The Green New Deal proposed by Ocasio-Cortez contains an interesting part:“Economic security for those unwilling to work.”
There needs to be a strong social net for those who are unable to work or temporarily out of work, no doubt. But for those who are **unwilling **to work, this opens up a huge can of worms. Many workers in America - perhaps even the majority - do not enjoy their jobs and work their jobs only because they have to make financial ends meet. If we provide enough financial assistance that Americans who don’t want to work, don’t have to work another day in their lives, then many millions of people (especially, those who work in minimum-wage industries, such as janitors, fast food, cashiers etc) would retire on the spot. That would be catastrophic for the economy.
Perhaps one could argue that this is just another word for Universal Basic Income. But UBI would also be problematic if it is so generous that many people simply quit working altogether and leave a gaping hole in the workforce. (Unless Ocasio-Cortez is proposing massive automation that would let tens of millions of workers not have to work, but I don’t think she is suggesting that at all.)
And this was about the least crazy thing in the green new deal, which I would have flunked if it had been handed in as a grade 8 social studies assignment. My favorite is the plan to replace all air travel with high speed rail.
And again, we have the marriage of climate change policy with the whole laundry list of intersectional stupidity like the UBI. Because apparently you can’t have one without the other, and climate change isn’t important enough on its own. So instead, let’s alienate three quarters of the country by tying climate change mitigation to radical left-wing politics.
Someone in the Democratic party who actually cares about climate change should tell AOC to shut up before she makes the issue even more toxic to anyone who isn’t already a fellow traveler.
This appears to be a manufactured outrage by the right wing, as the words “unwilling to work” do not appear in the legislation, but only in her press release; and the legislation is non-binding anyway.
Look, I’m not an AOC fan. I think she would be largely laughed at and disregarded if she were a poster on this message board. But if the topic is something like whether health care and affordable housing should be available to all Americans, or just those with jobs, I’m going to side with making that available to everyone. And I mean everyone.
So… UBI is unemployment insurance? If you are going to test for a willingness to work, then that’s what it becomes. And if you aren’t, then it does cover people who are unwilling to work.
Employees are not worth “as much as they would like to be paid” - if that were so, everyone would be paid 2-3x as much as they are now. They are paid as much as the employer is willing or able to pay.
Why the quote marks? I didn’t say that. They’re not paid what they’re worth.
I’ll bet you wouldn’t be too thrilled to clean the office bathroom yourself or wash your own dishes at a restaurant.
What the employer is willing to pay does not determine the employee’s worth only the power the employer has over the employees.
It seems odd to assume that the outrage isn’t genuine just because the phrase appears in a press release. There’s a lot of outrage at stuff said in Trump’s press releases, but I don’t think it’s “manufactured”, at least not all of it.
Trump shoots off his mouth and sometimes something happens. “Hey, I got a stupid idea, let’s withdraw from Syria!” and boom, it starts happening.
Here we are talking about someone shooting from the hip and the actual text of the resolution doesn’t support what she said, PLUS the resolution doesn’t do anything. If you ask me, it could well be that incompetence is partially to blame here: she may have thought her legislation said something that it didn’t say.
But yes, manufactured outrage. Typical for many of those in Trump’s corner when this woman is involved.
You’re not wrong, it’s a huge can of worms. What do you do with someone who’s unwilling to work? We’re already picking up a lot of costs associated with their choices, from emergency medical care to extra policing to homeless shelters and food pantries.
The “problem” is that as a society we’re generally unwilling to let this class of person just die on the streets. I mean, I think that’s a good thing, but that also means we’re going to have to address the problem one way or another, and there’s no indication that the way we’re currently addressing it is any good.
There are very, very few people who are unwilling to do any work at all. What you actually get is people who don’t want the work that pays them enough to live on. If we had universal basic income, then you’d see a lot more people following their dreams and becoming artists, philosophers, or other sorts of unprofitable workers.
Chronos, not everyone is a frustrated artist with an MFA working in an unsatisfying job. The vast majority of of people, if given a free income, will spend their time watching TV, surfing the net, drinking, smoking pot, or otherwise just chilling.
I grew up in a welfare neighborhood, and I never saw anyone on welfare following their dreams to be an artist. I DID see a lot of people sitting around on sofas smoking, drinking, and watching TV.
The idea that we will become a nation of artists and thinkers is ridiculous.
There are lots of people who will not do some jobs unless you pay them very well.
There are lots of people who, when offered free money or a ‘rewarding’ job that pays the same, will choose the free miney every time - Unless you think there are sanitation workers out there who would just love to get on their trucks and pick up garbage all day for free if they didn’t have to worry about an income.
Finally, there are lots of people who talk a good game about wanting to do a lot of things, but need to have a fire lit under their ass before they’ll actually get out of their chair and do it. Go look at the number of people who manage to find jobs just as their unemployment insurance is running out.
In essence you’re selling your labor to the company. Hence, they set the price they’re willing to pay for your labor (i.e. the value of your labor), based on economics- how fungible of a commodity are you? How high is the demand for your skills and experience? How inflexible is the demand for that position to be filled relative to the other two factors? And so on…
If you’re inexperienced and/or unskilled enough to be easily replaceable by someone just like you willing to work for less, then WHY would the employer pay more to hire you? That’s how a market works- if there are multiple providers of the exact same good, then people will buy from the cheapest one because why would they spend more? But if they need a specific good, or at a specific time, or with specific features, then there are less of them, and they’ll still try and get it cheaply, but the sellers will price it higher- that’s why a master carpenter commands a much larger wage than some goober with a hammer and no experience with carpentry.
So if you’re in this lower-end situation where your skills and experience don’t manage to even recommend you better than minimum wage (which is a pretty pitifully low bar for skills and experience, I have to say), and someone comes along and offers you the option of working for minimum or doing your own thing without having to work, which are you going to pick?
And if you’re an employer, you’ll probably have to raise wages for the people willing to work, but in the long term, you’ll probably look to automate where you can to save on labor costs.
And I agree that the idea that UBI/negative income tax/whatever is going to suddenly liberate people to become artists, thinkers and authors is absurd. Plenty of middle class and above people have the ability to explore this when they’re younger- how many actually end up as artists? Not many, probably because real artistic talent is scarce. What this scheme might do is convince a lot of people to be “artists” in the sense of they spend time doing artistic stuff without any skill.
Look at it this way… growing up in school, how many kids had artistic talent? Academic talent? Athletic talent? A small percentage in each category. The vast majority of students were not athletically, artistically or academically remarkable in any way, positive OR negative. The vast majority of the population is there- UBI isn’t going to change that. At best what you’d see is a relatively small number of skilled people emerging who never had the time or the wherewithal to do it before. But most people are going to do the same crap they already do in their off time- watch TV, fiddle with their phones, etc…
Since that applies to all skills, that takes the argument that success is based on hard work and blows it out of the water.
If someone is born with average or below average skills, why should that condemn them to a life of poverty and abuse?
This is happening already regardless of anything happening in politics. Automation especially with ever improving AI will render most menial jobs unavailable to humans eventually. Fast food cashier? Yeah your job is going away. Warehouse worker? Many of those jobs will soon be done by robots.
So the question is what do we do about the entire class of people that will one day not be employable because there will be no jobs that they can do? Soylent Green?