People in retirement work for themselves. Retirement doesn't mean sitting around doing nothing, it just means you work on whatever you feel like working on whenever you feel like working on it, and not what when and how someone else says just because you have to.
An employer could offer that if we got rid of minimum wage laws which we could do if we had UBI, but why would anyone accept it? Like you say, they're no longer so desperate that they have to accept just any job for any money because a little money is better than no money. It becomes a question of whether the money the job pays is worth the time lost to the worker.
With an UBI, and eliminating minimum wage, real market prices for wages would be set at last. For some jobs, that might mean they go down -- which is to say, new jobs come into existence that can't right now with the minimum wage because they're not worth (to the employer) what you'd have to pay them. But for other jobs, that might mean they go up, if the only reason people accept such a pittance for the hard work they have to do is because the alternative is death, which it wouldn't be anymore with an UBI.
So easy, fun, low-paying jobs spring into existence, and people can take them just for something to do and a tiny bit of extra cash; meanwhile shit jobs, that pay shit because anyone can do them even though nobody wants to, pay more because otherwise everyone tells those employers to shove their shit jobs up the ass they came from.
if there were actually houses and lots at those prices this wouldn't be a problem at all and i would be mostly done by now. empty lots outside city limits of the tiny rural town i live in ask $200k just by themselves. and no i'm not fucking moving so far away it might as well be another country, abandoning my job and family and future wife (just pending our ability to live together) who are all here in the process of doing so.
My personal life goals are just to pay off any house at all (which currently is a lifelong task I'm not sure I will ever finish), after which the remaining costs of living are small enough to be easily covered by a minimal amount of work (or a reasonable retirement investment), freeing up my time to spend doing creative projects that I want done for their own sake and not ruined by limits and requirements set by marketability.
A world where fewer people are working because more people are capable of retiring sooner sounds like exactly the kind of world we should always be striving toward. The end goal of human progress is for everyone to be born into perpetual retirement.
Obviously nobody would work (for someone else) if they could keep any arbitrary standard of living and not work.
But if you had the choice between either getting every third paycheck doubled for the same amount of work, or else living on a third of your income for zero work, which would you pick? I sure as hell know I would keep working and just pocket the extra money to reach my life goals sooner, rather than live a life of bare subsistence just so that I could sit around doing nothing.
(Not that I would be doing nothing even in that case... I'd spend the time on the life's work of not-for-profit personal projects I'm probably never going to have time to complete otherwise).
That may be true for what Trump is doing now but it definitely was not true when Obama took office, which is actually one of the big reasons I was disappointed with him as a president. The ACLU had this elaborate document made up between the election and inauguration day cheerfully outlining all of the good things the new President could do to reverse the damage GWB had done within days, weeks, months, etc, of taking office, a nice timeline of how quickly the damage could be undone. Pretty much none of it happened. A few lukewarm improvements were made over the years like the ACA, but basically all the things Bush fucked up have stayed fucked up despite the opportunity for Obama to have reversed them.
I was told at the time by loyalist democrats that the reason he didn't was to preserve political capital and keep things from turning into a game of every new president immediately reversing everything the old president did. Obama can't undo Bush's damage, they said, or else the next Republican will just undo all of Obama's progress.
Well, that's happening anyway, so I guess it's no steps forward, two steps back for us.
Combine that with a tax credit of 50% the mean income and you're spot on. Average people pay nothing and get nothing, people below average get a hand up, people at the top pay for it.
The real long-term solution is to see to it that ownership of the factories and robots is widely distributed, so that there aren't just "the few" who control them, we all do.
Maybe the next step after an UBI to just solve rudimentary poverty would be a different kind of UBI, this time where the "I" stands for "Investment". Give everyone not just a monthly cash payment, but a monthly share of an index fund, so that people gradually become owners of the automated capital generating the income. Then maybe, in the very long run, the first UBI (where the "I" stands for "Income") can be phased out entirely, since everyone would have a steady stream of income from their investments anyway.
I think you got distracted by the mention of minimum wage, which isn't what the bulk of my post was about. Most of what you write I agree with but it's beside the point of discussion.
