Tax as a %age of GDP is a fairly widespread way of measuring the tax burden, which today is relatively low.
This and this show the makeup percentage of revenue. Percentage from income taxes looks to have been higher around 2000 and in the '80s.
Your language is deceptive. You are trying to present income taxes today as having dramatically increased or being relatively high when neither of these things are true. As the graphs above show, percentage of revenue from income tax has sat somewhere between 40 and 50% since the '50s.
Reducing profits is the chief form of impairment that a business can experience. And if you reduce profits to the red, then you've destroyed the case for the business.
OK. So once we follow your idea and successfully drive wages - ie: costs - down to slightly-more-than zero, who is going to buy the stuff business produces ?
You need to consider that there's a revenues side of the ledger as well as an expenses one.
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards.
No it doesn't. An economy running on a razor-thin profit but still producing excess of everything it needed would have high living standards.
And we can see that living standards are declining despite all the regulation to the contrary.
Er, no. Living standards are declining because all the regulations that protected normal people's incomes have been systemically destroyed. That's why real incomes for almost everyone in the US have gone nowhere for thirty-odd years.
I think it's time to look at what's working and what isn't. My view is that a lot of that regulation is actually very counterproductive, making the situation worse.
Everyone knows what works. Post-WW2 USA (until the neoliberals took over in the '70s, brought in the morally bankrupt NAIRU, deregulated everything, started selling off public assets and disassembling the public services - again, a common problem throughout the western world, though some countries had their Reagans and Thatchers much later - here in Australia, for example, we didn't go full retard until the mid-90s) was the quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history. It was a time of increasing real wages, a large and financially secure middle class, relatively high social mobility, large-scale public investment and full employment as a policy goal rather than a bete noir.
Productivity gains haven't translated into increased real income for two main reasons: Increased cost of housing, and increased cost of education.
I think you need to think about this a bit more. Both of these things are paid out of real income.
Productivity gains haven't translated into real income increases because all the excess is getting siphoned up by a handful of people at the top and has been since the '70s.
It's important to point out that this is a deliberate policy choice.
(Also: House prices are largely driven by (artificial) supply constraints. Credit makes the problem worse, but it's a catalyst, not a cause. Look at South Korea - incredibly tight credit, but massive housing bubbles due to supply constraints. Residential use of land isn't even a rounding error - actual supply is, for most practical purposes, infinite.)
(Not to detract at all from another point you made, either, and that's the horrific cost of usury.)
A jobs guarantee is a better solution. At least until we hit the point where there really isn't anything for the vast majority of humans to actually do (ie: the Star Trek outcome).
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. People have to produce first before anything at all can be consumed.
Can you point us to some successful businesses that produce things without any expectation of selling them ? How long would you let gold toothpicks pile up unsold in a warehouse before reconsidering ?
The economy is demand driven. Without consumption, production has no point. No business produces without the expectation that their products and/or services will be consumed.
Supply-siders are always a hoot. Until you come to the horrifying realisation that they're serious, and have been running the world for the better part of forty years.
Businesses are not "impaired" from employing US workers. They *choose* not to so as to achieve greater profits.
(Note that this is common issue across the western world as most barriers in place to protect living standards have been torn down in the name of greater profits.)
I agree with this in principle, but reality is sadly a touch more complex. Fact is nearly everybody needs help sometime in their life, and a few need it nearly continuously.
Sure. That’s what welfare and publicly funded services are for.
How does that factor if the employer is simply adding the output of her production into the standard supply stream? She assembled sprinkler components. Purchasers wouldn't know that disabled labor was involved at all unless they really dug deep into the certifications and such.
It’s more about the employer doing the right thing.
It’s a good scenario to throw in though, as a sanity check, but I would say that it falls into the area of welfare/public support. The work such people can do is good for them health-wise, but doesn’t really “count”. Worth considering is that these sorts of jobs are going to disappear completely - if they’re not already gone - in the very near future thanks to automation.
Ah, so you're actually rewriting my proposal to fit in with your concepts.
Well, no, I’m applying it to some of the complexities of the real world.
Everyone who is unemployed will be dependent on the BIG, and most people in low-paying jobs will become dependent on it. Broadly speaking, anyone who is currently dependent on welfare payments of some sort, would be dependent on a BIG. Because - as you’ve said - ultimately your BIG is just a more streamlined and efficient version of the system already in place.
People can’t just up and move. Moving is disruptive, expensive and time consuming, and the kind of people who will be dependent on a BIG will be the lower socio-economic groups who have basically no spare income or savings to start with. Cheaper areas also tend to have less employment, so you’re basically forcing people without jobs to relocate to somewhere with lower chances of finding a job. Ghettoisation of a kind.
That’s before considering the impacts of forcibly uprooting people from their social support structures. Think about kids in schools. Think about people in similar situations to your mother (who might become disabled and unable to work through, say, an accident).
'Management level' is actually a spectrum, but broadly speaking you're correct there. That being said, I think 'broad regional adjustments' should be the states/cities supplimenting the BIG if they wish to do so, not the feds varying it themselves. As I said earlier, if NYC wants to suppliment it, they can. People in NYC would just get 2 deposits instead of one, or however NYC decides to administer things.
This is a possible compromise, but it does sort of break the premise of a single payment.
Sure it does. Like I said earlier, it acts like a form of unemployment insurance, which makes moving between jobs easier by reducing the transition risk. Making it easier for people to move between jobs does not help people who don’t have jobs.
