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US Senator Introduces the First Bill To Give Gig Workers Benefits (techcrunch.com)
Virginia Senator Mark Warner has introduced a bill that will give basic benefits to gig workers. "Warner has just proposed the first-ever piece of national legislation aimed at helping on-demand and other non-traditional workers without traditional benefits, like paid sick days or a retirement plan, have some sort of a safety net," reports TechCrunch. "The bill asks the federal government to set aside $20 million in funding for organizations to use to look at the types of benefits programs individual workers could take with them from job to job." From the report: "[Portable benefits is] that emergency fund," Warner told BuzzFeed, which first reported news of the bill. "It might be a fund to take care of a disability if you get hurt. It might work with some existing retirement programs. Part of it would be, depending on what happens with Obamacare, an ability to help deal with health care expenses. I think there will be a variety of models." The funding wouldn't be enough to cover everyone, of course, but if it gets the green light a draft of the bill indicates it would earmark $5 million toward grants doled out by Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta for organizations already looking into portable benefits and $15 million for new programs.
..which specifically targets computer programmers from an era before the government allowed millions of Americans to lose their jobs to cheaper offshore labor and to foreign nationals imported to be trained as their replacements to work in America without even knowing how to use toilet paper, deodorant or having any loyalty to the country, intent to contribute in any way to the common good or even an ancestor who ever defended the world from tyranny.
... but would it have been too much to ask, to mention that he is of course a Democrat.
Well, call me an optimist, but I'd have thought it would be a pool the workers would have to pay into themselves.
It's not like "benefits included" jobs don't take the cost of those benefits into account when creating a salary package, it just seeks to make that same arrangement more portable.
The flaw, of course, is that "gig workers" are paid shit. It looks OK on the surface because they're comparing their income to one that has already had a good portion removed before they see it to pay for benefits, but it's shit.
Is running a sole proprietor business a "gig"? Or is that too formal to count? It's the same exact thing with even more volatility.
For the purposes of this plan, a "gig" is defined as any area of labor for remuneration where there is not enough money to feed political campaigns and lobbyists sufficient protection money to prevent government interference.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It would already be much simpler to solve this problem with a basic income that everyone gets.
The biggest problem that I see with this proposal is, as others have pointed out, where do you draw the line between someone "doing gigs" and a sole proprietor of a business with a variety of clients? Or between either of those and an independent contractor working full time over years for one big client? Say the latter were entitled to benefits because he's close enough to a regular employee; if he then shifts to working, still full time altogether, for two different clients, each of them for years at a stretch, does he lose those benefits? If not then, then how many clients does he have to have before he stops being "basically an employee" and becomes "basically the owner of his own company with a lot of customers"? And then, between that sole proprietor and the "gig worker", what, does it depend on how many hours he's in business, or how much money he brings in, or how regular his customers are? Even if you decide where to draw those lines, how much overhead cost is there going to be just determining on which side of each line every single person in the workforce falls, before you even start talking about the money paid in actual benefits, and then the overhead to run all the separate benefits programs, etc?
Much, much simpler to just give everyone a simple cash payment (call it a tax credit, make tax payments due and refunds distributed monthly instead of annual, and you need no additional administration overhead), funded by a flat tax (of that credit amount over the mean income, so the math automatically balances out and it is revenue-neutral). Everyone gets a safety net with which to obtain the services provided by the otherwise free market, everyone still has incentive to work because everyone always wants more and there's no downside to making more money because you still get the same benefits, and everyone pays the same percentage of the additional money they earn to fund it, which has the overall effect of everyone making below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population) seeing some net benefit, people near the mean income seeing almost no effect whatsoever, and only the people at the extremely rarefied top of the income scale actually paying much of anything in net. It puts a centerward pressure on all incomes, driving them closer to the mean with a force proportional to their distance from the mean, meaning that as income inequality gets worse it pushes harder, but as it gets better it automatically pushes less. And it lets you let the entire rest of the market operate freely, cutting all kinds of expensive specialized benefits programs and things like minimum wage, resulting in an overall freer market, but with none of the usual downsides thereof.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Marx did not propose ideas — to be implemented or not. He thought of his theories as laws of nature — like gravity — take it from someone, who was forced to study Marxism in high school and college...
His claim was, the workers' revolution is inevitable when the means of production develop beyond a certain point. That it did not actually happen in the US, UK, and other countries is proof, the asshole was a fool and wasted years of his life on a big mistake — while his wife brought up their children.
Or maybe we should, now that the realization is kicking in, stop this creep up of Communism and go back to having a drastically lower involvement of government in the citizens' daily lives? Something like this, perhaps?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There already IS benefits 1099 contractors can take with them from job to job (gig to gig)...it's called learning to negotiate your bill rate so that you can pay (and be free to choose) your own health insurance, set up a nice HSA to sock away pre-tax money for routine medical needs, to pick and choose your own retirement, set up a SEP, sock away and invest your money as you wish...no, we can't have the vast majority of contractors be depended upon to put on their "big boy" pants and make their own choices in life, negotiate their gigs, have the freedom to move from job to job and be able to write of actual expenses of doing business (mileage, etc).
