You know what stops that? Better education. Especially for women.
So, I take it you’re in favour of free university education, at least for women, since the fertility of the poor is such a concern for you.
But they weren’t intended to be careers. Full stop. Just because some try to make them careers doesn’t magically turn them into career jobs because a worker would like them to be, nor does it follow that the government should turn them into career jobs. I also mowed grass when I was a kid. Should that pay a living wage? How far do we go down the bunny trail with this?
Can we agree that there are certain jobs that are not meant to pay a living wage or are we outlawing those jobs?
Why does “a person should not do X” mean that we must have a lavish government program to prevent a person from doing X?
But you didn’t take a paycut, did you?
Do you think you’re particularly exceptional in that?
The benefits of education women are manifold. It’s unquestionably a net benefit to society to do it. Government (and civil society) should spend its money on things that benefit society.
It’s got jack to do with what people “should” or “should not” do. It’s not an argument from morality. It’s an argument from economics and other benefits.
But even for your argument - what’s the alternative? Punishing women who do what (you say) they “should not” after the fact? That’s so shortsighted it’s just not funny. Have you never heard that prevention is better than cure? A stitch in time saves nine?
I’m not going to say I think there shouldn’t be any means testing - but I do think it should be graduated (lose $1 in benefits for every $X earned above the limit or something similar) rather than like falling off a cliff, where making $1 more makes you lose eligibility altogether. But I’ve known plenty of people, both professionally and personally who have limited their income to keep some sort of benefit. It generally requires advance knowledge of the income limit , knowledge of how close you will be to the threshold and some ability to control your income - but wouldn’t you turn down 10 hours of overtime if you knew it meant you would lose your medical coverage or your eligibility for affordable housing ?
That’s nice. Are there 40m ‘intended to be a career’ positions available for these people? If not, what exactly do you think these people should do to care for their families?
They can theoretically increase their skillset and compete for the 57m good jobs in the economy, but all that does is shuffle who has a good job and who has to settle for a lousy job. It doesn’t magically create 40m new good jobs out of nowhere.
Even if it did magically create new jobs, who would work those 40m lousy jobs that are now open? They’re terrible jobs, but someone has to do them. As much as we want to rag on those jobs, they’re actually very important for the functioning of the economy.
One last parting shot for this post, I once agreed that some jobs shouldn’t pay a living wage, and anyone working that sort of job to support a family should get some other kind of support to fill in their needs. Unfortunately, some folks in the government have weaponized social support, so I can no longer agree. You work a job, you get paid a living wage. Full stop.
I think a sensible solution would be to gradually reduce the benefits on a sliding scale as income increases, rather than have a sharp cutoff line where you stop getting it if you make even $1 too much. I would have happily payed a monthly premium to stay on Medicaid.
As far as I can tell, the Republican solution is simply to slash Medicaid. If the GOP had their druthers, I wouldn’t have ever been eligible for it in the first place because I’m an able bodied adult with no children, not covered under the pre-Affordable Care Act status quo. I strongly disagree with that.
Conservatives defend CEO’s making hundreds of times more than their employees by saying we need to pay them all that money to motivate them to work hard. But when the issue of minimum wage comes up, they say that if we pay poor people too much money, they won’t be motivated to work hard!
When was the last time you paid somebody to cut your grass ?
Or babysit your child ?
Or walk your dog ?
Or clean your house ?
That ignores the very existence of the third option that many of us are talking about: reject your definition and pay “an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work.”
I do feel as though some of these arguments speak directly to a couple things I’m fond of saying:
- The spreadsheet belies the humanity. You have a rather rigid idea of ‘how things ought to be,’ but it isn’t how they are (which brings me to my next recurrent theme). There’s an ‘ultra-rational’ and ideological dissonance swearing that X ought to work, Dammit, though it clearly isn’t – at least, not for the many (read: poorer);
- The keyboard study that I love to cite
- Conservatives have talked about the slippery slope that’s taking us to eternal damnation since, IIRC, about 1777 (ibid)
- Many things about the structure, nature, institutions, legislation, and values-based systems in our country are based on what another DOPER referred to as the (something like) Straight White Christian Male Hegemony – the landed gentry at that. For them, the chess board is set up Just Fine, ThankYouVeryMuch. They resist every change that upsets this delicate (, sadistic, inhumane, indecent, oppressive, avaricious, Darwinian, colonialist) balance which inures overwhelmingly to their favor. It’s still the same fight of the Civil War at its core.
So awfully many of these arguments really remind me of the banning of smoking in indoor buildings. Remember the Chicken Little Contingent on that one ? You’ll kill business. Children will be born severely deformed. That’s Communism !
Ditto getting peanuts off of airplanes because people were having anaphylactic allergic reactions to even the dust.
But the histrionics have always, always, always been just that – in part because of the keyboard study issue, in part because of an interest in maintaining a grip on political and personal power and privilege – “never cede even an inch.”
But the arc of the moral universe is long but it is bending toward justice. Pretty much apart from Roe vs. Wade, this is why those old fights have always died out so quickly: the stubborn opponents were simply wrong.
Exploitative pay practices and the omnipresent threat of outsourcing for cheaper costs are exemplars of that: they really represent the hegemonic mindset I described above rather than any actual win-win outcome.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Right, that makes the most sense to me. Similar to how the IRS divides up tax rates by income brackets, so that people don’t have to fear accepting a raise/promotion because only the amount within the next bracket is taxed at that higher rate (although some people still don’t understand that, perhaps in their heads they got it mixed up with how public benefits works).
In fact, this solution is so straightforward that I can’t imagine how the writers of the current benefits laws did not foresee people handicapping their own income growth in order to keep their benefits. Or maybe that was exactly the legislators’ purpose, to gimp payrolls and increase the bottom line of the corporations whom they are in bed with.
