Universal Basic Income is real, and it’s coming.
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agriculture and construction (for mexicans). Neither of which Americans want to do and ironically both industries pay well above minimum wage.
Interesting. I asked the homeless man who frequents my block if he would help me move some furniture for $10. He said yes, helped me, and I even bought him a 40oz to go with the $10
Universal basic income, as a replacement for the labyrinthine system of public welfare, would be fine, and probably work better than our current system. Would almost certainly save money, too. The issue is that the left (at least the modern left) doesn't view UBI as a replacement for welfare but a mere supplement or addition to it.
I try and stay out of the political stuff for the most part but, uh, she's pretty terrible.
I'd be shocked if it didn't happen within 20 years. The only way it wouldn't happen is blatant Luddite protectionism. I'm not advocating UBI today but I view it as a moral necessity at some point. There will come a day where technology is advanced enough that we can't all be gainfully employed but I won't hazard a guess on when that day is.
"I can't believe you and people like you want to force pregnant women to carry dead fetuses to "term" and make them endure active labor just so you can control their bodies."
See? I can misrepresent your views on this too if I, like you, didn't give a rat's ass about context.
Ag is notorious for paying minimum wage. Going to need a different example on this one.
The Seneca, SC McDonald's also has a kiosk, and the Walmart now has more self-checkout aisles than normal checkout aisles with cashiers.
All I can say is if she has a knife, keep your penis away because she has a Lorena Bobbit look to her.
I don't see that as an ethics question, if we are talking about some sort of mandated wage (which is what this thread is about). At least not as stated.
IMO your salary should be what value you add to the organization. In the case of a fast food operator, it could be expressed as what will it cost to put a machine there. It would be stupid for a business to pay someone $30,000/yr when a machine can do the job for $20,000.
I think in your scenario, the onus is on the family to improve their income through education or just working themselves up. I don't think the government should have to give them money.
There is a lot of money to be made in the trades now, if you are willing to do it.
Now - in the scenario where there just aren't enough jobs then there is a problem. I'm not sure what we do at that point but I think the idea of excess taxes on the wealthy will backfire. Bill Gates has already addressed this - people will find ways to hide their money from the taxes. Because the rich can afford really good tax attorneys and accountants. So UBI is likely a non-starter.
I think in the end people will always have to find a way to add value.
@CUAngler
Yes. So to bring in ag workers on a temp work visa you have to first offer those jobs to US citizens. Assuming none apply (which happens 99% of the time) the farmer must pay those workers the "prevailing wage" in your region. Those workers who are paid on piece rate (based on productivity for a job like picking fruit) can make more than the prevailing wage, but are guaranteed no less. If any Americans come to you at any time during temp period you must hire them at those rates and provide housing.
Here are the 2019 wages:
https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/adverse.cfm
His idea won't really help and it's based on the premise that $1000/month will somehow end up being spent and produce more money for the economy. And his way of getting that is adding a series of new taxes and it's a backdoor way of getting VAT into our system which is the worst idea ever. We are not Europe. We came here to get away from Europe. If people want the European way, there is open immigration between our nation and the EU. I didn't get too far into this video before I couldn't take anymore. He's making a lot of assumptions and jumps that are not necessarily correct. We do have a very uncertain future because of automation and we need to start thinking about this problem. However, I get off the bus when a labyrinth of taxes starts being proposed. The top 25% of earners are paying far more than their share of taxes now. Adding more will not help us solve problems.
I doubt I'd agree if he's running as a Democrat, unless he's not progressive. I've heard people from across the spectrum discuss the pros and cons of UBI, though
I think it is an ethics question. If your stance is "If you can't support yourself off the earnings of your 40 hr/week job, you just need to be better" I guess that's fine. I don't agree with it. I think some people just don't have a lot of that kind of potential. Bettering yourself also tends to cost money and always costs time and those things are at a premium for the sorts of people who can't support themselves on a 40 hr/week job. My stance is that one way or another, you should be able to live if you work 40 hours a week.
Oh so you're assuming all of these people are working totally on the up and up. I don't know what percentage of agricultural workers are working legally but I'm pretty certain it's disproportionately low.
EDIT: This article says it's between 46% and 70% of agricultural laborers are undocumented.
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To start - we are talking about the wages a company pays to their employees. Not some sort of charity above that or government assistance.
The problem is that wages come down to cold, hard, unfeeling, non-partisan, non-racist, non-sexist, nonreligious, non-homophobic math. The universal constant.
