But if the minimum guaranteed pay is paid by government entities, it does not have any of the damages of a minimum wage.
You must be joking. You really think that adding $3.5 trillion in taxes so you can hand out free money to anyone who wants it won't have any of the same damages that a minimum wage does? Costs are costs. It doesn't matter if the employer is forced to pay $10/hour for work that's worth only $1/hour or if he's paying an extra $9/hour in payroll taxes. It's the same $9 cost and it gets passed on to the consumer either way.
Someone may be willing to work for $3/hour
But they can't because the minimum wage is much much higher than that. You can't get rid of the minimum wage in your mythical free-money universe because there will still be people who have morals, who don't think the government owes them a living, and who want to work for their pay. You'll be cutting their throats if you get rid of the minimum wage.
if they are getting $2k/month from the government no matter what.
They're going to get $4166/month from "the government" no matter what. That's $50k/year divided by 12 months/year. Why would anyone work for $3/hour if they're getting $4k a month free? No, wait, you're $50k/year number was in current dollars, so after rampant inflation and spiraling costs of everything, that's more like $250k/year, or $20k/month.
That extra money would be like a 30% raise.
Ten hours a week at $3/hour is $30/week, or about $120/month. Even considering your mistaken claim of $2k/month, that's only a 6% raise. You really can't do math very well, can you? Given the real number is $4166/month, your "raise" is less than 3% -- one tenth of your number.
Oh, but I accepted your statement that they'd work 10 hours a week at face value. Maybe they'll work full-time to get that 30% "raise". Let's see. To get a 30% raise out of a $3/hour job and $4166/month free, you'd need to work 416 hours a month, or about 100 hours a week. 30% of $4166 is $1250. To earn $1250 at $3/hour is 416 hours. Divide by four (weeks per month) and you get 104 hours per week. Give or take. See how simple the math is? Why don't you try it sometime? Or do you really think that someone who is getting $50k/year free will want to toil at a menial job for 100 hours a week? In case the math escapes you, that's more than 14 hours per day, seven days a week. That's spending almost 60% of your life working as someone's assistant, doing laundry or washing dishes or whatever the rich people would hire them to do.
But hold on a moment. Since this mythical fellow who is working full time to make money in addition to the free $50k actually has an income, and he needs to be taxed to pay for the $3.5 trillion in handouts, he won't be keeping most of that money. His "30% raise" will result in him keeping maybe 20% of that money, or in real terms, a 6% raise. Do you know anyone who would work 100 additional hours a week for a 6% raise? I don't.
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself. But you are giving the rest of us a good laugh.
I never proposed that at all. I said that the guaranteed $50k per year didn't necessarily have to be given without work
Either it requires work or it doesn't. Pick one. If work is optional, who is going to work? $50k/year free? Send me the check. $70k/year for 10 hours a week work? Wow. Send me the check.
but the basic concept of a guaranteed basic income is not a new idea.
Of course it isn't. Everyone who doesn't have money has at one time or another thought about a system of free money that would mean they don't have to work at all. You notice how successful such systems are, don't you?
We already have something similar in our current welfare system,
Welfare doesn't guarantee a payday that exceeds what more than 50% of the households have (in 2009). And if you remember, this idea of having to work for the money was met with enormous howls of pain and cries of "slavery" when the conservative leaders proposed it. It was called "workfare". Liberals hated it. And here you are proposing it again, this time with the beneficiaries being explicitly the rich people who get personal assistants out of the deal.
They won't have a choice on the tax increases...
If we don't start handing out $3.5 TRILLION dollars in new welfare there won't need to be the massive tax increases to pay for it. You've just made a perfect circular argument in support of your slavery program. "The rich will have to pay more taxes anyway to pay for the slaves we'll provide for them, so we might as well create the slave class to work for the rich...".
I never said the employer would pay $50k/year. Most, and possibly all, would come from welfare programs.
Every employer will be paying that fee because the taxes will have to cover it. You're saying "a few dollars a day", and I'm showing you the true costs of your ridiculous idea. I even pointed out that your proposed employer "contribution" to the system would be at a $40/hour rate, which is hardly "a few dollars a day".
