But a guy sitting on his ass today collecting disability isn’t going to be working 60 hours a week in a factory for $20 a day, especially if he’s got that sweet basic income.
Because let’s face it. That unemployed lazy bum already earns money, just off the books. He’s already cleaning somebody’s gutters for cash. He’s already got some hustles going on. For cash.
He’s not going to work brutal hours in a sweatshop for a pittance, unless the alternative really is starvation. The fact is, if we did away with the minimum wage tomorrow how many new sub-minimum wage jobs would open up? Two? Three?
Seriously, think about it as if you were an employer. Wages are only a part of the costs of hiring an employee. If an employee isn’t productive for you at $7 an hour, imagine the quality of the employee you’d get if could offer $4 an hour. Such a person wouldn’t be worth hiring even if you could do so for free, because they’d be worse than useless.
And it turns out that in America there are alternatives to working in sweatshops. Because you can’t support yourself on $5000 a year. Nobody in America will choose to compete on price against Chinese factory workers. Is a little bit better than nothing? Yes, except when you have to break your back for that little bit. You can’t ignore the cost the worker has to pay to get that pittance.
For the first time ever, I see something octopus and I agree on.
He calls for removing the minimum wage, but he also calls for lobbying for minimum basic income. I think that is a valid strategy. Let market forces determine what each job should pay, but provide a baseline for survival for all Americans. Okay with basic survival income? Fine, don’t work. Want some extra? Go find a job. Sure, it may only pay $2 per hour, but at full-time, that’s an extra $350 a month. That could go a long way toward making your life better, gives you purchasing power, and moves the economy along.
The businesses lose the leverage over the workforce that allows unmitigated greed to pull wages to the floor, because the basic needs of people are taken care of. People don’t have to work for $0.50/hour out of desperation, so wages will fall in line with a supply/demand curve. Don’t pay enough for trash collection, and the garbage is going to pile up until you pay enough to entice the workforce to come to you.
I’m glad someone gets it. The reason I don’t see eye to eye with the modern left is I doubt the sincerity of the political class that exploits the populace with ideas that sound compassionate with regards to first order effects. I don’t like the theocratic side of the right wing but in the modern era overbearing state power has been more damaging than overbearing popes and cardinals.
I know that. We all know that. We all probably take advantage of that. I don’t look for a business license when I shop for someone to spread mulch or clean a gutter.
Well if that’s true than there is no harm to get rid of minimum wage if only two or three people are going to be ruthlessly exploited.
You don’t know that. We have teens, retired folks, stay at home parents, etc that could all use a bit of cash. You also are making the assumption that an individual person remains constant over time and doesn’t increase his or her or xes market power. Someone who goes to work and develops habits that are conducive to getting stuff done has more economic power daily. It may be a little but it’s greater than 0 and the rate of increase is greater than 0.
A wage floor is only a solution to get left wing votes. And it helps some of those at the margin who cannot be replaced. Yet.
if you give out a basic income as cash to people, you won’t end “need” or “poverty” or provide for everyone’s essentials. there are some number of people in this country that would spend their basic income on alcohol or meth and at the end of the month still wouldn’t have a place to live or food to eat because they didn’t pay their rent or buy groceries with it. I’d like to hear the “basic income” advocates address this. Do you have a plan to care for those people who are too messed up for whatever reason to properly manage their finances so that their basic needs are met? Or do you envision a non-cash-based “basic income”?
We are reaching a point at which MOST of us, however well educated, may become “useless.”
There are more and more jobs that robots and computers can do better and/or cheaper than humans can. Even engineers, doctors, lawyers, and accountants may learn soon that they are every bit as replaceable as Pittsburgh welders or Detroit auto makers.
Unless, of course, that person actually is disabled and is physically unable to climb a ladder and clean gutters. But I see you’ve drunk the kool-aid on the notion that no one is actually disabled, just gaming the system. No one actually needs a wheelchair, it’s all just for show. That guy with the wooden leg? He’s just faking it for sympathy.
I don’t see any government policy that could create a utopia. There are always going to be those that squander whatever income they receive. The idea is to remove policy that distorts incentives in such a way that productivity is negatively impacted while not infringing unnecessarily on liberty.
Should we not have auto insurance because we have still have those that don’t properly maintain their cars or drive poorly? Or health insurance even though we are a nation of fat asses? Those situations are less than ideal but we still don’t want to eliminate programs or products that mitigate risk.
So, because some people are drug addicts we should leave everyone without a safety net?
Drug/alcohol addiction and mental illness are a problem, but leaving those people penniless won’t help. Maybe for those in that state there should be a fiscal guardian appointed that will see their bills are paid, food to eat, and they have a secure place to sleep at night, the rest of the money being given to the person in question. Sure, that money may still get spent on drugs/booze, but if you leave such people without funds entirely they’ll just rob and steal to get their favorite poison(s). If there isn’t a sure cure I’ll go for harm reduction.
Of course people are actually disabled. But even a guy in a wheelchair can earn money. Obviously it depends on his skills. A software developer is only going to be marginally impacted. A carpenter a lot more. A guy with a wooden leg is going to be fine as a lawyer, but severely impacted as a house painter. And so “disability” isn’t an absolute physical measure, but an economic one. Because retraining the house painter with a prosthetic leg to become a lawyer isn’t very likely to succeed for most people.