Let's be real here - not all jobs are worth a "living wage." What you must understand is that every company works very hard at doing more with less. Less scrap. Less rejected items. Less overhead. And less labor. What often stops them is that labor is cheaper than other options. Right now, it may be cheaper for BMW to use a person to install the windshield in the X5. But raise how much they have to pay this person (by sliding the pay scale up by raising minimum wage) and suddenly that $100,000 machine that can do it, with an expected life of 5 years looks more attractive.
Examples:
Checkout clerk at a grocery store - most customers can do this themselves. Now many places have one checkout clerk for four self-serve stations. Amortize the cost of those stations over their life span and you probably come out cheaper than having the clerks. So how can you pay the clerks more than the machines cost? You can't.
Fast food employee - being replaced by technology. If that machine costs $20,000 a year to operate and replaces an employee that makes $30,000/yr, it would be stupid not to do that. The math says you have to in order to stay in business.
So people have a few options - improve their skill set (their value to the workplace) - which can often be done by just working their way up, or find another route.
It's not that I don't WANT people to be able to make money - the math just does not work.
It should also be noted that minimum wage was never intended as a living wage. It's a wage for high school kids. But LOTS of other stuff is tied to it, and if you raise minimum wage you wind up sliding the entire pay scale up. Which effectively means the buying power of each dollar goes down and you are right back where you started.
When we get into government subsidies - now the problem is where does the money come from? Tax the uber-rich and the uber-rich start finding tax havens like Lichtenstein and Greece. Suddenly Dwayne Johnson's next movie is made and produced in China and his pay is in RMB to a Greek bank. Jeff Bezos moves his personal money (at least what his ex-wife doesn't take) to Lichtenstein through clever accounting orchestrated by his rock-star accountant. And the whole system collapes.
Bill Gates has even commented on it and said similar things:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/b...re-extreme-and-missing-the-picture-2019-02-12
(he goes into part of it anyway)
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Once again that is flat wrong. With the proliferation of e-verify and harsher immigration enforcement going back 5-7 years you find very few farm workers who are undocumented. It does not exist like it did 10 years ago. As farms have consolidated and increased in size farms are run more like corporations. They can neither find nor risk breaking the laws to hire undocumented workers. When you need 200 workers to pick tomatoes you can't risk it.
https://www.epi.org/blog/h-2a-farm-guestworker-program-expanding-rapidly/
You can see from the link above that h2a applications have skyrocketed in the last several years indicating more and more are paying 50%+ above minimum wage.
This is the part that most people miss when they start hating on UBI. Cuts out all the governments wasteful bureaucracy that's built around modern welfare. Could actually SAVE more money than it costs, relative to our current systems.
And in a weird twist of fate, creates more unemployed individuals. That's neither for it or against it, just an interesting byproduct.
You don't have to explain how continuous improvement works to me; it's literally my job.
I don't really care what the original intent of the minimum wage was, to be honest with you. Your argument is that it's a wage for high schoolers but a lot of people working minimum wage jobs are not minors. Half of minimum wage workers are over 25. I don't think the argument that they should just earn more money is a practical one. If you think that wages should only be dictated by industry then I think the government should provide a safety net.
I don't think you read the Bill Gates article. He said raise taxes and didn't talk about fleeing at all. He said that we should raise the Estate Tax, Capital Gains tax, etc. I sincerely doubt that all of these wealthy individuals are just going to move simply because they're taxed more (especially when people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all of Hollywood want to be taxed more).
EDIT: Also from that article and interesting: 5% of South Carolinians earn at or below minimum wage.
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Your link says that visas are on the rise, not that illegal workers are rare.
Well, let's figure that out. Let's say I make $10 per hour (That's well above the minimum wage that I'm sure you are against raising). I work 40 hours a week for $400 dollars. That sounds like about $1200 dollars per month. I'm sure that after taxes and social security that comes to < $1000 per month. And again, that's WELL above the federal minimum wage.
That's actually one of the points the guy makes, not many would make use of this.
I doubt you actually listened to the link above, but one of the points is that there is not going to be "at some point" automation is going to take away people's jobs. This is already happening. Right now, only about 1/3 of all Americans graduate from college and HALF of American jobs are in Transportation, Manufacturing, Food Service, and Clerical. In other words, jobs for folks with a HS education Transportation and Manufacturing have already been hard hit by automation. What's going to happen when we figure out AI that can drive things around from one place to another? It's already in the works. As technology increases there are always new "good" jobs created to maintain that technology, but these jobs are FAR fewer than the jobs lost to the tech advances.