I use the number $50k to symbolize a lifestyle comparable to a family that makes $50k today. Obviously I wasn't talking about $50,000 physical dollars
Here's another "I didn't mean to say". Ok, A $50k/year lifestyle. That will cost vastly more in your utopian guaranteed income world. Simple math. $3.5 trillion dollars in taxes taken out of the productive people and handed to the poor. Costs to businesses will go up ($140/hour base wages in your world, productivity decimated), so prices will skyrocket. A $5 hamburger today will cost $25 then. So you trying to change the system by converting it to a "lifestyle" instead of dollar figure just makes things worse. Multiply costs by 5 and that $3.5 trillion balloons into $17.5 trillion. That's an upward spiral that has no end until the entire system crashes. Like a Ponzi scheme.
If you actually thought I meant $50,000 physical dollars, you should have at least assumed that was only $20-30k in today's dollars.
I assumed you meant what you wrote, which is apparently my mistake. You don't even know what you're writing.
I never claimed that my proposals will increase productivity.
You said that the costs would be paid for by the increased productivity. You can't claim productivity increases created by other people as an excuse to hand out astronomical sums of other people's money.
I do actually think my proposals will be more productive than the alternative,
I've already shown you how that belief is absolute nonsense, using actual numbers and something called "math". If nothing else, a $3.5 trillion dollar addition to the US budget will cause a collapse of the US economic system faster than it would take for the first checks to the freeloaders to appear in the mailboxes. If there even any mailmen left after they learn they can make $50k/year without having to do another day's work in their life.
No, you don't. There is a thing called "welfare" and "unemployment". You are proposing a system that you now say guarantees $50k/year to a household but REQUIRES 10 hours a week of work (which your initial proposal did not), suggesting that the work would be as "assistants" to rich people. You really don't see what you're saying here, do you? You really think many smart rich people are going to want someone who is around just 10 hours a week and costs them massively in increased taxes? You don't realize that having an assistant that does 40 hours per week will cost at least $200k/year in just guaranteed "salary" and wind up being four people to manage and coordinate instead of just one? You think that would be an increase in productivity?
I wouldn't do my own dishes or my own laundry if it only cost a few dollars per day to have these things done for you.
Neither would I. But $50k/year is a lot more than "a few dollars a day". That's $136 dollars per day, every day, weekends included. That money has to come from somewhere. And then you want to pay them $20k on top of that, which is $54/day, every day, weekends included. But let's use more correct numbers. Those workers will work 50 weeks, or 250 days per year, at best. That turns the actual rates into $200/day and $80/day. Total: $280/day. That's $1400 per week for a ten hour work week, or $140/hour. Yeah, I think I would like a system like that. (in fact, I make about that much in salary, so if I only had to work ten hours a week that would be great! Sign me up! My "productivity", which you claim would increase, would be less than 1/4 of what it used to be, however.)
Even if all you personally had to pay your "assistant" who does your laundry was the $20k/year number and let the taxpayers foot the bill for the rest, you are personally paying $40/hour for that assistant, while he watches the dryer spin so he can do the next load. This is what you call "a few dollars per day"? If you can't find someone today to do your laundry for $20/hour you must have some pretty seriously disgusting laundry, and I can see why you'd want to have a government system providing labor to do it for you.
I'd love it, until I realized what would happen to the society as a whole, and to those poor schmucks left paying taxes to support that. Looking at the 2009 numbers from the IRS, there were about 69 million people in the bottom 50% of AGI. That's a good estimate of "households". The AGI cutoff was about $32k, so I expect that all of these people would love to join your guaranteed $50k/year bandwagon. That's $3,450,000,000,000
dollars you'd need to come up with to pay them from somewhere. Almost $3.5 TRILLION dollars. Per year. Now, what makes this number interesting is that if there were 69 million people in the bottom 50%, there are the same number in the top 50%. That means that those people would need to pay, on average, $50k/year MORE in taxes to fund this massive guaranteed payout scheme. And even more interesting, that extra $3.5 trillion would be on top of the $850 billion they already pay in taxes.
