Telecommuting can happen for so many jobs that bringing broadband out to rural areas needs to be a priority. Particularly if H1B visa restrictions become tighter – entry-level jobs for coder types will open way up. It doesn’t take that much training for someone to pick up enough SQL or something similar to do entry-level work.
Now that employers are starting to realize that they don’t need to physically stand over employees to make sure they work, telecommuting is feasible.
I’ve wondered whether a two-money economy could be feasibly implemented. You would have “city money” and “rural money”, each managed by a different Federal bank. Each census, you designate each county to one of these groups and all businesses in that area will give and take money of the correct type, and money exchange services available at banks and other locations.
While that might seem a bit extreme, I feel like there are more issues at stake than employment. Like it or not, intelligence is at least partly a factor of genetics, so if movement of people is completely unidirectional and correlated to intellect, your countryside is going to get slowly stupider. Or even if you don’t believe that to be a real worry, you still have to consider that if no one is moving back out into the countryside, there won’t be anyone explaining what life is like in the city, why cityfolk think in certain ways, etc. The rural areas won’t have any mechanism for moderating their beliefs according to “foreign” ideas.
But if you can make these areas look promising, financially, to live cheap, start a family, retire to, etc. then you can achieve a more even movement of people in and out of the city, to keep the country more balanced socially and genetically, while also allowing the countryside to do a better job of competing with foreign nations.
They are already cheap.
Most houses in nice neighborhoods around here go for upwards of half a million dollars.
I could buy an entire street in some rural areas for that.
I have a strong revulsion for going to work every day and having my paycheck go to pay people to sit around doing nothing. As long as there is some work that needs doing by people, the concept of “fairness” comes into play when determining who has to do it.
Of course, the way work is evolving, the notion of needing people to show up some place for 8+ hours a day and perform some rote task is rapidly becoming obsolete.
It’s the same thing with rural areas. There is a cost in laying fiberoptic cable, water lines, power lines and other infrastructure. The benefits for connecting those far-flung remote areas generally doesn’t outweigh the costs. Particularly when there are actual cities and greater metro areas that need to develop this infrastructure.
In reality, how much of the population of the USA doesn’t have some sort of internet coverage?
There are many different models for Universal/ Basic income. The Basic Agreement is:
Partly it combines welfare, disability pay, and many other payments already given to poor People, but eliminates the different bureaucracies (partly to make sure People are below the Limit for welfare, partly because disability is a seperate Office, etc.) That part would save Money.
Partly it’s a new tax or raising the current tax Limits esp. for capital Investment gains, and maybe in the future, for Robot owners, along with normal income tax for anything above a ceiling.
It has been tried twice, once in an European mountain village during the 30s Recession, and once in a Canadian town during the 70s. There’s a lot of data from the second Experiment that has only recently been discovered and Needs analyzing, but preliminary analsysis Points that giving People Money without making them feel like charity cases or make them jump through hoops, means that they apply themselves for education, which improved their chances at Jobs, and a healthier Lifestyle (maybe less stress and more satisfaction).
And broadband allows Streaming of educational Videos, like MOOC from many universities, for People who can’t afford a real University on-Campus.
Part of your paycheck goes to taxes because you live in a community and enjoy the benefits of the social contract. Which means paved roads; Schools that educate the workers, because otherwise each employer would Need to start teaching reading before they can employ People; having a working court System for dealing with Business matters (more or less).
Part of the social contract is that you don’t let People starve, so you have welfare. The only question is whether you believe that most poor People are shirkers who don’t deserve it (a common myth, Facts disprove it) - then you spend a lot of Money on Bureaucrats to make hoops and control poor peoople.
Or you accept that no matter what System, and at what Level, a certain percentage will always look for ways to game and cheat, but up to say 10% of cheating, Society can live with it. A lot of People cheat deliberatly on their taxes, but when they are rich, there is far less interest in getting more tax inspectors to catch them.
And looking at non-poor People: how many CEOs waste their time in their Office doing looking-busy work because they are unable to properly do their Job? (The orange cheeto is the most public and recent example, have you looked at his schedule?) But there is Little complaint about that, for some reason…
I’m sure the rural folks will just love your offer to move them elsewhere. Herd them up, move 'em out.
It’s one Thing to start a dedicated retirement community in sunny Florida, building it from the ground up with the right infrastructure, and sell it to middle-class or richer People.
It’s another Thing to have small villages of a few hundred People far away in the sticks, who are all poor living on just-survivable Pensions, without infrastructure.