The people I was replying to were saying that cutting full-time work hours would increase wealth equality by spreading the work and thus the wealth around. I was retorting that that only spreads wealth from the middle class (specifically from fully-employed working-class people) to the lower class (specifically to underemployed working-class people). If you make $20/hr and work 40hrs a week and someone else makes $20/hr but can only get 20hrs a week of work, and then full time is cut down to 30hrs, you now have 10hrs less work and $200 less income per week, and the other guy respectively gets $200 more income for his 10hrs more work. But the people employing both of you, who don't work by the hour but make money by owning things, keep all the same money. It doesn't cost the people at the top anything, it just moves money from the middle to the bottom. Which then means that there's fewer people in the middle, and it's harder to get from the bottom to the top.
The people I was replying to were saying that to offset that effect, you make sure that everybody gets paid more. But how do you do that? This is where I mentioned minimum wage, only to say that it's not enough. In the above scenario, someone who was working 40hrs/week for your hypothetical minimum of $10/hr would be down $100/week if full time was cut to 30hrs, and you could fix that by raising minimum wage to $13.33, so that minimum wage worker benefits from the combination of changes (he makes the same money for less work), and the underemployed guy making $20/hr benefits as described before (he gets more work hours and so more income), but the fully-employed person is still just SOL (fewer work hours and so lower income, unless he can win a steep uphill fight for a 33% raise just to get back to where he used to be), and the people at the very top who should really be bearing the burden still get off scot free.
The fundamental error the people I was replying to make is assuming that the people at the top are at the top because they have more work hours to do. The people at the top don't work hours to begin with, and the people at the very tippy top don't work at all. Everyone who has to work is, at best, middle class, if they're in the tiny sliver of people who have capital sufficient for their own needs but insufficient to live off of, and otherwise lower class. So shifting around the amount of work just shuffles money around the people at the bottom. It's the people at the top making money off of owning everything without doing any work at all that are the problem, and you can't fix that by redistributing the nonexistent work they do to other people.
making sure they are receiving higher wages so they can still live
This is the hard part and the important part that Joe Dragon above keeps ignoring every time he posts this same thing and I post the same retort. You can raise the minimum wage, sure, but then you can't mandate that everyone above the minimum wage gets some kind of proportional raise, without in the process having complete government dictation of what every single person gets paid, which would be a very bad thing.
Without doing that, cutting hours has the effect of shifting wealth from the middle class to the lower class (or at least from the fully-employed to the underemployed), without affecting the upper class (who aren't wage workers to begin with) at all, with the net effect that the gap between rich and poor gets even wider. You end up pushing people away from the middle, making the rich richer and the poor poorer and more people overall poorer... but at least they're more equally poor? Like that's supposed to help?
What you want to do is to push everyone toward the center, so it's easier to climb up from the bottom and harder for those at the top to rocket even further away from everyone else. If you give everyone a basic income of some fraction of the mean income, and then tax everyone that same fraction of their own income, that is exactly what happens. People with lower incomes see a greater boost in their income post-BI-and-taxes. That effect diminishes as your income gets closer to the mean income, and then reverses as you climb above it, pulling you back toward it, harder and harder the further above it you get.
Cutting everyone's hours without boosting everyone's incomes proportionately only hurts the middle class, and to boost everyone's incomes proportionately you need to implement what is effective a tax-funded basic income, so the first step is that tax-funded basic income... and then at that point there's no point in even mandating anything about hours at all because the basic income already takes care of everyone.
I find it weird that Marc is described simply as a "Silicon Valley investor", like he's just one of innumerable rich people interested in tech, instead of describing him as the founder of Netscape, who first brought web browsers to the masses, which seems like the much bigger deal if you're going to say who he is and why anyone should care about his opinions.
Your overall point is stop on and one I keep making again and again, but your math is a little off. You don't give the UBI then tax income+UBI, you just tax income then give UBI. So for a tax of x and an UBI of y each person's take-home is (1-x)*income + y.
Household income figures are around twice personal income figures because the average household is about two people. The preceding numbers are personal income figures because we're talking about just one person. All your numbers are doubled because you're looking at households instead.
I was a desperate poor single young man wisely not having kids or getting married while I was shit poor, and I never qualified for EITC.
My equally poor divorced father stopped qualifying for it as soon as I moved out to go to college.
Mom is on disability so doesn't file taxes but I doubt a single woman not supporting a kid would qualify for it either.