And my point is, a guy with a fucked up back who can’t hang drywall anymore can still do some productive work of some kind. And people who don’t have regular jobs very often do odd jobs for cash, or as favors for people. Just because you’ve got a prosthetic leg or a TBI doesn’t mean you’re useless, even if it really does mean you can’t hold down a full time job.
You cannot make someone give you a job. The hardest thing in the world is getting hired. The competition for minimum wage jobs is fierce, and they don’t even pay enough to live on. If my job didn’t provide a lot of holiday overtime in November, December, and Passover, I’d be on disability.
Tell me how people who’ve had a bad break can get a job. From my personal observation, about 30% of people are just using the system not to work. And using the system takes more work than a regular job.
And I’ll remind you, when I was desperately going through the government agencies trying to fin work. 13 so-called “professionals” told me to get permanent disability. I’m telling them I want to work and I can work and I have experience and I’m very very smart and catch on easy, and they’re saying “Be happy on disability.” How is that helping me. They don’t even encourage people to work.
Some tolerance for abuse is always cheaper in the long run than “zero tolerance” at any cost. It’s called the law of diminishing returns. Tiny incremental benefits become staggeringly expensive.
Could we reduce the number of, say, school shootings to zero, from what is actually a pretty small number? Yes, probably. But what would be the cost, in terms of physical infrastructure, policing and curtailment of constitutional rights? Are we willing to pay it?
What would be the cost of reducing the number of people who don’t fit in with our dogmatic perception of social order? Not just the economic cost of policing, but the cost in terms of the erosion of your own rights to be who you are, and think and work and live outside the box in a manner that fits your own personal identity?
Here’s another point: All the work that needs to be done in this country can be done, completely ad efficiently, by about half the work force. So what is the point of forcing the “useless” ones to pretend they have a useful job?
Your last paragraph isn’t true. There is always room for more services or goods to be produced and consumed but price absolutely matters. Stuff can be made cheaply if the economy is producing at maximum productivity. Several million people working can build a lot of nice bridges and clean up the whole country. There’s work to be done. Look at Detroit. That city can use some tidying.
Except in this society “can’t hold down a full time job” IS equated with being useless.
As you noted - not everyone can be retrained for another career.
Even if they are - having to switch careers any time past 30 or 35 is going to be difficult due to ageism. Add in bias against disability and it’s a double whammy. The only thing worse than that would be adding a criminal record to the list.
I have a nephew with a TBI. Physically his body is capable of work, but he can’t even hold down a part-time job because his injury leaves him with little control over his emotions and how he expresses them. No, he actually can’t hold down even a part time job.
Even if you are “guy with fucked up back who can’t hang drywall but can still do something productive” good luck getting hired - employers are going to choose the guy with the back that isn’t fucked up before the guy with the fucked up back. In no small part due to the extra costs of insuring the guy with the fucked up back (which is yet another argument for genuine universal health coverage).
When there is a surfeit of labor - and that’s what we’re looking at going forward, and becoming more so - employers will cherry-pick the offerings. Why hire a qualified disabled applicant when you can hire a qualified able-bodied one? That’s the reasoning.
Let me also state that when it talked about “doing something productive”, I wasn’t just talking about employment. A guy who lives with his parents and mows the lawn and waters the plants and when the neighbors go on vacation collects the mail is doing something productive even if he’s not earning a wage from even part time employment.
And agreed about the difficulty of finding a job. That’s why I want to stress that “disability” isn’t a physical or medical diagnosis, but an economic one. Is this particular person’s issues severe enough that there’s pretty much no chance they’ll ever get regular (even part-time) employment? And that completely depends on their skills and the job market, none of which are static but are only marginally changeable.
Well, labor is unique. Its supply curve goes up with price up to a point then the supply goes DOWN with price because people start to value their leisure over pay. This highlights the immutable fact that labor is NOT just another factor of production. I can’t think of any other “commodity” where the supply ever goes down as price goes up.
Too many econ 101 types think they know everything they need to know about economics.
Depending on where you set the minimum wage, grey market labor is not driven by minimum wages, it is driven by the desire not to pay taxes or earn n income while collecting needs based benefits. A minimum wage of $10 won’t drive labor to the grey market.
American labor is highly coincident with American consumption and American consumption is still one of the most important dynamos of the global economy. But considering that the global trade geni is out of the bottle, we might as well enjoy the benefits of trade. We can do this by taxing those who benefit the most from trade (for example taxing the Apples of the world) to pay for a WFA type program to rebuild our roads and bridges with labor that has been displaced by free trade.
If trade makes us better off in the aggregate and makes a few very much worse off then the ones who enjoy the most benefits of trade can be taxed to pay for work programs for the ones who get hurt. Right?
Basic income is a great idea. A poverty level basic income with an additional tax that would leave the average taxpayer in the same position would cost about 2 Trillion dollars after getting rid of all other need based programs. Our current budget is about 4 trillion/year (that includes stuff like social security, medicare, etc. So you are talking about increasing the budget by 50% (with a welfare tax to pay for it) as a solution to minimum wage?
Sure, 80% of Americans would end up at or close to where they were before the basic income/welfare tax was instituted but how about you get a little closer to the weeds and examine it from somewhere closer than 50,000 feet.
I agree that as labor becomes outmoded, basic income concepts will eventually become more popular but that is so far in the future we will be trying to figure out how to handle the pesky separatists on Alpha Centauri.
The unique thing about American labor is that it is in America. Just like the unique thing about American Real estate is that it is in America. There is some labor that can only be performed in America at the moment. Construction comes to mind. A works program to rebuild roads and bridges might be worth looking into.