You could build a cheaper model of a retirement town with the right infrastructure near a City and try to make them move there (though not all old People want to move), but the state/ govt. would Need to pay for it.
Sorry, you’re right. I forgot that price was binary, not continuous. No such possibility of cheap, cheaper, somewhat cheaper, a ton cheaper, nor cheapest. We may as well get rid of dollar values on products and just write, “Cheap” or “Expensive” on them.
You could buy an entire city in rural Mexico.
What is the Federal minimum wage in New York City?
What is the Federal minimum wage in Stockton, Kansas?
What is the MSRP for a queen mattress in New York City?
What is the MSRP for a queen mattress in Stockton, Kansas?
What is the Fed’s interest rate for banks in New York City?
What is the Fed’s interest rate for banks in Stockton, Kansas?
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic there, but that is EXACTLY your proposal.
By going to a two tier economy, you will be getting rid of dollar values on products, and substituting city dollars (expensive), or rural dollars (cheap).
Would have to look them up, as I don’t live in New York City or Kansas,
Unlike your claim (?) that I am looking at things from a binary perspective, I think that is you.
I live in what is aptly called, (especially for this discussion) middletown. It is somewhere in between those extremes. My locality is relatively cheap, most houses around here go for well under 100k, probably mostly in the 60’s-70’s.
If you go about 10 miles south, you get into some pretty expensive suburbs. There are a range of houses, but you aren’t getting into one for less than 250k, and that’s gonna be a pretty tiny one. Average is upwards of 500k, and many go for well over a million.
If you go out to the east a bit, you get into some really cheap areas, where houses go for well less than $50k.
Minimum wage, fed interest rate, and the cost of a mattress are all pretty much identical.
You aren’t going to get people to move to rural areas by making it cheaper somehow. It already is cheap.
If you want to get people to move to rural areas, you need to add services, like broadband, and school and hospitals. Jobs would be a plus too.
Is income commensurate to exertion given?
If so, i’m going to be rich.
Under current system, pulling 80 90 hours doesn’t make me rich
it does change tax bracket though 
Is that how the labor market works?
Huh, no, that is not how the labor market works. You answered your own question!
In the 1950’s poor rural kids migrated to the metro areas upon graduation from high school.
They knew they would have no future hanging around their rural town.
Why should it be any different today ?
If you live in a poverty with no job/real low paying job you can sit and cry " woe is me" or do like the generations before you did and move to where the jobs are.
Because there are fewer jobs in the metro areas. And the job requirements are higher.
This is avoiding the question. A universal basic income of 15 grand would cost around 4 trillion dollars if you limited it to adults. That is more than the entire US federal government budget.
Yup, people just think the govt can just snap their fingers and…PRESTO…everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income
Taking your numbers at face value, remember that Basic Income is in lieu of all the other transfer systems. So SS, SSDI, and all forms of “welfare” and food stamps and rent subsidies and EITC and … all disappear at the same time.
So yes, it would be more expensive than what we’re paying now. But the incremental cost is a lot less than the total cost.
We also gain the ability to shut down all those bureaucracies and spend the money on the public, not in the bureaucrats.
The smarter way to implement paying for basic income is to implement a capital taxing system. Companies pay some fraction of their taxes in shares, not in dollars. The dividends of this growing fund are used to pay benefits. The end state a hundred years alter is that everybody “owns” or at least has the rights to, some fraction of the capital stock of the nation.
In an era when the vast majority of economic returns are to capital and very little return is to labor the only way to have a populace that participates in the formal economy is to have them be capital owners as well. Whether directly or by proxy via a sovereign wealth fund is the only real question.
Absent that we end up with an economy like present day southern Mexico or Congo, with large swathes of the populace not in it at all. our system of government will not survive that economic transition. So we need to prevent it somehow.
The truly interesting question for me is what a successfully implemented BI would do to anti-social behavior and all the money we spend on police, courts, prisons, and private security to handle the consequences of that behavior.
If this produces a vast new sub-culture of idle hands we might see an explosion in crime. If it removes the need for a lot of people to steal to eat or afford what they think of as the basic necessities it might have the opposite effect. Hard to say *a priori *which effect will predominate.
I’m not terribly excited about universal basic income, but it seems trivial to wiggle the tax brackets such that the basic income is negated for those with higher income. I don’t need UBI, so tax me $15k more. So it doesn’t have to be a net outlay of $15k (or whatever) per person.
Many cottage industries are located in small towns. Now one doesnt need high speed for say just a website but some access is good. The government years ago required subsidized phone service in rural areas and so I see no problem with some web access.