if nothing else.

Form a Non-Profit. Hire people. Make it happen. Prove us, the collective masses, too stupid to know what's good for us.

This is false dogma. China has been UNARGUABLY a wild success. Now subtract every human life that ended prematurely or was lived in relative poverty because the USA funded terrorists and facist overthrow of their democratically elected socialist government