Internet service also requires engineers and technicians to set it up and keep it going, and people to manage billing customers for it. Setting up internet service in rural areas would create jobs in this way, as well as allowing for telecommuting, cottage industries, and online coursework.
I have some reservations there. First, people do have different requirements. Someone with multiple handicaps might find it quite hard to exist on an amount of money that a healthy person would be fine with.
You could, of course, set up a system for extra support for the really needy… but then you’re back to a bureaucracy, differentiated payouts and a lot of the projected savings went up in smoke.
Also, I suspect UBI will work differently from country to country. A country with high employment will have costs spread out over more people, whereas less employment means a higher burden per person. Being freed from the actual need to work will probably lead some people to quit work and there is a risk of a negative feedback cycle there.
Finally, I wouldn’t count on replacing pension schemes people have paid into for all their lives.
True. Although have a civilized health system where there is universal access regardless of income would go a long way to mitigating that problem.
:smack:
Yes, I was being sarcastic. And no, that is not the proposal. My point, which seemed like it was not unclear, is that finances are a gradient. There is not such a thing as expensive and cheap. There is “competitive” and “non-competitive”. You can say all you want that the countryside is cheap, but that depends on what you’re comparing it to. As I noted, while you might be able to buy a whole street in Middlesville, America, you could buy a whole city in Somalia. If you’re a company investing in manufacturing, it might cost $1b to build a factory just outside Chicago, $500m to build it in Middlesville, and $250m in Centralo, Mexico. The fact that Middlesville costs less than Chicago still doesn’t make it cheap. Big ticket items are always expensive, even at their cheapest, so you have a strong incentive to go with the lowest bidder even if it means leaving the country.
Same thing for a person retiring. Looking at housing costs in Mexico (on the water), the price for a new house is about the same as for a new house in Stockton, Kansas. If you can be on the water, for the same price, why stay in the US? To be competitive, rural America needs to be able to offer a low enough price to compete against Mexico. Right now, it is not.
The Federal minimum wage is Federal, as is the Federal interest rate. That is to say, it is national. MSRP is national.
Yes, and that means that rural America, while cheaper than urban America, is still limited in how low they can go. If you split off rural America into its own country, able to set its own interest rates, minimum wages, etc. it would be competitive with Mexico. Right now, it cannot do that because it is sharing money with one of the largest economies in the world and many things are pegged to what city-folk can afford, making the countryside non-competitive with similar economies.
Even if it can’t get to quite the same level of Mexico, it will have better educated, English speaking workers in the same timezone as US businesses.
Jobs would bring the other things. If you have jobs and cheap living, you’re going to get workers. Once you have workers and cheap living, some number of retirees will decide to move out (instead of moving to the beach), to be by family. Once you have families, you’re going to get schools, hospitals, etc.
If you can’t make rural America competitive with urban Mexico, and yet you demand a minimum wage in the countryside and price products that are both tied 60% to urban life in America, you’re trashing all of the potential of rural America. It doesn’t need those values to be as high as they are, but they’re going to stay that way because, again, they’re sharing a currency with the most powerful economy in the world.
Small towns have to attract manufacturing. That brings jobs to rural people from 30 or more miles around.
The governor and mayors in my state are constantly recruiting new businesses and manufacturing. Offering deals on land and tax breaks.
There are advantages to small towns. Less traffic, lower crime, people used to manual labor. Ideal for manufacturing.
Hope Ark has about 10,000 people. Klipsch horns are designed and manufacturered there.
Because waterfront sucks? Not that I’d want to retire in Kansas either where it is alternately too hot or too cold, but there are plenty of places north, west, and northeast of Kansas where I wouldn’t mind retiring and some of them have fairly cheap housing as well.
Paying for shared services we all use and benefit from is not the same thing as paying everyone whether they work or not.
Maybe the money should be targeted towards people who are unable to work.
That may not necessarily be true. It actually might be more expensive to build and maintain the factory in Middlesville. The factory equipment costs the same but it costs more to ship it further. It may cost more to bring in all the men and equipment to build it. And Middlesville might lack access to highway, rail, ports, intermodal freight yards. Water, power and internet might also be an issue.
I don’t disagree with what you are saying here, I just don’t see how a two tiered economy would address any of these issues.
It really seems as though those using the cheaper money for their economy are simply going to be disadvantaged to those who are using the higher tier money.
Why stay in the US? I can think of many many reasons why you may not want to move to a country that has fewer services and protections, less stable government and economy, than the US.
Some people do make that choice to move abroad where their dollar will go further, but they don’t do that if they have any desire to continue to benefit from the things that are here.
I actually thought you made a mistake here, and did not mean federal, as obviously, that’s gonna be the same in all states.
Do you acknowledge that the State (and city) MW is different in Kansas and in NY, and that the interest rate you are actually going to get at a bank in new york and kansas may vary drastically, and that a mattress, while has a listed MSRP, is probably going to be much more expensive to buy if you buy it in a mattress store in NY vs Kansas?
I think that sharing the money with the large economy makes it better, not worse. If they are not sharing with a strong dollar, and instead are using a weaker country dollar, then importing goods fro other countries would be more expensive. Importing goods from the parts of the US that us the city dollar would be more expensive too.
But until then, you have no reason that anyone would want to move there.
That’s why different states and cities have different minimum wages. They have different property values. The cost of groceries in the store is dramatically cheaper in ohio (I don’t know about kansas) than in new york.
Most things like food and land are going to be cheaper in rural areas than in cities.