No, you've just ignored them. Unemployment - By eliminating welfare cliffs, it eliminates the penalties those on welfare face when seeking employment. Ergo, they're more likely to actually find jobs, because a job actually improves their situation. Income gaps - I don't actually give much of a shit about this.
I haven’t ignored them, I’ve refuted them.
You are almost entirely focussed on people who already have work, and trying to make it easier for them to change jobs (and having lived and worked in America ca. 2008-2011, I have some appreciation of the realities). Your secondary focus is on people who have jobs and want longer hours, and while you are correctly concluding that welfare cliffs discourage them from taking on more work, you haven’t properly considered why welfare cliffs exist - because wages are too low (wages are too low because they’ve basically not grown in real terms 30-odd years while inflation has done its usual thin
It is exactly how it works. You will not find anyone actually responsible for running the accounting of taxation and expenditure who disagrees. But the most obvious way to realise it is the truth is to consider: how do I pay taxes if I do not first have money ?
This might help you understand where money comes from.
Hard to take anyone seriously making the implicit argument that if people weren't getting public support for medical expenses, their need for medical care wouldn't exist.
Then again, the same guy then goes on to conflate desire to consume and ability to consume, so I guess he's not looking to be taken seriously.
Supply-siders. Always good for a laugh. One wonders how long Mr Williamson would stand at the end of a production line watching million-dollar gold toothpicks pile up yelling "MOAR!" before the truth hit home.
You did claim that just creating more money was the solution.
Pretty sure all I did was describe how taxation and money works. Anything past that was your inference.
If the Government just "shut off taxes" (an absurd notion, but, whatever) it would not be prevented from spending. However, without tax obligations to be paid there would (eventually) be no demand for the Government's money and it would consequently become effectively worthless (which means of course that fewer and fewer people would accept it - Government wouldn't be prevented from spending, but it wouldn't be able to buy anything).
None of this changes the fact that the money exists - MUST exist - before taxes can be collected. How do you pay tax without first having the money to do so ? Where does that money come from ?
Government creates money when it spends (or lends). (Banks also create money when they issue loans, and that we allow them to wantonly create the same money as Government is one of the biggest reasons we're in the mess we are today.)
The purpose of taxation is revenue.
No it is not. A currency-issuing sovereign government does not need taxation revenue to spend. There is no better example of this than the vast array of countries that regularly spend more than they tax, often for extended periods of time.
The fundamental purpose of taxation is to create demand for the Government-issued money. The application of taxes is then to control inflation, influence the distribution of wealth and income and incentivise - or disincentivise - behaviour.
I'm getting the idea our thought processes are very different. No, the objective of society shouldn't be to produce as much as possible. It should be to maximize the life and freedoms of it's citizens.
Right. So a key part of that objective is to ensure the increase in real incomes and living standards, and keeping people mentally healthy and engaged in society.
So incomes - wages - and employment are moral issues. Because being unemployed and dependent on a subsistence stipend from the Government, is no way to go through life, son.
Don't know about full time. The work was productive, though, as I said, it wasn't enough to cover her load on the care system, it only helped. She was paid something like $1-2/hour.
Ok, so not really relevant to the situation. She’s invalid, and would be covered by welfare not a minimum wage. “Work” in this context is just a part of her treatment (unless the person she’s working for is selling the product of her labour as if she weren’t disabled, in which case it’s exploitation).
Per person. The rest doesn't matter other than maybe 'young'. There is disagreement on how to handle that. The intent of the BIG is to be a universal income guarantee, and to reduce overhead. You can't do that if you go micromanaging again.
Huh ? Of course it does. A BIG calibrated for somewhere with very low living costs is all but useless in somewhere with very high living costs (which is to say, would need to be supplemented by additional assistance so people can survive).
Making broad regional adjustments isn’t “micromanaging”. Dictating to people they’re allowed to buy vegetables but not candy is “micromanaging”.
I've never had a guaranteed job lined up when I left my last one. Finding another job is, in itself, a full time job today. At least in the USA.
Something a JG addresses but a BIG does not
Regardless, there’s nothing different about leaving a JG job and any other job. That’s the point. To workers, it’s just a job.
ROFL. Dude, I always assume that capitalists are heartless bastards motivated only by the prospect of more money in their wallets. You need to actually read what I write. Services will be provided to people surviving on the BIG for the same reason as everything - they have money to spend, however little. Said services will require people to provide them. Thus employment.
Yes. The point you have not addressed is how that is any different to the situation today, hence how it will improve unemployment, income gaps, etc, over today.
Then either you haven't met any real libertarians or you're constructing more straw men. Libertarians believe that with liberty comes responsibility.
Speaking of fallacies, that sounds like a Scotsman.
I’ve talked to lots of people who call themselves Libertarians. The pillars of their beliefs tend to be unwavering beliefs that they are “self made” and that they owe society nothing, and people who cannot emulate their situation cannot because of variables entirely within their control.
This inevitably leads to the deification of the wealthy who have “made it” and contempt for the disadvantaged who have not.
A belief in social support/welfare/assistance to the disadvantaged tends to be markedly lacking in the typical Libertarian’s list of descriptive bullet points.
Yep. You just can't seem to realize that a BIG is just one brick in the pile to do just that.