For example an assembly line may be retooled and a factory with hundreds of workers now has < 100 (granted at a better pay grade). At some point and this is going to happen sooner rather than later, there simply won't be enough jobs to go around for the people wanting them. I've yet to hear an adequate response to the problem.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea of this at all. This practically screams welfare state. But I'm very unconvinced the a 40 year old truck driver or an unemployed coal miner is going to be able to pick up computer coding or be retrained somehow. AND even if they could, there simply aren't going to be enough jobs around to replace all the low tech jobs lost.
Lot's of saying how this is bad on here, but few ideas on how to fix what's already a big problem.
I don't believe that this is so, but I do believe that right wingers say this so that they have an excuse to be against it. FYI, the guy above actually said that UBI would supplement the current system ONLY if the person didn't get over the $1000 total.
You can argue this one all you want. I can just tell you from my extensive experience in this industry that the notion that illegal workers are the norm and/or wages are close to minimum wage are factually not correct. Remember, the original point of this discussion was wage rates, so even if the workers were illegal that would not prove that they were being paid at or below minimum wage.
Wages HAVE to be dictated by industry. I don't see how this is even considered an opinion. It's math. If a person doing a job costs X, and a machine can do it for Y, and Y<X......you go with Y. In reality it does get a little more complicated since sometimes the numbers aren't as firm as we'd like but the point remains. Do it any other way and you go out of business, put out by someone who DID do it that way.
There are a lot of jobs that machines can't do yet - but those jobs aren't minimum wage either.
As for the article - it was a start - basically it shows how dumb all of these "tax the rich" ideas are simply because the Uber rich WILL find a way around them. I believe that was basically Greece's economy until recently. It's all around you. Ever notice that cruise lines register their ships in oddball places rather than the US? Why Delaware has so many companies based there? It also shows how dumb these tax proposals from Warren, AOPSC, etc are.
As to Buffettm etc - they all SAY they want to be taxed more until the bill comes.......
They also don't have to move. They can just move their money. It would be complicated, but once again, the real money in tax accounting is in DODGING taxes. If I were an uber-billionaire, you can be damn sure I'd dodge every tax I could. If for no other reason than to make a point. Not to mention if you take 70% of earnings over a certain amount, why would they then earn money over that amount? Seems like it would't be worth the effort.
End of the day - whatever we/you/they come up with, there will need to be a way to pay for it. And it will have to be sustainable.
And to think, at one point in time in this country a form of UBI twice passed the House with broad bipartisan support and the support of a conservative Republican president, Richard Nixon. People, especially conservatives, think it's a crazy, radical new idea when it's really not.
Worth your read if you're interested and have the time: https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/t...-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145
Worth your read if you're interested and have the time: https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/t...-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145
You do realize in the link you provided ITT that less than 1% of the hourly wages earners are in farming, forestry and fishing that make at or below the minimum wage. It is actually among the lowest of any industry at just 1.7% of workers within that industry making at or below.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm
I agree automation will take away some jobs but they will still be a need for operators and skill workers. I am sure BMW is a state of the art automation plant and how many employees do they employee ? I worked in manufacturing for 37 years before retiring in 2013 and yes we automated a lot of equipment in the last 20 years but still needed operators , warehouse employees , maintenance employees, we also had to hire contractors to do compliance inspections and repairs on hoist, elevators, forklifts, pallet jacks, HVAC , forklifts /pallet Jack battery inspections and cranes...A lot of the robots we installed were to eliminate heavy lifting and increase the speed of loading pallets with finish goods...Still a need for all the other jobs...
Your math is a little off ..10 per hour x 40 = 400 per week x 4 (most all months have 4 weeks) = 1600 per month not 1200... 400 per week x 52 ÷ 12 = $1733 per week...with that being said I don't think any manufacturing jobs start out at 10 per hour. Flipping burgers yes..
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I just don't see the incentives in place with UBI vs the Reverse Income Tax, as it was framed by MF. Milton was very clear about the importance of that component. Thanks for your thoughts and best wishes.
People talk about a universal income like its a video game. Like its just something we can do by flipping a "switch". Has anyone actually listened to people like the one in this video. He admits, 1/2 the population is on government assistance already, millions of manufacturing jobs are disappearing year to year, people don't want to be re-trained, etc.. So the solution is to just flip a "switch" and presto! Don't worry, a check is in the mail!