That’s just it. What is an “honest day’s wage”? One that far exceeds the market value of it? That seems to be a dishonest wage.
To illustrate the point, as you have, should dog walking, something any 10 year old can do, pay $15/hr? Lawn mowing? You are just pricing things out of existence.
And, IMHO, that’s just it. You’re not pricing things out of existence. It’s almost like people who argue that HOAs are The Only Way Forward for Neighborhoods in America (how did we ever survive without them ? Answer: just fine, if not better).
Didn’t we have an economy – even a more robust economy with less wealth and income inequality – before Ronny Reagan and the Greed Is Good ethos came into power ?
[that’s rhetorical]
I’ve posted links to recent and credible studies that show that increasing the MW gradually has virtually no adverse impact on employment. The question is whether it actually is a positive sum game (and I think it is).
If it really is a positive sum game, then you mitigate the upfront costs (the alleged devastation of the economy, and elimination of an infinite number of jobs, neither of which seems to be true in elevated MW cities, states, regions, or other countries), and begin to raise wages.
The Market is like a corporation in a critical sense: it has no soul.
The Market is the single biggest factor (save for unbridled greed) in the privatization of profit and socialization of loss in the US. The Market is one clear way in which the rest of us truly subsidize the wealthiest Americans.
Why ?
It’s a textbook market failure.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But this isn’t that. Nobody expects a different result. It’s just that it works so awfully well for those benefiting from ridiculously low wages.
I really do believe that many Chicago School economists would passionately and sincerely argue that Feudalism was a market economy.
But it’s time to end that lie.
Save for collective bargaining – passionately and tenaciously targeted by the RW in the US (as the equivalent of “the Damned Yankees trying to ruin our economy and change our beloved way of life”) – the lowest tier income workers in the US have absolutely no power. That, in itself, is really a form of market failure.
It’s really not (rhetorical in the part I failed to quote). Take women out of the workforce and the problem is solved. I’m not seriously advocating for that, but for everyone that points to the 1950s and 60s as where we need to be now, lets keep things the same before debating.
That’s another (incendiary) thread entirely…
I think the point is that it could be done, and it could be done in an environment with a 91% top marginal rate.
To your point: I don’t think we can have it all and continue unchecked population growth in this country.
I do think that illegal immigration (NB: we drew all of these people here, in part to help privatize profit and socialize loss, so I think they need to be treated extremely humanely) is a market distortion.
But I also think that we can easily afford to pay people a living wage.
Look: would corporate EPS for some of these business decrease ? Possibly – at least at first. Would that result in lower stock prices and less investor interest from equity markets ? Same answer.
But if you take this downstream a bit, then you see what I’m talking about playing out: the wealthy become just a tad less wealthy and the poor become just a tad less poor.
And that’s not Socialism, any more than telling restaurant workers that they can’t crap on their hands and the return directly to work is Socialism.
Unfettered capitalism (and the kleptocracy that we’ve become) is what I’ve seen in emerging nations around the world. The nations that have the best numbers on scores of pretty inarguably important metrics tend to be the Social Democracies.
If we dropped the labels, and focused solely on outcomes, and then sought to implement best practices, we’d be heading toward much of what they do.
Instead …
#Murica
#FreeMarket
#NoNannyStateForMe
And of course the latter tends to be better for the economy, especially right now with super low interest rates, as poor people will spend the extra cash.
I think your basic premise is that its better to be unequally rich than equally poor.
I think most people would agree even if they don’t recognize that the poor in their country are wealthy by global standards.
This Onion article immediately came to mind: Man Living In Most Affluent Country In World History Has Nerve To Complain About Being Homeless.
Exactly. I view it as a clear positive sum game.
It actually reminds me of what Margaret Thatcher said:
The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money
That’s really just vacuous, ideologically self-serving blather.
In this case (the current American model of Capitalism), it’s actually true: keep squeezing every last possible cent out of the poorest Americans, and they will soon not have a cent left to give.
[In other words, Thatcher was as guilty of projection as DJT constantly was – she (almost surely unwittingly) tipped her hand]
And then you’ll have to spend an inordinate amount of resources either sustaining them or trying to advocate for legislation that says we should not sustain them, and then essentially watching them suffer and then die.
Sounds a bit familiar …
That seems reasonable; that all-or-nothing cut-off definitely makes things weird- a sliding scale and an opt-in option would be a great compromise. I mean, why NOT let higher income people opt into Medicaid if they’re willing to pay a portion?
I suppose the Republican viewpoint is that healthcare isn’t a right, shouldn’t be an entitlement, and isn’t the government’s business to pay for. When viewed through that lens, stuff like sliding scales, etc… seem like red herrings, when the goal would be to dismantle the entire thing.
Yeah? What if the dog is located far enough away from any 10 year old so that they can’t safely get there? What if the dog needs to be walked at a time the kid is in school? What if the owner doesn’t want to give a key to their house to a 10-year old? I’ve got news for you - dog walking services are very common, charging at least $15 an hour. My high school aged daughter worked for one when she had a license. Lots of adults worked for it also.
I had a paper route when I was a kid. Today with so few people getting papers there is no way a kid could make money with one delivery per block. Adults do it today. That’s not kids being lazy, that’s the market changing.
And sometimes the jobs become crap thanks to the employers. Retail used to be a career. Now lots of retail people get 30 hours a week and no benefits (and floating hours.) Is that their fault?
Lots of conservatives want to go back to the 1950s. I think they may be partially right. Give us higher taxes on corporations and the rich, more infrastructure spending, and less inequality. The '50s can keep their sexism and racism though.