A BIG does not make people self sufficient. It does the exact opposite, pretty much by definition.
Sigh... It's because the population is dropping too quickly, as I said and you apparently didn't understand. We're only automating at a certain rate, and said rate is slowing. Meanwhile, short of robots out of Asimov's works we need more and more healthcare workers, because automation there isn't progressing ve
Wierd. I don't view it as a moral position at all. It's a productivity statement.
So you believe the main objective of society should be simply to produce as much as possible ?
Only if you ignore the whole BIG proposal. As an example, I have an aunt who is mentally retarded. She has worked in the past. Should she have been paid a 'living' wage? While she enjoyed the work and was paid some for it, by no means was her productivity enough to pay for her to live on, even discounting the additional medical and supervision requirements.
No, it's independent of a BIG. Was your aunt working a full-time, productive job, or was she doing "make-work" to keep her busy and reduce load on the care system ?
Not really, since a BIG is per person.
Per what person ? Old ? Young ? Healthy ? Unhealthy ? Living in the middle of NYC or in a cheap country town ?
Subsistence for all these people carries different costs.
2 working adults? 1? Grandparents? In my family it's 'traditional' to live close enough to them that they provide like half the child care.
One working adult, because the other is caring for the children.
You are playing pointless semantic games to try and present a BIG as more rational, justified and consistent than a liveable minimum wage. It's not. Both are defined at an arbitrary figure based on particular arbitrary criteria.
I'm a very wierd libertarian. Still, I'm far from unique:
Cato, et al, support the idea of a BIG because they see it as formally absolving their ubermensch superheroes from having any responsibilities back to the society that created and supports them. It's just another aspect of their broken, selfish, hyper-individualistic philosophy. "Privatise the profits, socialise the losses".
I'll point out that libertarians are about freedom.
Mmmm. Freedom from responsibility in my experience.
You can't have freedom without laws and enforcement. You can't have laws and enforcement without Government. Government is - in a proper democratic system - the administering of the People's will.
You have failed to make a justification as to WHY this would be true.
A BIG does nothing to fix unemployment because it does nothing to try and fix unemployment. It assumes unemployment will be fixed by benevolent capitalists employing people and paying them well out of the goodness of their hearts.
One problem with your proposal is that of how do people get OFF the guaranteed job? They're busy working rather than looking for new work. You'd probably still need unemployment insurance. Etc...
Huh ? This makes no sense at all. They get off the guaranteed job the same way they get off any other job - by finding a better one.
Ah, this makes me turn your assertion about me saying they deserve to starve back on you. You're saying that if somebody can't work well enough to earn enough to support a family of four on their income, even as a brand spanking new worker, that they should starve to death as quickly as possible.
No. I'm saying that the minimum wage level for full-time work (by which I am thinking of jobs like a janitor, or a waitress) our society should be prepared to accept is sufficient to support a family of four.
Yes, this means for a brief time a "brand spanking new worker" will be "overpaid". But that's a cost of doing business in a society that has decided a minimum wage job should be liveable.
You most often had dual earners for a period, with the wife quitting to take care of the kids only after the husband had gained enough seniority, work experience, and education to have a position that paid much more than entry level. Before that, they were living in apartments and everything else.
I'm not sure what "living in apartments and everything else" is meant to signify. A liveable wage for a family doesn't mean they're in a five bedroom house on a suburban block. It means they can put a roof over
To put it another way - I normally get the OPPOSITE argument you're pushing - that too many workers would STOP working if a BIG is paid.
Sure. That's because you're probably usually arguing with loony right-wing religious nuts who fundamentally think we're all lazy sinners looking for a free ride, or loony right-wing supply-siders who think the only people who can't find work are the lazy and incompetent.
In reality, most people want to work because they find it personally fulfilling and because being poor sucks. This is as true at the bottom as at the top. There will always be a percentage of people who *are* lazy freeloaders, but they are a small minority.
You say that any job should pay enough to live on. I say that not every worker is worth a 'living' wage.
And I say that is a horrifyingly immoral position.
To deconstruct, you are basically saying that there is some work where you believe the people who do it literally do not deserve to live. That they should be sucked of whatever they can deliver, then left to die.
(I don't mean the above in a personally judgemental way, but I won't apologise for putting it in blunt terms.)
However, I bet if all those people disappeared tomorrow in a puff of smoke and consequently that work wasn't getting done, you'd notice. Probably firstly in the office toilets.
First problem - living wage for what? A single person? A nuclear family? A single mother with 3 kids?
Firstly, I'll point out that exactly this same "problem"/argument applies to a BIG.
Secondly, my personal measure is a liveable wage for a typical family of two adults and 2-3 children. Because anything smaller is below species survival level.
Add in unexperienced, low-qualification workers, and it takes some time to build the experience to be worth those kinds of wages.
Again, I come back to the point above. You're effectively saying people performing minimum wage jobs are worth so little *as people* they don't even deserve to live because they don't contribute enough to society to justify their existence.
Yes, the wage stagnation sucks. A lot of it is due to arbitrage and the outsourcing to China causing wage equalization for factory labor.
No, it's due to the systematic undermining of workers of which outsourcing is but a part. This has been going on for the better part of forty years.