No...we throw the baby out with the bathwater, on something that has worked for a LONG time, now that there are some new twists on it out there.
No one holds a fucking gun to your head to work 1099. You have to either be a responsible (and talented enough to be in demand) adult, and know what jobs to take and how to negotiate, do paperwork and budget to be a contractor, OR...have it be something part time to add money to your regular "day job".
I"m sorry, but being an uber driver has never been about making a living at it full time, it is a part time job to make some side money.
But, here we go, likely ruining people that do "real" 1099 contracting, and balance the risks vs the rewards of this form of employment, and independence.
If you are a real 1099 contractor, you already budget your bill rate to pay you own benefits and vacation/sick time...and it is portable wherever you wish to work next....it already works without the Feds intruding even more into our work lives.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Why can't they pay into SS (retirement plan) and signup for 'affordable' Obamacare, paid sick days? As a self-employed worker, that's on the gig worker, not the taxpayer. Your gig economy 'career' doesn't pay enough to cover SS & Obamacare? Time to figure out a better career...
Ken
Why do you want to use the violent coercive power of the state to enforce one-sided contacts that are detrimental both to the worker getting screwed over and to society as a whole? Contract fetishizing Libertarianism is laughably hypocritical. It's impossible without a strong, central, authoritarian state.
More half measures. Fix this problem, fix that problem, when what we really need is a sensible, universal, single payer system. American healthcare is increasingly looking like a tower of quick fixes and temporary patches, which of course are ineffectual, because we won't start the root problem in the face. We need a healthcare system, not a medical industry.
Half measures are likely the only viable course of action at this point, because we don't stand a chance in hell in dismantling the trillion-dollar Medical Industrial Complex.
Greed N. Corruption has become far too powerful. Not saying it's right, just stating fact.
In several jurisdiction on the European continent, contractors are already legally required to get their own insurance (in countries that don't provide it), save money for retirement, pay insurance for sick leave, factor in vacation time in their rates, etc.
This ends up working nicely there.
It helps bringing down the amount of working poors.
So yeah, we "Evil Euro-Communists" have actually manage to find a way to fuck it less than your "Land of the Free (markets) !"
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All of libertarianism is impossible without a complete dictatorship. Interestingly one of the first people to every realize that and say it out loud was a highly regarded conservative.
History lesson follows:
Back in the 1970's after the democratically elected but left-leaning Salvadore Alende's government was overthrown in a coup by Pinochet, major libertarian economist F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman basically wrote his economic policy. Pinochet did the whole republican pipe dream. He destroyed the welfare state. He cut taxes on the rich. He locked the currency to the dollar and declared war on inflation. He got rid of practically every regulation (in between he killed tens of thousands of people rather brutally but lets' focus on the economics).
It was called the "Chilean Miracle" - the country's GDP growth rate shot up to amazing levels, it looked set to rapidly become the wealthiest country in South America ! It seemed too good to be true.
And Hayek set off to Britain to use those numbers to sell the idea to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher went over the list, looked at the amazing results in Chile, and listened to Hayek and then adopted quite a few of Pinochet's policies. Hayek ranted that only adopting SOME of those policies would not achieve the same good results and Thatcher told him: it's impossible to do more than a few. Chile is a dictatorship, Britain is a democracy. You can ONLY do the full libertarian recipe for an economy in a dictatorship - it's impossible in a liberal democracy over a free people.
The tail of the story is that it turned out the Chilean miracle actually WAS to good to be true - it literally never happened. What DID happen is that, in the absence of any significant taxes bankers had nothing to discourage padding their profit margins to drive up share prices, and in the absence of basically any regulation of the finance industry: there was no way to catch them doing it.
Soon every banker was reporting massively greater profits than any of them were actually making. In reality - none were making much more than they had been making under Alende - and the entirety of that massive GDP growth consisted of nothing but flagrant lies on balance sheets - bankers pretending they made much more profit that never existed, driving up their share prices and getting a lot richer.
By 1982 investors started getting fishy, some started investigating... and discovered the fraud- and the Chilean economy collapsed into tatters.
The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time did not yield a single penny in growth - all it did was to produce perhaps the greatest scale of bankfraud in human history (Seriously - it made the subprime crises look like somebody misplaced the petty cash). Somebody else based his ideology on the Chilean miracle - and never altered it even after the miracle was shown to be nothing but smoke and mirrors, Ronald Reagan.
And, in a very real sense, that's how the world we live in now was born.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Much, much simpler to just give everyone a simple cash payment (call it a tax credit, make tax payments due and refunds distributed monthly instead of annual, and you need no additional administration overhead), funded by a flat tax (of that credit amount over the mean income, so the math automatically balances out and it is revenue-neutral).
No. Flat taxes are inherently regressive because people with less money spend more of their income on taxes on necessities, and you are taxing them twice; once when they get paid, and again when they buy the things they need. Graduated tax scales are inherently fairer because those who derive the most benefit pay the most taxes.
