Uber is interesting because it uses a very right-wing business model (independent contractors, skirting government enforced monopolies, bypassing nearly all regulation) to provide substantially better quality service to progressives than left-wing business models (e.g. taxi commisions, heavy regulation, medallion quotas, etc.) As such, it poses a conundrum for your typical urban liberal, because their beliefs about the proper role of government do not conform to reality. Obviously this isn’t a very surprising observation to anyone right-of-center, but progressives will need a bit of doublethink to get them out of this situation.
For what it’s worth, the continued success and growth of lower priced rideshare offerings, like Uberpop and Lyft, soundly indicates the inability of democratic processes to produce correct market outcomes. The intelligentsia uniformly sound the alarm for more regulation (all the while hypocritically partaking in barely regulated ridesharing), but market forces strongly indicate that people prefer the cheapest possible taxi service, with very little consideration given to quality or safety. Since Uber and its ilk do not impose negative externalities on uninvolved bystanders, there is hardly any need for government regulation. Those who prefer higher quality, safer ridesharing services are free to purchase them. The fact that most people prefer cheaper taxi rides indicates that no one actually cares about safety except for progressives who are eager to stifle and seek rents from a successful upstart.
The situation compares, in many ways, to the deregulation of air travel. Policy makers, who are overwhelmingly wealthy, cosmopolitan, and left-of-center, gave many dubious reasons for the necessity of maintaining highly regulated and expensive air travel. But because of their backgrounds, they were unable to recognize (or perhaps psychotically did not care) that their preferences strongly differed from those of the people they pretended to help. In the end, market forces prevailed and the cost of air travel sharply declined, a fall which happened to help poor people most of all. The same change will probably come to taxi service, likely with some regulation being imposed on Uber and co, but leading to the downfall of sclerotic taxicab monopolies and their incestuous relationship with captured regulatory agencies.
Well, my proposal solves it for health care benefits.
So we need to address retirement. Right now, the only qualified plans available to an employee are IRA plans with 5500/6500 contribution limits. But there’s no real reason we couldn’t allow an individual to set up a 401k-like plan so that he can contribute 18,000/24,000 plus 25% (up to his earned income), with matching limits deducted from employment tax as well as from income tax. An individual probably couldn’t set up a defined benefits plan (like a pension), but most employers are moving to defined contribution plans anyway. The days of a guaranteed pension are long over, even for full-time employees.
Next: dependent-care benefits. Right now, an employer can provide $5000 of eligible expenses, which are deducted from income and employment tax. An employee can only claim a 20% credit on up to $6000. Well, that’s a simple one to fix - eliminate the credit, and make form 2441 an above-the-line adjustment to AGI and employment taxes for up to $5000. Now we’ve equalized that benefit too.
Education benefits permit an employer to pay up to $5000 (roughly) for education expenses excluded from income. So modify the form 8863 credits to make that same deduction available to any individual.
Group term life insurance can be excluded up to certain statutory limits for employees under a company offering such a plan with at least 10 participants. So - I think you see where I’m going - offer a similar deduction from income to any taxpayer.
If a person were to get all these benefits directly from an employer, they only benefit from 1) simplified accounting and 2) real-time benefits. That’s because it’s done through payroll with each paycheck and reported at the end of the year. But everyone else can be made equal at year-end by allowing equivalent deductions for any individual with earned income.
Really, the last item we’re left with is unemployment benefits. Those are available to any employee (part or full time) but denied to independent contractors. We’d have to implement some kind of provision that would allow (or perhaps, require) self-employed individuals to purchase unemployment insurance for themselves. Calculation and collection of the tax is actually the easy part; with a self-employed person the hard part would be proving that you’re unemployed and calculating the benefits. Still, government regulations have tackled much more difficult issues.
Single-payer healthcare; single-payer retirement. Removes both from the employment equation. (Not that there are many companies offering anything like traditional retirement any more, anyway; it’s all on the individual to manage and control, which may be very libertarian but historically produces pretty poor results.)
I don’t see complicated tax and credit juggling serving any better end, except that it may seem simpler to try and tinker with the existing system than replace it in large strokes. I think we passed the “amend the codes a little” point a few decades back, and need to make some baseline changes in the system.
Unemployment benefits etc.? Well… I lean pretty strongly towards the basic income model, but maybe we don’t want to go there in this thread.
Single-payer systems definitely make it easier to decouple employment from benefits.
My personal priority is the quickest path to a system that doesn’t favor people who get benefits as an employee so that the playing field is leveled for part-timers, self-employed and unemployed individuals. To that end, I think that allowing a reconciliation of the existing taxes and credits is our quickest path there and a worthwhile goal even if we can’t agree on a broader reform of the system.
Ok. So the solution to the “third job option” is Universal Healthcare and Pension? Yes, I agree but Good fucking luck lol.
Canada has a weak version of what’s needed. No drug coverage and the pension is super lame. My dad made a very solid income and it earned him about 650 or so a month in Canadian Pension after 65.