Ah. I view it more as I'm dealing with current reality. I support a BIG because I see it as addressing a number of problems. Sure, with enough reforms, we could probably eliminate the welfare cliffs. But there's also the administrative costs. Under a BIG, those should be much reduced. In addtion, as a libertarian, I'm opposed to government meddling - which is just what we're seeing with politicians proposing everything from limiting the amount of seafood people on welfare can buy to the types of goods and where they can withdraw money.
There's some conflicting ideas in this statement.
Firstly, you say you're dealing with current reality, yet supporting a BIG is a *massive* change from current methods and mentalities around welfare. You can't really dismiss a jobs guarantee in that context (arguably less of a change than a BIG). Secondly, you say you're a libertarian opposed to "government meddling", yet a BIG is about as "government meddling" as you can get since it's effectively making a huge swathe of the population fundamentally reliant on "government" for surviva.
A lot of them aren't in full time jobs, or their family are underemployed.
I have been pretty explicit in my position that anyone in a full-time job should not find themselves reliant on welfare (outside of relatively unusual circumstances).
Underemployment is the problem a jobs guarantee fixes. A BIG does not. If anything, it will make it worse.
Do you have a meaningful method to ensure that 'livable incomes' are available? Or are we going to pay people a living wage even for what
We got rich because we started building things again.
No, you got rich because people consumed the things that were built, thus driving further production.
With no-one to consume, production is pointless. Where is the wealth in a warehouse full of cars nobody can afford to buy ? How do you get rich selling things to people without any money ?
That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that."
Yes.
But not "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X."
As I noted, I was responding to your assertion that simply boiled down to 'it won't work'. I didn't see a need to elaborate any more than you did. It seems pointless to waste time on the semantics of an otherwise useless exchange.
I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."
It's misleading because you are misrepresenting the relative differences between the top and the bottom, then using that to present an argument about progressive taxation stating that the top tax rates only need to be a little bit higher because their incomes and wealth are only a little bit higher. Plus there's that whole "tax is for revenue" thing.
It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling?
How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?
LOL. From someone who just launched an attack for begging the question, you go on to do exactly the same thing.
The increasing gap since the neoliberals took over the world in the '70s and '80s is no different to previous times, and it will produce the same outcome (social stratification, civil unrest, conflict, etc). That's the point. It *can* be different, because the outcome is a result of policy choices and because we are in a narrow gap in history where the people - rather than a handful of elites - actually have (though rapidly becoming "had") some ability to influence that policy.
Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly [washingtonpost.com] during a massive spike in productivity [wordpress.com] starting just after 1960?
Actually the late '70s was when productivity increases detached from median income increases. As with most of the big economic problems in today's world, you can thank Reagan and Thatcher for it.
Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.
Yes. Because large and increasing income and wealth gaps is something history has demonstrated more than once are bad.
People doing productive work draw a cost.
Which is more than recovered in their output. That's, y'know, kind of the point of PRODUCTIVE WORK.
You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!"
I have not. Again with the fallacies.
The rich are not a natural resource.
What does that even mean ?
You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue.
They're not. A currency-issuing sovereign Government does not need tax revenue to spend. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. It is demonstrated every day by every currency-issuing country on the planet.
Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything.
Same way they do all the time. They create (though I suspect you're the kind of guy who prefers the word "print") the money and give it to people for goods and services.
Income inequality has not always grown. It did not grow in the postwar period (low- and middle-class incomes grew faster than high incomes). It's worth noting that this period covers the most rapid increase in overall wealth, prosperity and living standards in human history, precisely because of that.
(This clip has been doing the rounds recently, showing the last forty years. It's unfortunate it doesn't show the last sixty, because that would be much more dramatic.)
This was due to deliberate policy choices, including things like high top tax rates, strong workers rights, strong regulatory frameworks (particular around the finance industry), strong social services, and investment in public infrastructure.
Of course, people got used to these increasing living standards and wanted it to keep going (in no small part because "the American dream" is comprehensively propagandised throughout society). So in the face of stagnant incomes for the last 30-40 years, they have instead turned to debt to pay for those increasing living standards, which has produced the private debt catastrophe currently enveloping the world. Now huge parts of their incomes go into servicing that debt, increasing wealth inequality even more (since it is the wealthy who own the banks) and reducing their disposable incomes even more.
Since you mentioned it, it's worth noting that social mobility in the US has been steadily decreasing and is amongst the lowest in the western world. The same is happening in other countries (eg: here in Australia) as income and wealth disparities increase. It will continue, as the wealthy become more and more isolated from everyone else in private housing estates, private schools and the upper echelons of business and politics. The scariest thing is, this time, we are within site of the elites not needing the working classes at all, thanks to advancing technology.
I repeat. Increasing income inequality is a policy choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Tax as a %age of GDP is a fairly widespread way of measuring the tax burden, which today is relatively low.
This and this show the makeup percentage of revenue. Percentage from income taxes looks to have been higher around 2000 and in the '80s.
Your language is deceptive. You are trying to present income taxes today as having dramatically increased or being relatively high when neither of these things are true. As the graphs above show, percentage of revenue from income tax has sat somewhere between 40 and 50% since the '50s.
You ought to think about what you just said.
I have.
Reducing profits is the chief form of impairment that a business can experience. And if you reduce profits to the red, then you've destroyed the case for the business.
OK. So once we follow your idea and successfully drive wages - ie: costs - down to slightly-more-than zero, who is going to buy the stuff business produces ?
You need to consider that there's a revenues side of the ledger as well as an expenses one.
The thing that is missed here is that reducing profits also reduces living standards.
