Since when is being a stay at home parent not working? I’d say that if you are a stay at home ‘parent’ who sits on the sofa eating cheetos all day while ignoring your family, you may be a parasite on them. But if the family is supporting you, that’s their choice. It’s not a matter for tovernment, and no one is asking strangers to support the choice through taxes.
I don’t care how you arrange your personal life, so long as you are not asking society to pony up to support it. I’m retired early, and can now spend my time yammering on the SDMB if I want. But I am living on an earned pension and savings, and will eventually collect a government pension that I contributed to my entire working life and had no choice in.
If I were sitting here doing the same thing, but I was broke and demanding that the government pay me with someone else’s labor despite being able to work, THEN I’d be a parasite.
I’m using ‘parasite’ technically, by the way. as in, a member of a community that depends on it for survival but who refuses to contribute. A test for this is to universalize it: If you demand to be given a basic living without working what would happen if everyone in society demanded it? Would things still function? Could we pay for it? Would hard but necessary jobs still get done? If not, you are taking advantage of the fact that other peoole will not make the same demands on society that you are.
No, it doesn’t. Jesus. This is not that hard a concept. And is ‘not a good look’ another character shot?
The problem is that you have been failing throughout the discussion to put specific criteria on the concept, and then getting annoyed when people don’t correctly guess exactly what it was you intended by it.
You seem to think that somebody who lives on money that legally belongs to them, even if they did nothing to earn it and never make any other useful contribution to society, doesn’t count as a “parasite”. However, somebody who is partly or wholly supported by taxpayer-funded spending is a “parasite”, no matter how much they are contributing to society or how hard they’re working (e.g., by raising children).
You say that you don’t count your own retired status as “parasitical” because it’s funded by your own previous earned income. When you start drawing your government pension, if you end up receiving more in benefits than you paid into the pension program, will you be a “parasite” then? If so, will you cease drawing that pension in order not to be a parasite on society, perhaps going back to work in order to replace that pension income?
If you wouldn’t, I don’t really see a qualitative difference between you and the single mother who lives on welfare benefits rather than earnings while she’s raising young children full-time. Both of you are expecting the government to “pay you with someone else’s labor”.
This is the sort of detail that you really need to get into if you want to throw around such an adversarial term as “parasite” without being misinterpreted. You can’t just invoke vague phrases like “asking society to pony up” and expect people to know exactly what you mean by that, unless you explain it.
For example, there’s the issue of why somebody should get a pass on “parasitism” if they’re going to school on a taxpayer-funded scholarship, for example. Or, for that matter, via special government-subsidized low-interest education loans. How does that not count as “asking society to pony up to support” your educational ambitions, at least in part?
You seem to be able to figure out the worth of being a parent without assigning a dollar value to the labor. Why is it impossible to do the same for drawing a webcomic, or performing music?
Your post was all about productivity, not where support was coming from. I’m glad you realized that this wasn’t a reasonable position.
I guess you consider the Poor Law Amendment Act a good thing. No handouts, put them in workhouses designed to be so bad as to discourage the poor from freeloading.
It’s sort of been touched on but the thing I wonder is what people who believe that money shouldn’t be given to people who aren’t working would think if productivity increased to the point where a much smaller percentage of people needed to work (10%? 1%?).
Regardless of whether there is a practical way to make it work, at some point is there a point where it would be desirable to run a society with that principle being minimized or eliminated.
I think this type of thinking tends to come from low income unskilled workers. The thought process being, “I have to spend 40 hours a week cleaning toilets, processing meat, collecting garbage, etc. and barely make enough money to spend my free time sitting in an 8x6 room, watch 25 year old movies, and eating bean paste and algae. Why should I have to do that work if I can earn that “reward” without having to put in any of that work?” And as things stand, they have a point. Their work, however unskilled it might be, should let them enjoy access to more luxuries than those who get “the bare minimum” for now working.
This is a problem that those on the right overlook, even the working class people who should know better. I really don’t get where they’re coming from either. If the working class right would only get on board, we as a society could force the owners to pay their fair share.
Take the typical owner of a sports team as an example. Say Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, Robert Kraft, or Joel Glazer, to take some of the more assholish examples. They don’t produce anything of value, and they do lay about while other people run things for them. The value from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example, comes from the entertainment they provide and those who provide support to allow the athletes to provide that entertainment. That is provided by everyone from Tom Brady on down to the person cleaning the toilets in the stadium on game day. Anybody can sign a check, and while that provides a lot of money, it doesn’t generate any wealth / provide any value. Those owners, therefore, are benefitting off the labor of all their employees, while doing nothing but signing checks.
ETA: If you think the owner is necessary, just look into the Green Bay Packers as proof that an owner is superfluous.
Seriously? There are plenty of jobs in law, finance, real estate, consulting, marketing, general corporate management, and other fields that get compensated far in excess of any value they create. Certainly a lot more than anyone who actually makes or fixes anything for a living or service jobs like firemen or teachers that society actually needs. Or perhaps more accurately, maybe they create value for people or entities that already have large amounts of capital.
When it comes to property tax specifically you folks in NJ do not have one of the highest tax rates in the country. You have the highest, period, in the country.
A lot of it just replaces benefits we are currently providing. And because it’s universal there’s less overhead in providing it.