There's a "family" of three desperately poor people not filing taxes together because we don't live together and none of us see a lick of this EITC.
A first step toward making a universal basic income would just be making EITC universal. Make poor people, not poor families, get the credit. Then, yeah, expand it from there and it makes a great start. Give every single taxpayer a tax credit of a fixed amount, tax every single taxpayer a fixed percent to fund it (a percent equal to the credit amount over the mean income would make it immediately revenue-neutral), and there you go, you have a universal basic income. Then make tax refunds paid out monthly instead of all at once (and allow tax payments to be made monthly too, to be fair about it) so people don't blow their whole basic income at once right after tax season.
You probably live somewhere ridiculously cheap. There is no other way that is true. In any case, $45k is almost twice the median income and not far from the 75th percentile yourself. You are not poor, you whiney baby. Also did you not see the part where I save a third of my income? I am not frivilous. Housing is just stupidly fucking expensive, you self righteous insensitive prick.
You STARTED OUT making more money than almost 75% of Americans, almost TWICE the amount that half of Americans make less than. Which is still, also, only around the mean income. But you have always made at least about average and the vast majority make far less than average, so for most people it is just now that easy. It is impossible to live frugally enough to achieve the same results as more than doubling your income.
Half of Americans make around $25k or less. Mean is around $50k or so, and falls around the 75th percentile. You're probably thinking household income which is about twice personal income because the median household is about two people. I am not two people. And housing is stupidly fucking expensive. Almost everyone is completely fucked. I am just barely maybe not fucked eventually.
My grandparents were rich. My parents are both rapidly on their way to dying in the street by "retirement age". And I'm 10 years behind them in life. Despite being an order of magnitude or two further ahead than most of my generation, according to articles like this. We are all completely fucked unless something is done about it.
So everyone born to poor parents is just fucked, and that's fine and we should leave it like that instead of actually giving people that equal opportunity you folks love to bang on about?
Slashdot Mirror
People in retirement work for themselves. Retirement doesn't mean sitting around doing nothing, it just means you work on whatever you feel like working on whenever you feel like working on it, and not what when and how someone else says just because you have to.
An employer could offer that if we got rid of minimum wage laws which we could do if we had UBI, but why would anyone accept it? Like you say, they're no longer so desperate that they have to accept just any job for any money because a little money is better than no money. It becomes a question of whether the money the job pays is worth the time lost to the worker.
With an UBI, and eliminating minimum wage, real market prices for wages would be set at last. For some jobs, that might mean they go down -- which is to say, new jobs come into existence that can't right now with the minimum wage because they're not worth (to the employer) what you'd have to pay them. But for other jobs, that might mean they go up, if the only reason people accept such a pittance for the hard work they have to do is because the alternative is death, which it wouldn't be anymore with an UBI.
So easy, fun, low-paying jobs spring into existence, and people can take them just for something to do and a tiny bit of extra cash; meanwhile shit jobs, that pay shit because anyone can do them even though nobody wants to, pay more because otherwise everyone tells those employers to shove their shit jobs up the ass they came from.
if there were actually houses and lots at those prices this wouldn't be a problem at all and i would be mostly done by now. empty lots outside city limits of the tiny rural town i live in ask $200k just by themselves. and no i'm not fucking moving so far away it might as well be another country, abandoning my job and family and future wife (just pending our ability to live together) who are all here in the process of doing so.
My personal life goals are just to pay off any house at all (which currently is a lifelong task I'm not sure I will ever finish), after which the remaining costs of living are small enough to be easily covered by a minimal amount of work (or a reasonable retirement investment), freeing up my time to spend doing creative projects that I want done for their own sake and not ruined by limits and requirements set by marketability.
A world where fewer people are working because more people are capable of retiring sooner sounds like exactly the kind of world we should always be striving toward. The end goal of human progress is for everyone to be born into perpetual retirement.
Where are you that your janitors get paid $2.40/hr?
Obviously nobody would work (for someone else) if they could keep any arbitrary standard of living and not work.
But if you had the choice between either getting every third paycheck doubled for the same amount of work, or else living on a third of your income for zero work, which would you pick? I sure as hell know I would keep working and just pocket the extra money to reach my life goals sooner, rather than live a life of bare subsistence just so that I could sit around doing nothing.