No it doesn't. An economy running on a razor-thin profit but still producing excess of everything it needed would have high living standards.
And we can see that living standards are declining despite all the regulation to the contrary.
Er, no. Living standards are declining because all the regulations that protected normal people's incomes have been systemically destroyed. That's why real incomes for almost everyone in the US have gone nowhere for thirty-odd years.
I think it's time to look at what's working and what isn't. My view is that a lot of that regulation is actually very counterproductive, making the situation worse.
Everyone knows what works. Post-WW2 USA (until the neoliberals took over in the '70s, brought in the morally bankrupt NAIRU, deregulated everything, started selling off public assets and disassembling the public services - again, a common problem throughout the western world, though some countries had their Reagans and Thatchers much later - here in Australia, for example, we didn't go full retard until the mid-90s) was the quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history. It was a time of increasing real wages, a large and financially secure middle class, relatively high social mobility, large-scale public investment and full employment as a policy goal rather than a bete noir.
Productivity gains haven't translated into increased real income for two main reasons: Increased cost of housing, and increased cost of education.
I think you need to think about this a bit more. Both of these things are paid out of real income.
Productivity gains haven't translated into real income increases because all the excess is getting siphoned up by a handful of people at the top and has been since the '70s.
It's important to point out that this is a deliberate policy choice.
(Also: House prices are largely driven by (artificial) supply constraints. Credit makes the problem worse, but it's a catalyst, not a cause. Look at South Korea - incredibly tight credit, but massive housing bubbles due to supply constraints. Residential use of land isn't even a rounding error - actual supply is, for most practical purposes, infinite.)
(Not to detract at all from another point you made, either, and that's the horrific cost of usury.)
Imagine what a "basic income" would do.
Subsidise business.
A jobs guarantee is a better solution. At least until we hit the point where there really isn't anything for the vast majority of humans to actually do (ie: the Star Trek outcome).
Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. People have to produce first before anything at all can be consumed.
Can you point us to some successful businesses that produce things without any expectation of selling them ? How long would you let gold toothpicks pile up unsold in a warehouse before reconsidering ?
The economy is demand driven. Without consumption, production has no point. No business produces without the expectation that their products and/or services will be consumed.
Supply-siders are always a hoot. Until you come to the horrifying realisation that they're serious, and have been running the world for the better part of forty years.
Since 1967, median real income (adjusted for inflation) has increased by 23%.
Indeed. But don't forget that increase stopped sometime in the '70s.
The reality is that the percentage of income that Americans pay to the government has never been higher than it is today.
False.
Sure, but that has been done.... did you not learn anything from history?
Yes. Post-WW2 USA saw the fastest, broadest and greatest increase in wealth and living standards in human history.
Right up until the neoliberals took over in the '70s and started driving taxes down.
The USSR is a perfect example of what happens when you take all wealth from people and give it to the state.
Ah, I see the problem. You have no idea what taxes are for or how they work.
Businesses are not "impaired" from employing US workers. They *choose* not to so as to achieve greater profits.
(Note that this is common issue across the western world as most barriers in place to protect living standards have been torn down in the name of greater profits.)
So it's based on a false dichotomy fallacy ?
Probably shouldn't be surprising for someone that would obviously see no moral issue in something like good old-fashioned Feudalism, I suppose.
Alcohol has a biological effect that I enjoy.
Like, say, caffeine. Or adrenaline.
I agree with this in principle, but reality is sadly a touch more complex. Fact is nearly everybody needs help sometime in their life, and a few need it nearly continuously.
Sure. That’s what welfare and publicly funded services are for.
How does that factor if the employer is simply adding the output of her production into the standard supply stream? She assembled sprinkler components. Purchasers wouldn't know that disabled labor was involved at all unless they really dug deep into the certifications and such.
It’s more about the employer doing the right thing.
It’s a good scenario to throw in though, as a sanity check, but I would say that it falls into the area of welfare/public support. The work such people can do is good for them health-wise, but doesn’t really “count”. Worth considering is that these sorts of jobs are going to disappear completely - if they’re not already gone - in the very near future thanks to automation.
Ah, so you're actually rewriting my proposal to fit in with your concepts.
Well, no, I’m applying it to some of the complexities of the real world.
Everyone who is unemployed will be dependent on the BIG, and most people in low-paying jobs will become dependent on it. Broadly speaking, anyone who is currently dependent on welfare payments of some sort, would be dependent on a BIG. Because - as you’ve said - ultimately your BIG is just a more streamlined and efficient version of the system already in place.
People can’t just up and move. Moving is disruptive, expensive and time consuming, and the kind of people who will be dependent on a BIG will be the lower socio-economic groups who have basically no spare income or savings to start with. Cheaper areas also tend to have less employment, so you’re basically forcing people without jobs to relocate to somewhere with lower chances of finding a job. Ghettoisation of a kind.
That’s before considering the impacts of forcibly uprooting people from their social support structures. Think about kids in schools. Think about people in similar situations to your mother (who might become disabled and unable to work through, say, an accident).
'Management level' is actually a spectrum, but broadly speaking you're correct there. That being said, I think 'broad regional adjustments' should be the states/cities supplimenting the BIG if they wish to do so, not the feds varying it themselves. As I said earlier, if NYC wants to suppliment it, they can. People in NYC would just get 2 deposits instead of one, or however NYC decides to administer things.
