Bernie Sanders is in for 2020 Was this his announcement?
asahi:
I think the real ‘ism’ ought to be innovation-ism. We need to rethink many of our assumptions about how our economy, society, and political system are going to function in a new age, particularly one that will be radically transformed by not only new technology but a new (worse) environment.
I just ran across this last night. I thought you might be interested. It’s a website called Evonomics: The Next Evolution of Economics . There are articles from Andrew Yang as well as articles on how traditional economics is not working as intended in many respects.
asahi:
I also agree with Yang on the minimum wage. I’d rather simply pay people a dividend or whatever you want to call it instead of forcing businesses to pay a cost for the sake of human welfare. Businesses probably should pay corporate taxes that go to a national welfare scheme, which would include healthcare costs and a pension program. I’m for a basic wage floor so that workers aren’t outright exploited, but using that wage floor to make the market pay a livable wage is probably just going to make it harder for small businesses to compete and it could even raise inflation in the longer term.
Some information from another thread on the $15/hr minimum wage.
Yeah, there’s a enormous quantity of literature showing that minimum wage increases haven’t increased unemployment by any measurable amount. You’d have to do some pretty selective reading to miss it.
Here’s Brad DeLong’s summary, of which the most relevant bit is: “The majority of economists believe that raising the minimum wage from its current level would significantly boost the incomes of the working poor and have little adverse effect on employment. A large minority of economists believe that raising the minimum wage would actually increase employment…There’s no debate on whether minimum wages at their current level are discouraging employment. They don’t.”
Here’s a paper studying the impact of increasing the minimum wage by more than 50% (from 8.25 to 13). Conclusion: "After the minimum wage hikes, incomes were boosted most for more than 330,000 total workers in low-paying occupations and industries…Overall, the higher minimum wage has been associated with an increase in worker incomes but little to no impact on employment or the number of private business establishments. "