The things that aren’t are going to be things like internet access, healthcare access, and any manufactured products or machines that come from the cities with their larger industrial base. Creating a separate currency will not, in any way I can see, help to address those problems. It would just create another type of division between rural people and city dwellers.
How do you feel about those who are able to work, but are unable to find work?
Kansas and Missouri might not have the ocean but we have alot of lakes and rivers.
So in the short term, as automation replaces boring jobs, new jobs building new forms of automation should arise. In addition, the economy should theoretically expand.
I mean, if automated vehicles supplant 10 million workers, in theory that’s 10 million people who can be providing automation engineering services or physical therapy to the elderly or some other now “hot” job that our economy needs more of. As a side note, as the boomers become elderly, there in fact is expected to be a huge amount of additional jobs providing them healthcare services, at least for a few decades until they are all expected to die.
Right now, the USA is considered to be at roughly full employment. (we can debate whether that number is fudged in another thread). That means that for the USA economy to grow overall, people must be freed up from some current jobs so that they can occupy new ones.
So it’s not all doom and gloom. Not for now. Yes, ultimately, the automation is going to grow to the point that it’s hopeless for anyone who is not a superstar automation engineer or an owner of capital. And then another phase of growth will mean that AI takes 100% of all jobs. But that’s decades away, maybe centuries, nobody can say for certain.
*But *- basically all these future jobs are going to be in cities, per the theme of the thread. Rural areas only have 1 thing to offer - resources. Land and buried resources. And most of the tasks involved in farming are boring and simplistic - no reason the farm equipment cannot be almost completely robotic. There would need to be service centers where the robots get maintained, but with automated vehicles, the equipment could drive themselves to be serviced in most cases. There are soil chemistry checks and checking for bugs on a given field, but that could be done remotely by some agricultural data analyst. (who is a city slicker)
Same argument for mining. The logical outcome is going to be that mining gets done from the surface, where the workers basically work in a big maintenance shop, and only the robots are allowed into the dangerous underground.
So if rural areas fundamentally don’t have anything to offer - the only way any politician can do anything about this is they can either :
a. transfer wealth from productive industries to prop up industries in rural area
b. transfer wealth directly to the individuals who live there, giving them just enough money so they can move
(b) is a much cheaper option. Whether or not it’s the one that gets taken is politics, (a) sounds better.
For the same reason connecting them with roads, rail and electricity does. It makes them less “sticks” like.
This is not a problem that is likely to ever get “solved”. People in rural areas typically vote against policies that redistribute wealth or provide nationalized services that would benefit them. They also refuse to retrain or move. You saw this with the last election. They would rather vote for someone like Trump who promises to bring back their outdated jobs in obsolete industries rather than vote for someone who suggests replacing those jobs and industries with modern ones.
Broadband is nice but it isn’t enough. Yes, there are some jobs you can work totally remotely - but generally those positions are going to be kind of competitive. A lot of Americans work remotely some of the time. The ones with the good jobs have real in person skills and connections and do show up in person once every other week or so at a minimum, the remote workdays are just to save time that would otherwise be wasted commuting. Any job that can be done *completely *remotely - that doesn’t have some difficult aspect that you need to manipulate something in person sometimes - can just be performed by a foreigner in another country for less money.
So you need to be in a cities. Cities have connections. You can get things done in a city. Need any sort of specialized equipment or specialized service? A city probably has it. Cities are specialized towards different industries. Where I live, if my company needs specific services, you just pick up a phone or look online, and you can get it. It’s drastically more efficient than it would be trying to accomplish the same task in the sticks.
Also true of Somalia and Centralo. I was factoring that into the overall cost.
I’m not sure why people think rural areas should be a priority. There are plenty of manufacturing cities that need to be revitalized. And doing so would provide more bang for the buck than laying broadband in rural Iowa. Places like Detroit, MI; Little Rock, AR; Bridgeport, CT; New Haven, CT; Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA; Trenton, NJ. These cities have been plagued by economic stagnation, crime and all manner of social ills for as long as I can remember.
That aspect is covered in the OP. The rural areas have the outsized political power to drive the rest of the country. The dying cities don’t.
That’s the difference that makes the rural issue relevant here in 2016/2017. That may change over time.
How much extra power do they have? Districts are supposed to apportion to population, I thought the imbalance was from rural states and the rule that all states get at least 3 electoral votes, even if almost no one lives there. 538 has pointed out that even with this system, populous states have enormously more political power. It’s just a slight imbalance, a bug in the system as it were.
(hey, the founding fathers had only basic mathematics and they were working under a deadline! they did ok, all things considered)
Personally, I don’t think rural areas should be prioritized. I think poor people need to get the fuck out of rural areas and move closer to urban centers where social services can be delivered to them more efficiently, and where they have a better chance of finding training/job opportunities.
I could understand preserving the rural way of life if folks were living off the land as substinence farmers or something. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. However, I’d be fine with the state enabling rural folks to set up their own farming collectives. Some programs like this are being tried out in cities on a small scale.
Isn’t that “Govt. interfering with our way of life”? /sarcasm
You already have a completly unbalanced, undemocratic System with Gerrymandering, so why should anything else be balanced?
Yes, what a pity everything the founders did was cast in iron and carved into Stone and can never ever be … amended … to modern times. And what a pity that the US is so exceptional - God’s own Country, and the only true Democracy ever on the face of the Earth - that it can never ever look at how other countries do it and maybe adapt something.
I feel like we are pretty good at structuring communities around whatever resources and infrastructure is needed to make them work. What we aren’t good at is restructuring those communities or possibly even dismantling them altogether when the technology changes and the old configuration is not longer viable.