This is a possible compromise, but it does sort of break the premise of a single payment.
Sure it does. Like I said earlier, it acts like a form of unemployment insurance, which makes moving between jobs easier by reducing the transition risk.
Making it easier for people to move between jobs does not help people who don’t have jobs.
No, you've just ignored them.
Unemployment - By eliminating welfare cliffs, it eliminates the penalties those on welfare face when seeking employment. Ergo, they're more likely to actually find jobs, because a job actually improves their situation.
Income gaps - I don't actually give much of a shit about this.
I haven’t ignored them, I’ve refuted them.
You are almost entirely focussed on people who already have work, and trying to make it easier for them to change jobs (and having lived and worked in America ca. 2008-2011, I have some appreciation of the realities). Your secondary focus is on people who have jobs and want longer hours, and while you are correctly concluding that welfare cliffs discourage them from taking on more work, you haven’t properly considered why welfare cliffs exist - because wages are too low (wages are too low because they’ve basically not grown in real terms 30-odd years while inflation has done its usual thin
It is exactly how it works. You will not find anyone actually responsible for running the accounting of taxation and expenditure who disagrees. But the most obvious way to realise it is the truth is to consider: how do I pay taxes if I do not first have money ?
This might help you understand where money comes from.
This is a recipe for ghettos and social stratification.
Hard to take anyone seriously making the implicit argument that if people weren't getting public support for medical expenses, their need for medical care wouldn't exist.
Then again, the same guy then goes on to conflate desire to consume and ability to consume, so I guess he's not looking to be taken seriously.
Supply-siders. Always good for a laugh. One wonders how long Mr Williamson would stand at the end of a production line watching million-dollar gold toothpicks pile up yelling "MOAR!" before the truth hit home.
My point is more I do not see private schools and prisons as inherently bad.
Eugenics is not _inherently_ bad, but you would struggle to find an example where it has not been used badly.
You did claim that just creating more money was the solution.
Pretty sure all I did was describe how taxation and money works. Anything past that was your inference.
If the Government just "shut off taxes" (an absurd notion, but, whatever) it would not be prevented from spending. However, without tax obligations to be paid there would (eventually) be no demand for the Government's money and it would consequently become effectively worthless (which means of course that fewer and fewer people would accept it - Government wouldn't be prevented from spending, but it wouldn't be able to buy anything).
None of this changes the fact that the money exists - MUST exist - before taxes can be collected. How do you pay tax without first having the money to do so ? Where does that money come from ?
Government creates money when it spends (or lends). (Banks also create money when they issue loans, and that we allow them to wantonly create the same money as Government is one of the biggest reasons we're in the mess we are today.)
The purpose of taxation is revenue.
No it is not. A currency-issuing sovereign government does not need taxation revenue to spend. There is no better example of this than the vast array of countries that regularly spend more than they tax, often for extended periods of time.
The fundamental purpose of taxation is to create demand for the Government-issued money. The application of taxes is then to control inflation, influence the distribution of wealth and income and incentivise - or disincentivise - behaviour.
Where is the wealth in a bunch of consumers working to build cars that they then drop into a giant hydraulic compactor to make blocks of steel?
Who is suggesting that ?
No point trying to have a discussion if you're just going to lie about what I said.
I'm getting the idea our thought processes are very different. No, the objective of society shouldn't be to produce as much as possible. It should be to maximize the life and freedoms of it's citizens.
Right. So a key part of that objective is to ensure the increase in real incomes and living standards, and keeping people mentally healthy and engaged in society.
So incomes - wages - and employment are moral issues. Because being unemployed and dependent on a subsistence stipend from the Government, is no way to go through life, son.
Don't know about full time. The work was productive, though, as I said, it wasn't enough to cover her load on the care system, it only helped. She was paid something like $1-2/hour.
Ok, so not really relevant to the situation. She’s invalid, and would be covered by welfare not a minimum wage. “Work” in this context is just a part of her treatment (unless the person she’s working for is selling the product of her labour as if she weren’t disabled, in which case it’s exploitation).
Per person. The rest doesn't matter other than maybe 'young'. There is disagreement on how to handle that. The intent of the BIG is to be a universal income guarantee, and to reduce overhead. You can't do that if you go micromanaging again.
Huh ? Of course it does. A BIG calibrated for somewhere with very low living costs is all but useless in somewhere with very high living costs (which is to say, would need to be supplemented by additional assistance so people can survive).
Making broad regional adjustments isn’t “micromanaging”. Dictating to people they’re allowed to buy vegetables but not candy is “micromanaging”.
I've never had a guaranteed job lined up when I left my last one. Finding another job is, in itself, a full time job today. At least in the USA.
Something a JG addresses but a BIG does not
Regardless, there’s nothing different about leaving a JG job and any other job. That’s the point. To workers, it’s just a job.
ROFL. Dude, I always assume that capitalists are heartless bastards motivated only by the prospect of more money in their wallets. You need to actually read what I write. Services will be provided to people surviving on the BIG for the same reason as everything - they have money to spend, however little. Said services will require people to provide them. Thus employment.
Yes. The point you have not addressed is how that is any different to the situation today, hence how it will improve unemployment, income gaps, etc, over today.
Then either you haven't met any real libertarians or you're constructing more straw men. Libertarians believe that with liberty comes responsibility.
Speaking of fallacies, that sounds like a Scotsman.