This is the craziest shit I have ever heard. Debt notes don't appear without consequence, digital units of account don't just appear without consequence. All of this is nothing more than creating "wealth" from nothing and indebting your posterity. This idiot actually thinks if he "pays" people, them "spending" it is going to actually "create" something!! WTF!! Why even give the people anything! Why doesn't the government just bypass the people and finance the whole country then? Pay the people, pay every employee and employer, then everyone has all of this "money" so then the government can collect the taxes from the "wealth" they created from nothing!! LMFAO!! Talk about a circle jerk in economic theory!!
This is the craziest shit I have ever heard. Debt notes don't appear without consequence, digital units of account don't just appear without consequence. All of this is nothing more than creating "wealth" from nothing and indebting your posterity. This idiot actually thinks if he "pays" people, them "spending" it is going to actually "create" something!! WTF!! Why even give the people anything! Why doesn't the government just bypass the people and finance the whole country then? Pay the people, pay every employee and employer, then everyone has all of this "money" so then the government can collect the taxes from the "wealth" they created from nothing!! LMFAO!! Talk about a circle jerk in economic theory!!
I'm sorry but your anecdotes aren't worth anything to me. If you can't provide a citation for your claim, it's probably because it isn't true.
Well wages are dictated by government (to some extent) now. We have a federal minimum wage and we have overtime. It is not true that we live in a completely free market. However I was only providing the bounds of my views on the subject. I think that if you are willing to work for 40 hours a week, you should be able to live a modest life in this country. If the minimum wage isn't enough to support that, I believe there should be social programs to close the gap.
I agree that tax avoidance is a real thing. I also think it's curious that rich people have loopholes that they're not currently exploiting but will start exploiting when taxes get too high. I also find it curious that the rest of the developed world has higher taxes than us and somehow haven't collapsed because of all of the tax avoidance of the wealthy.
You're right. I contested a point that wasn't really relevant to this conversation but I was wrong nonetheless. Even if illegal immigrants are getting paid more per hour than minimum wage, though, it's not necessarily accurate to suggest that the agriculture industry would pay those same hourly rates if it was fully staffed by legal employees. Paying someone under the table avoids payroll taxes and I'm assuming they also receive no benefits. It's like a company paying $100 an hour for a contractor vs $100 for a W2 employee. The W2 employee is actually more expensive.
Not one single financial aspect of our country is controlled by the so-called "free market". Why? Well its actually very simple, the market no longer determines what money is and the cost (interest rates) of it. Both are dictated by government decree. Its been that way for over 100 hundred years now. Prior to 100 years ago, there are virtually NO examples of a UBI. I wonder why that is? I know, people actually did the unthinkable, they actually PAID for their expenses as they went along.
Government no longer pays (taxes) as they go, instead we borrow (like a UBI) as we go. If we actually had to pay for wars, health care, SS, etc. we would end basically all of it tomorrow. A UBI would fall under the category of "unfunded" liabilities and that is already into the hundreds of TRILLIONS of dollars. Who gets to pay for all of that chunk of change, any volunteers out there?
Ethically - I tend to agree. A person willing to actually work should be able to feed themselves and live a modest lifestyle. But just about anyone working full-time in this country isn't at minimum wage either. Where I work uses a lot of unskilled label and we even pay over minimum wage. But either way we seem to have put the minimum wage argument to bed for now.
As to the "rest of the developing world" there are a lot of factors there that I won't get into.
Now this could be different in places with higher costs of living but I don't know how to address that one.
As to the loopholes it's risk/reward. There's a cost to moving all of your money to Greece or Lichtenstein. For the Warren Buffetts or Jeff Bezos of the world right now it's probably not worth it. Raise the taxes enough and it suddenly becomes more fiscally responsible.
Also bear in mind if these people really wanted to "help the masses" they could do it right now. 10% of Buffett's fortune would provide health insurance for a LOT of people.
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This is painting with too broad of a brush. What is a "modest" life in this country and by what standards do you measure it? Also, the cost of living is not the same in all areas of this country but federal minimum wage and overtime laws are; so, if two people make the exact same pay in the exact same job in two different parts of the country, assuming their definition of modest is verbatim in all respects, then one may get social hand outs and the other may not based on where they chose to live and the associated cost of living? And all of this is done under the auspices of fair and equitable? I have a hard time getting on board with that.