(Not that I would be doing nothing even in that case... I'd spend the time on the life's work of not-for-profit personal projects I'm probably never going to have time to complete otherwise).
That may be true for what Trump is doing now but it definitely was not true when Obama took office, which is actually one of the big reasons I was disappointed with him as a president. The ACLU had this elaborate document made up between the election and inauguration day cheerfully outlining all of the good things the new President could do to reverse the damage GWB had done within days, weeks, months, etc, of taking office, a nice timeline of how quickly the damage could be undone. Pretty much none of it happened. A few lukewarm improvements were made over the years like the ACA, but basically all the things Bush fucked up have stayed fucked up despite the opportunity for Obama to have reversed them.
I was told at the time by loyalist democrats that the reason he didn't was to preserve political capital and keep things from turning into a game of every new president immediately reversing everything the old president did. Obama can't undo Bush's damage, they said, or else the next Republican will just undo all of Obama's progress.
Well, that's happening anyway, so I guess it's no steps forward, two steps back for us.
Combine that with a tax credit of 50% the mean income and you're spot on. Average people pay nothing and get nothing, people below average get a hand up, people at the top pay for it.
The real long-term solution is to see to it that ownership of the factories and robots is widely distributed, so that there aren't just "the few" who control them, we all do.
Maybe the next step after an UBI to just solve rudimentary poverty would be a different kind of UBI, this time where the "I" stands for "Investment". Give everyone not just a monthly cash payment, but a monthly share of an index fund, so that people gradually become owners of the automated capital generating the income. Then maybe, in the very long run, the first UBI (where the "I" stands for "Income") can be phased out entirely, since everyone would have a steady stream of income from their investments anyway.
I think you got distracted by the mention of minimum wage, which isn't what the bulk of my post was about. Most of what you write I agree with but it's beside the point of discussion.
The people I was replying to were saying that cutting full-time work hours would increase wealth equality by spreading the work and thus the wealth around. I was retorting that that only spreads wealth from the middle class (specifically from fully-employed working-class people) to the lower class (specifically to underemployed working-class people). If you make $20/hr and work 40hrs a week and someone else makes $20/hr but can only get 20hrs a week of work, and then full time is cut down to 30hrs, you now have 10hrs less work and $200 less income per week, and the other guy respectively gets $200 more income for his 10hrs more work. But the people employing both of you, who don't work by the hour but make money by owning things, keep all the same money. It doesn't cost the people at the top anything, it just moves money from the middle to the bottom. Which then means that there's fewer people in the middle, and it's harder to get from the bottom to the top.
The people I was replying to were saying that to offset that effect, you make sure that everybody gets paid more. But how do you do that? This is where I mentioned minimum wage, only to say that it's not enough. In the above scenario, someone who was working 40hrs/week for your hypothetical minimum of $10/hr would be down $100/week if full time was cut to 30hrs, and you could fix that by raising minimum wage to $13.33, so that minimum wage worker benefits from the combination of changes (he makes the same money for less work), and the underemployed guy making $20/hr benefits as described before (he gets more work hours and so more income), but the fully-employed person is still just SOL (fewer work hours and so lower income, unless he can win a steep uphill fight for a 33% raise just to get back to where he used to be), and the people at the very top who should really be bearing the burden still get off scot free.
The fundamental error the people I was replying to make is assuming that the people at the top are at the top because they have more work hours to do. The people at the top don't work hours to begin with, and the people at the very tippy top don't work at all. Everyone who has to work is, at best, middle class, if they're in the tiny sliver of people who have capital sufficient for their own needs but insufficient to live off of, and otherwise lower class. So shifting around the amount of work just shuffles money around the people at the bottom. It's the people at the top making money off of owning everything without doing any work at all that are the problem, and you can't fix that by redistributing the nonexistent work they do to other people.
making sure they are receiving higher wages so they can still live
This is the hard part and the important part that Joe Dragon above keeps ignoring every time he posts this same thing and I post the same retort. You can raise the minimum wage, sure, but then you can't mandate that everyone above the minimum wage gets some kind of proportional raise, without in the process having complete government dictation of what every single person gets paid, which would be a very bad thing.