I’ve talked to lots of people who call themselves Libertarians. The pillars of their beliefs tend to be unwavering beliefs that they are “self made” and that they owe society nothing, and people who cannot emulate their situation cannot because of variables entirely within their control.
This inevitably leads to the deification of the wealthy who have “made it” and contempt for the disadvantaged who have not.
A belief in social support/welfare/assistance to the disadvantaged tends to be markedly lacking in the typical Libertarian’s list of descriptive bullet points.
Yep. You just can't seem to realize that a BIG is just one brick in the pile to do just that.
A BIG does not make people self sufficient. It does the exact opposite, pretty much by definition.
Sigh... It's because the population is dropping too quickly, as I said and you apparently didn't understand. We're only automating at a certain rate, and said rate is slowing. Meanwhile, short of robots out of Asimov's works we need more and more healthcare workers, because automation there isn't progressing ve
Wierd. I don't view it as a moral position at all. It's a productivity statement.
So you believe the main objective of society should be simply to produce as much as possible ?
Only if you ignore the whole BIG proposal. As an example, I have an aunt who is mentally retarded. She has worked in the past. Should she have been paid a 'living' wage? While she enjoyed the work and was paid some for it, by no means was her productivity enough to pay for her to live on, even discounting the additional medical and supervision requirements.
No, it's independent of a BIG. Was your aunt working a full-time, productive job, or was she doing "make-work" to keep her busy and reduce load on the care system ?
Not really, since a BIG is per person.
Per what person ? Old ? Young ? Healthy ? Unhealthy ? Living in the middle of NYC or in a cheap country town ?
Subsistence for all these people carries different costs.
2 working adults? 1? Grandparents? In my family it's 'traditional' to live close enough to them that they provide like half the child care.
One working adult, because the other is caring for the children.
You are playing pointless semantic games to try and present a BIG as more rational, justified and consistent than a liveable minimum wage. It's not. Both are defined at an arbitrary figure based on particular arbitrary criteria.
I'm a very wierd libertarian. Still, I'm far from unique:
Cato, et al, support the idea of a BIG because they see it as formally absolving their ubermensch superheroes from having any responsibilities back to the society that created and supports them. It's just another aspect of their broken, selfish, hyper-individualistic philosophy. "Privatise the profits, socialise the losses".
I'll point out that libertarians are about freedom.
Mmmm. Freedom from responsibility in my experience.
You can't have freedom without laws and enforcement. You can't have laws and enforcement without Government. Government is - in a proper democratic system - the administering of the People's will.
You have failed to make a justification as to WHY this would be true.
A BIG does nothing to fix unemployment because it does nothing to try and fix unemployment. It assumes unemployment will be fixed by benevolent capitalists employing people and paying them well out of the goodness of their hearts.
One problem with your proposal is that of how do people get OFF the guaranteed job? They're busy working rather than looking for new work. You'd probably still need unemployment insurance. Etc...
Huh ? This makes no sense at all. They get off the guaranteed job the same way they get off any other job - by finding a better one.
Ah, this makes me turn your assertion about me saying they deserve to starve back on you. You're saying that if somebody can't work well enough to earn enough to support a family of four on their income, even as a brand spanking new worker, that they should starve to death as quickly as possible.
No. I'm saying that the minimum wage level for full-time work (by which I am thinking of jobs like a janitor, or a waitress) our society should be prepared to accept is sufficient to support a family of four.
Yes, this means for a brief time a "brand spanking new worker" will be "overpaid". But that's a cost of doing business in a society that has decided a minimum wage job should be liveable.
You most often had dual earners for a period, with the wife quitting to take care of the kids only after the husband had gained enough seniority, work experience, and education to have a position that paid much more than entry level. Before that, they were living in apartments and everything else.
I'm not sure what "living in apartments and everything else" is meant to signify. A liveable wage for a family doesn't mean they're in a five bedroom house on a suburban block. It means they can put a roof over
To put it another way - I normally get the OPPOSITE argument you're pushing - that too many workers would STOP working if a BIG is paid.
Sure. That's because you're probably usually arguing with loony right-wing religious nuts who fundamentally think we're all lazy sinners looking for a free ride, or loony right-wing supply-siders who think the only people who can't find work are the lazy and incompetent.
In reality, most people want to work because they find it personally fulfilling and because being poor sucks. This is as true at the bottom as at the top. There will always be a percentage of people who *are* lazy freeloaders, but they are a small minority.
You say that any job should pay enough to live on. I say that not every worker is worth a 'living' wage.
And I say that is a horrifyingly immoral position.
To deconstruct, you are basically saying that there is some work where you believe the people who do it literally do not deserve to live. That they should be sucked of whatever they can deliver, then left to die.
(I don't mean the above in a personally judgemental way, but I won't apologise for putting it in blunt terms.)
However, I bet if all those people disappeared tomorrow in a puff of smoke and consequently that work wasn't getting done, you'd notice. Probably firstly in the office toilets.
First problem - living wage for what? A single person? A nuclear family? A single mother with 3 kids?
Firstly, I'll point out that exactly this same "problem"/argument applies to a BIG.
Secondly, my personal measure is a liveable wage for a typical family of two adults and 2-3 children. Because anything smaller is below species survival level.
Add in unexperienced, low-qualification workers, and it takes some time to build the experience to be worth those kinds of wages.