And yes, I’ll collect that money in some nominal way, but almost all of it will be taxed back, so the net cost of including me in that universal payment is modest. And yes, I’ll pay more taxes. And so will you.
Yeah, that’s probably true. You know why? Because rich people know other rich people, and we all know parasites who inherited enough money to live nicely and don’t bother to do squat to make the world a better place. And we also know people who work their asses off running scout troops, organizing community theater, making music, creating dance opportunities, cooking at soup kitchens, organizing volunteers to clean up local parks and rivers, … who don’t have a lot of money and sometimes struggle to make ends meet. And if we are honest, most of us know that we have enough money to live our comfortable lives because we were lucky. We were dealt good genes in the birth lottery, and our parents helped get us started educationally and financially. Yeah, i work. I like to think my work adds value to the world. But I’m lucky as shit, too. The difference between me and the lady who cleans my house is mostly luck. She works harder, at less pleasant work, than i do.
And the difference between me and the person who has disabilities and can’t hold down a steady job is almost all luck. Yes, i want that person to be able to live, to know that they will get enough protein paste to go to bed with a full stomach, to trust they’ll have a roof over their head, and heat in the winter. And if they know that, and if they won’t risk losing that by earning a little money, hey, when they are able, maybe they’ll play music for tips, or entertain kids at birthday parties, or help cook tastier meals for their roommates, or… you know, the productive things that people are likely to do even when they aren’t forced to.
For Yang’s plan, these savings only covered about 5.4% of the $1k/mo. The rest was covered by taxes or borrowing. Granted his is not the only way to do it, but he had more detail than many.
Adjusting income tax brackets and rates is one way to do it*, but AFAICT he kept those in place and added new taxes (VAT, financial transactions, capital gains at income rates, uncap SS, carbon tax.) How that works out for any individual is hard to predict. FWIW his increased taxes and savings only covered about half the cost.
*And this would have been my go-to if you’d asked me to design a plan so that you and I don’t come out ahead, but I fully admit I don’t know if it’s possible to get the math to work out.
For the sake of clarity, let’s say that this person does indeed lay about expecting others to run the factory for him. Hiring a factory manager with experience running factories is just good sense, after all. And hiring accountants to manage the money and/or the family’s wealth. And hiring lawyers to handle all of the details of business arrangements. In fact, it seems more typical than not for someone in this situation to not actually be involved in running the factory, IMO. I mean, I guess if they’re choosing the managers and accountants and lawyers they’re “running” things, but it’d be like me saying I’m doing work to remodel my house because I picked the contractor.
We can further expand this hypothetical to include someone who inherits real estate and hires property managers to run it while living off the collective rents, or someone who inherits a massive stock portfolio and hires financial managers to manage everything while living off the interest. Or a medieval lord who inherits a fiefdom and lives off the collective labor of the serfs who work the land.
These are all pretty black-and-white scenarios of people living off the labor of others, and I don’t really see the distinction you’ve made that they’re not “forcing” others to do it, while at the same time holding everyone to the expectation that they need to work to survive. If the factory workers, in your opinion, need to do work in order to survive, and they choose to do that work in this specific factory, is that barely even a choice? And in what way does that fig leaf of a choice absolve the factory owner from being a parasite?
The difference I see is that @Sam_Stone isn’t actually concerned about a person being a parasite, but is concerned about who the parasite is attached to. The prototypical wealthy layabout who consumes as much as 20 normal people while never having done productive work a single day of his life is not a problem because he’s convinced Daddy to pay for his lavish lifestyle.
The problem is when a parasite is attached to Sam, even if that person works more and consumes less than our wealthy parasite. It’s a reasonable distinction to make, but it divorces the concept from a public policy issue, and makes it one of personal concern. If we demand that people work to survive, it should apply to all, not just people without rich parents.
Forcing people to “work to survive” will not work smoothly for them who, for whatever reason, can’t. Also, you will see exploitation situations like when Angela Merkel’s government had refugees working for one euro per hour (vulnerable refugees are not likely to go on strike or boycott, why not exploit them?)
Thinking about this more, i think most rich people also know lots of rich people who don’t have to work and do it anyway, either for wages or as volunteers. Because most people like to contribute to their society, feel useful, feel valued by others, make a difference, etc.
So, for instance, i know four people who never had to work again when the software company they worked for went public/was sold. (I also know tons of people who worked just as hard but worked for software companies that weren’t Adobe or Google.) I know them because they are active, contributing members of groups I’m involved with. One runs a lot of puzzle-related things (as a volunteer) and creates and tests puzzles and games (also as a volunteer.) He’s also raising two small children. Two are active in various forms of dance, and help those activities stay afloat in meaningful ways. A fourth continues to work in a different field, but is also very active in the dance community.
Yeah, I’m sure there are people who would be satisfied living in a 10x12 room, eating Purina primate chow, and playing 25 year old video games. But most people want more. More space. Better food. And mostly, most people want more social connections, more appreciation, and more sense of accomplishment.
You must live in a very simplified universe where no sues anyone else, where there are no regulations from the government that businesses must adhere to, where land or buildings aren’t needed to produce goods, where no new products are ever introduced, where you have no need to understand if you are operating efficiently or not, and where people just pay compensation to people with no regard to the value they create.
In other words, you’ve never run a business have you?