If you want to fix taxes, start taking out exemptions. The best one is social security, which we call a contribution but is really just a kind of tax anyway. Remove the salary cap on social security and bang, you fix its funding problems immediately. Of course, that will drive people towards hiding more of their money in corporate tax dodges so that we have to crack down on those more, but that's not impossible either. Remember when the USA was just ignoring all the tax havens?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"can we please just have Medicare for All already ...?"
No. It would cause the system to collapse.
Medicare appears to "work" because it dictates the prices it will pay for any particular service. It certainly works for the people using the program, but the rest of us end up getting screwed because of it. Medical service providers make up for the losses they take on Medicare patients by forcing everyone else to pay more. Insurance companies have some negotiating power however. The prices they pay are much higher than Medicare prices, but nowhere near as bad as what a working uninsured person pays. Those poor folks get billed 5X, 10X, 20X or more than what Medicare pays for the exact same service! I'm sure you're heard the term "Medicare|Medicaid cost shift". All of the privately insured and uninsured people are forced to subsidize Medicare & Medicaid patients. What a brilliant system the government has designed. Shift the heaviest costs onto the working poor and lower middle class, causing hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies. I wouldn't describe that as a system that "works". In any other industry, this practice of price discrimination would be illegal, but government allows it in healthcare because the cost shifting is the only way the system is able to survive. If everyone paid the Medicare/Medicaid dictated prices(what you're suggesting) the providers would go bankrupt. If everyone paid the prices that the working uninsured are charged, Medicare & Medicaid would consume the entire federal budget.
Socialized medicine does not mean "Everything stays the same, except it's free". Keeping the providers in business without breaking the budget can only be done with higher reimbursement rates & strict rationing of services. "Medicare for All" is a pipe dream.
Nope. It is because he was wrong. Fundamentally...
According to him, for example, 8 hours of work by a ditch-digger is equally valuable as 8 hours of an engineer or a pastry-chef. Equally valuable and therefore to be equally rewarded. As I said, wrong .
The progressive movement of 1900 had little to do with what's known as "progressive" today. But if you are willing to defend, what those guys did, let's start with the Prohibition... :)
No. The reason was Capitalism's ability to produce wealth — more than any other regime — and enough of it to keep the workers and the farmers satisfied, to the dismay of the Marxists. It is this satisfaction they've been trying to erode with varying success ever since — with made-up "outrages" over non-issues like "gender equality"... See also Marxism 2.0.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
No, I don't think this is true — what ditch-digger would prefer a ditch he dug to a pastry? But even if he did value his ditch out of some sentimental attachment, what of it?
No, I haven't. And why is such inequality even a bad thing automatically and by itself? Is Michael Phelps' ability to swim so much better than that of the rest of us alarming? Should we impose a "windfall" tax on his Olympic medals? People have equal inalienable rights, but we aren't born equal. Unless you are also prepared to cripple the strong, lobotomize the smart, and disfigure the beautiful — for equality — why would you tax the successful?
But stipulating, the said disappearance of the middle class is both real and bad, why are you accusing the Capitalists of it — and not, for example, the ever increasing government "spreading" of everybody's wealth around? Or, for another example, not the trade policies favoring the truly oppressive (Marxist) China?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A flat tax plus a basic income becomes a progressive tax in net, so progressive that it becomes negative below a certain income, approaching negative infinity and zero income, while approaching but never exceeding the fixed percent as income tends toward infinity. Gross income plus a fixed amount minus a fixed percent moves all net incomes closer to the same number by some percent, meaning those further above and below that number get pushed toward it harder, and those close to it get pushed toward it less. E.g.:
384,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 384,000) = 300,000, an effective tax rate of 21.875%
192,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 192,000) = 156,000, an effective tax rate of 18.75%
96,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 96,000) = 84,000, an effective tax rate of 12.5%
48,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 48,000) = 48,000, an effective tax rate of 0%
24,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 24,000) = 30,000, an effective tax rate of negative 25%
12,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 12,000) = 21,000, an effective tax rate of negative 75%
6,000 + 12,000 - (0.25 * 6,000) = 16,500, an effective tax rate of negative 175%
If you set the tax percent to the credit amount divided by the mean income (or better, conversely, fix the credit amount to the same percent of the mean income, so it goes up automatically over time), the math automatically works it out to be revenue neutral. In this example I've assumed a mean income of $48,000/year (which is a little lower than in reality but makes the math easier to show) and a basic income of $1000/mo or $12,000/year or 25% of that mean income.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
However, lots of less wealthy countries have good universal health care. It's more complicated than just extending Medicare, but it can be done.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
From your link ( https://www.bloomberg.com/poli... )...
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said "We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs and the amount spent on those programs."
Bloomberg fraudulently inserted a period to make it seem like that was the full quote. It was not. The full quote is:
"We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but the number of people we help get off of those programs."
Bloomberg's cut-off, altered version doesn't make sense. But the full quote demonstrates an understanding of what true compassion is all about.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.