Again, I come back to the point above. You're effectively saying people performing minimum wage jobs are worth so little *as people* they don't even deserve to live because they don't contribute enough to society to justify their existence.
Yes, the wage stagnation sucks. A lot of it is due to arbitrage and the outsourcing to China causing wage equalization for factory labor.
No, it's due to the systematic undermining of workers of which outsourcing is but a part. This has been going on for the better part of forty years.
Ah. I view it more as I'm dealing with current reality. I support a BIG because I see it as addressing a number of problems. Sure, with enough reforms, we could probably eliminate the welfare cliffs. But there's also the administrative costs. Under a BIG, those should be much reduced. In addtion, as a libertarian, I'm opposed to government meddling - which is just what we're seeing with politicians proposing everything from limiting the amount of seafood people on welfare can buy to the types of goods and where they can withdraw money.
There's some conflicting ideas in this statement.
Firstly, you say you're dealing with current reality, yet supporting a BIG is a *massive* change from current methods and mentalities around welfare. You can't really dismiss a jobs guarantee in that context (arguably less of a change than a BIG).
Secondly, you say you're a libertarian opposed to "government meddling", yet a BIG is about as "government meddling" as you can get since it's effectively making a huge swathe of the population fundamentally reliant on "government" for surviva.
A lot of them aren't in full time jobs, or their family are underemployed.
I have been pretty explicit in my position that anyone in a full-time job should not find themselves reliant on welfare (outside of relatively unusual circumstances).
Underemployment is the problem a jobs guarantee fixes. A BIG does not. If anything, it will make it worse.
Do you have a meaningful method to ensure that 'livable incomes' are available? Or are we going to pay people a living wage even for what
Oh gawd. A supply-sider. You guys still exist ?
We got rich because we started building things again.
No, you got rich because people consumed the things that were built, thus driving further production.
With no-one to consume, production is pointless. Where is the wealth in a warehouse full of cars nobody can afford to buy ? How do you get rich selling things to people without any money ?
That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that."
Yes.
But not "it was done to X, therefor it was successful at X."
As I noted, I was responding to your assertion that simply boiled down to 'it won't work'. I didn't see a need to elaborate any more than you did. It seems pointless to waste time on the semantics of an otherwise useless exchange.
I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."
It's misleading because you are misrepresenting the relative differences between the top and the bottom, then using that to present an argument about progressive taxation stating that the top tax rates only need to be a little bit higher because their incomes and wealth are only a little bit higher. Plus there's that whole "tax is for revenue" thing.
It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling?
Because it's unintuitive and difficult for most people to comprehend or accept.
What is "skewed"?
Biased in an unfair or unreasonable manner.
How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?
LOL. From someone who just launched an attack for begging the question, you go on to do exactly the same thing.
The increasing gap since the neoliberals took over the world in the '70s and '80s is no different to previous times, and it will produce the same outcome (social stratification, civil unrest, conflict, etc). That's the point. It *can* be different, because the outcome is a result of policy choices and because we are in a narrow gap in history where the people - rather than a handful of elites - actually have (though rapidly becoming "had") some ability to influence that policy.
Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly [washingtonpost.com] during a massive spike in productivity [wordpress.com] starting just after 1960?
Actually the late '70s was when productivity increases detached from median income increases. As with most of the big economic problems in today's world, you can thank Reagan and Thatcher for it.
Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.
Yes. Because large and increasing income and wealth gaps is something history has demonstrated more than once are bad.
People doing productive work draw a cost.
Which is more than recovered in their output. That's, y'know, kind of the point of PRODUCTIVE WORK.
You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!"
I have not. Again with the fallacies.
The rich are not a natural resource.
What does that even mean ?
You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue.
They're not. A currency-issuing sovereign Government does not need tax revenue to spend. This is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. It is demonstrated every day by every currency-issuing country on the planet.
Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything.
Same way they do all the time. They create (though I suspect you're the kind of guy who prefers the word "print") the money and give it to people for goods and services.
Income inequality has not always grown. It did not grow in the postwar period (low- and middle-class incomes grew faster than high incomes). It's worth noting that this period covers the most rapid increase in overall wealth, prosperity and living standards in human history, precisely because of that.
(This clip has been doing the rounds recently, showing the last forty years. It's unfortunate it doesn't show the last sixty, because that would be much more dramatic.)
This was due to deliberate policy choices, including things like high top tax rates, strong workers rights, strong regulatory frameworks (particular around the finance industry), strong social services, and investment in public infrastructure.
Of course, people got used to these increasing living standards and wanted it to keep going (in no small part because "the American dream" is comprehensively propagandised throughout society). So in the face of stagnant incomes for the last 30-40 years, they have instead turned to debt to pay for those increasing living standards, which has produced the private debt catastrophe currently enveloping the world. Now huge parts of their incomes go into servicing that debt, increasing wealth inequality even more (since it is the wealthy who own the banks) and reducing their disposable incomes even more.
Since you mentioned it, it's worth noting that social mobility in the US has been steadily decreasing and is amongst the lowest in the western world. The same is happening in other countries (eg: here in Australia) as income and wealth disparities increase. It will continue, as the wealthy become more and more isolated from everyone else in private housing estates, private schools and the upper echelons of business and politics. The scariest thing is, this time, we are within site of the elites not needing the working classes at all, thanks to advancing technology.
I repeat. Increasing income inequality is a policy choice.