Adjusting for inflation the author proposes each adult can keep a yearly income of $132k and each child half of that or $66k. The amount is somewhat arbitrary and we can imply there are adjustments for personal circumstances (cost of living, special needs, etc.), but those details are a complex social policy. For example: the author’s allowance per child biases their system strongly towards larger families. Those that are part of the No Kids Movement would draw very different lines.
I’m not sure how retirement factors into this idea. Are retirees on a fixed-income automatically more moral? Or do we take the mean income over their lifetime? Or the sum total such that people that live longer are less moral?
The author themselves think a better number might be a third of that. I have the sense that all of us, except the most libertarian, would agree that there is a point at which too much is too much, but I suspect that many of us would draw that line somewhere higher than where we are currently at.
This is the weakness of quantitative or ala carte morality. It is not practical to apply and the bar of success is set so high that the underlying message gets lost. Practically speaking, those of us that are lucky enough to have opportunities need to have a positive impact on others both directly and indirectly (through government policy and organizations).
To me, the weakness is that it’s so — disconnected? Like, if you tell me I can choose to be better off and be less moral, or not as well off but more moral, that seems kind of abstract.
I think there’s two different, but related ideas floating around this thread. It might seem obvious, but in this case I think it helps to point that out.
The idea that the workers who are actually generating wealth, whether that be food, a durable consumer item like a chair, a blue collar service like fixing a leaky faucet, a white collar service like a doctor’s visit for management of a chronic illness, or whatever else, get to keep the money that is used to purchase those goods or services.
The idea that everyone, regardless of what kind of good or service they provide to others, or whether they provide any kind of good or service at all, should be compensated the same via wealth distribution in one form of another.
Sure, but what that works out to is how much of what one spends is going to those who actually worked to provide it for you vs. how much is going to the owners of the means of production. With something like iMusic, very little of it goes to the actual workers, with a food truck, a much larger percentage does. With charity, one isn’t directly getting back anything of value, and so the considerations are again different.
To come back to the two different concepts I mentioned above, I’m all in favor of the first one, that people who do the actual work should reap the actual benefit. Regarding the second, I’m against using wealth redistribution to try to make everyone equal, short of providing a bare minimum for those who are unable to earn wealth by providing some kind of good or service for others. In practice the vast majority of those people will be children and the elderly, along with the smaller number of disabled individuals who can’t work due to their disability.
ETA: I think getting these two ideas mixed up is a huge part of the reason that a large segment of the public (AKA the typical working class Republican) are so strongly against socialism. What I think they are really against is the second idea that I mentioned, not the first one.
For number two, I don’t think it’s so much people being compensated the same as it is establishing a minimum standard of living that everyone should be able to enjoy.
There’s another concept that isn’t touched on:
Just spreading money around without actually generating more actual wealth (i.e. more houses to live in or more eggs to stock grocery store shelves) potentially creates additional demand without corresponding supply and inflates prices. So you get into the question of whether it’s better to give people checks or to invest that money in businesses and infrastructure that ultimately increases productivity.
Those are just the consequences of trying to fix things by the first method vs. the second. If someone generates additional wealth (building houses, raising egg laying chickens, etc.) that person should be compensated for their labor, as opposed to compensating some oligarch whose only contribution is having a piece of paper that states they own the building company, the chicken farm, etc.
On the other hand, If we give people money (whether by taking it from those who did generate wealth or by running the printing presses at the mint for a longer period of time every day) even though they didn’t generate any wealth, as you say, we get inflation rather than doing anything to address the fundamental problems.
ETA: What is my recommended plan? Take money from the owners who contribute minimally or not at all in actual wealth generation, and give it to needy people in a form that they would have to spend it on things that would benefit them, but also with that money going to the people who did the actual work that generated whatever it is they need (shelter, food, whatever). This would thus incentivize increased economic activity rather than hoarding money.
It’s not a question at all, it’s the former; trickle down economics doesn’t work. Deciding to “invest that money in businesses and infrastructure” just means the owners pocket it themselves, both out of greed and because there’s no point in doing otherwise. They aren’t going to bother in increasing productivity when there’s no market, and without increased demand there isn’t one.
The economy is driven by demand, not productivity. And there’s not much demand when the great majority of wealth is held by a small minority.
It’s driven by both. That’s why it’s a “supply and demand” graph.
I’m thinking more in the sense of places with extreme poverty like Afghanistan or Sudan that lack any sort of infrastructure. Even if you just gave everyone piles of money, what would they spend it on?
You ALSO need infrastructure such as roads, water, electricity, high speed internet, etc as well as large businesses that can provide the economies of scale to provide a large amount of products and services affordably. And those are capital-intensive projects that typically can only be financed by governments or large corporate / financial entities.