Without doing that, cutting hours has the effect of shifting wealth from the middle class to the lower class (or at least from the fully-employed to the underemployed), without affecting the upper class (who aren't wage workers to begin with) at all, with the net effect that the gap between rich and poor gets even wider. You end up pushing people away from the middle, making the rich richer and the poor poorer and more people overall poorer... but at least they're more equally poor? Like that's supposed to help?
What you want to do is to push everyone toward the center, so it's easier to climb up from the bottom and harder for those at the top to rocket even further away from everyone else. If you give everyone a basic income of some fraction of the mean income, and then tax everyone that same fraction of their own income, that is exactly what happens. People with lower incomes see a greater boost in their income post-BI-and-taxes. That effect diminishes as your income gets closer to the mean income, and then reverses as you climb above it, pulling you back toward it, harder and harder the further above it you get.
Cutting everyone's hours without boosting everyone's incomes proportionately only hurts the middle class, and to boost everyone's incomes proportionately you need to implement what is effective a tax-funded basic income, so the first step is that tax-funded basic income... and then at that point there's no point in even mandating anything about hours at all because the basic income already takes care of everyone.
I find it weird that Marc is described simply as a "Silicon Valley investor", like he's just one of innumerable rich people interested in tech, instead of describing him as the founder of Netscape, who first brought web browsers to the masses, which seems like the much bigger deal if you're going to say who he is and why anyone should care about his opinions.
Your overall point is stop on and one I keep making again and again, but your math is a little off. You don't give the UBI then tax income+UBI, you just tax income then give UBI. So for a tax of x and an UBI of y each person's take-home is (1-x)*income + y.
Also, I explicitly said you're probably thinking household instead of personal income THREE REPLIES AGO. Maybe learn to read comprehensively.
Household income figures are around twice personal income figures because the average household is about two people. The preceding numbers are personal income figures because we're talking about just one person. All your numbers are doubled because you're looking at households instead.
I was a desperate poor single young man wisely not having kids or getting married while I was shit poor, and I never qualified for EITC.
My equally poor divorced father stopped qualifying for it as soon as I moved out to go to college.
Mom is on disability so doesn't file taxes but I doubt a single woman not supporting a kid would qualify for it either.
There's a "family" of three desperately poor people not filing taxes together because we don't live together and none of us see a lick of this EITC.
A first step toward making a universal basic income would just be making EITC universal. Make poor people, not poor families, get the credit. Then, yeah, expand it from there and it makes a great start. Give every single taxpayer a tax credit of a fixed amount, tax every single taxpayer a fixed percent to fund it (a percent equal to the credit amount over the mean income would make it immediately revenue-neutral), and there you go, you have a universal basic income. Then make tax refunds paid out monthly instead of all at once (and allow tax payments to be made monthly too, to be fair about it) so people don't blow their whole basic income at once right after tax season.
Tell that to the 225 million people who make less than me. Them first.
You probably live somewhere ridiculously cheap. There is no other way that is true. In any case, $45k is almost twice the median income and not far from the 75th percentile yourself. You are not poor, you whiney baby. Also did you not see the part where I save a third of my income? I am not frivilous. Housing is just stupidly fucking expensive, you self righteous insensitive prick.
You STARTED OUT making more money than almost 75% of Americans, almost TWICE the amount that half of Americans make less than. Which is still, also, only around the mean income. But you have always made at least about average and the vast majority make far less than average, so for most people it is just now that easy. It is impossible to live frugally enough to achieve the same results as more than doubling your income.
Half of Americans make around $25k or less. Mean is around $50k or so, and falls around the 75th percentile. You're probably thinking household income which is about twice personal income because the median household is about two people. I am not two people. And housing is stupidly fucking expensive. Almost everyone is completely fucked. I am just barely maybe not fucked eventually.
I make more than 75% of Americans and save 1/3 of my income toward future housing and I'm still probably fucked, but thanks for trying anyway.
My grandparents were rich. My parents are both rapidly on their way to dying in the street by "retirement age". And I'm 10 years behind them in life. Despite being an order of magnitude or two further ahead than most of my generation, according to articles like this. We are all completely fucked unless something is done about it.
So everyone born to poor parents is just fucked, and that's fine and we should leave it like that instead of actually giving people that equal opportunity you folks love to bang on about?
I wish I could upmod you but I've already posted upthread. This is the most insightful post in this thread.