In reality, the split point wouldn't be at 50% and $32k AGI currently, it would be more like the bottom 75% would sign up. They (in 2009) were making less than $63k/year. Now you've got 100 million "households" getting $5 trillion dollars per year due to the generosity of the taxpayers.
And this will all work out in the end due to "increased productivity"?
You may call them servants, but they would probably far prefer that lifestyle over working two jobs at McDonalds and Wal-Mart just to make ends meet like many do today.
Heck yeah, $50k/year free is a lot better than working ANY jobs. That's why people will choose that option. Even people who are currently working 40 hour weeks and paying taxes, which means you lose 30 hours of their productivity every week and all of their input to the income tax
It sounds like you need some controls on who can own guns.
We have controls on who can buy guns.
We have controls on who can own guns.
We have very little control on who steals guns, which is why the first two sets of controls do very little to stop anyone except honest, law abiding citizens from having guns.
Guaranteed doesn't necessarily mean you don't work at all.
Uhhh, yeah, it kinda does. That's what "guarantee" means.
It could mean that there are a large number of part time 10-20 hour per week jobs. Probably personal assistant jobs for the wealthy and upper-middle class that are too hard to do with robotics.
Do you not realize what you just proposed? An involuntary servitude system where the poor get to work as "assistants" to the rich. Not involuntary? If you want to eat...
I meant $50k per household.
You said "$50k per family". If you meant per household, you should have said so. The problem still exists, however. How do you define "household"? Two unrelated adults living in the same apartment are not a "household" in too many people's opinions. And even if you write a set of exemptions and definitions that make it so, then it becomes an enforcement nightmare.
but my point had nothing to do with the details of how the money is distributed.
Yes, I know, you ignored the blatantly obvious problem with handing out money for free. If you're going to propose something like this, the least you could do is consider how easily it will be abused and how much of a suck it will be on the economy.
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year.
Why would they? They don't get that now. Are companies in your universe going to start paying well above minimum wage for entry-level part time jobs?
$50k would come from welfare and $20k from their paychecks.
Wow. $70k for flipping burgers. You do realize that those burgers will cost triple what they cost today, don't you?
Wages would rise to whatever level is necessary to get people to do the job,
And costs would go up with them. TANSTAAFL.
No, in the long run productivity increases
Here's those mythical productivity increases that I corrected you on in another post. Having a bunch of 10 hour per week employees isn't going to boost productivity and it will increase costs.
so that the average person only has to work 10 hours per week to live a decent life.
Well, other than the horrific inflation that your system would create and the daily price increases, your guaranteed $50k person is going to be doing pretty well, especially if three or four of them get together to share an apartment.
But increased safety nets (welfare program) would be necessary to stop quality of life from decreasing as the number of hours worked decrease (paid for by the increased productivity of the general economy).
What? You think it is an increase in productivity to have three people working 30 hr/wk jobs instead of 2 working 45 hrs/wk? Benefits for three people vs. two. Training for three people vs. two. Three people who want time off instead of two. Maternity/paternity leave for three instead of two. Three desks instead of two?
Taxation on three people making just enough to have to pay taxes to start with vs. two who are making significantly more and thus pay significantly more?
You throw out this "increased productivity" like you thought it would really happen, but you've ignored the costs. Well, though, now that we have a significant distortion to the market due to mandatory insurance systems, yes, there is some savings to having three part timers who don't get health insurance vs. two that would. Are you happy with your three workers not getting health insurance because they are less than 40 hr workers?
If you had a system where everyone was guaranteed a family income of $50k, but the average working family has a family income of $150k, I think most people capable of being productive in tomorrow's economy will decide to work instead of staying home (or working crappy part time jobs).
If you guaranteed me $50k/year for the rest of my life, I'd walk out tomorrow.
If you told two teenaged kids that you'd give them $50k each without having to work for it, or $50k per "family" if they get married, you'd see a lot more unmarried couples. You must be horribly naive if you think that $100k per year tax free isn't going to be a huge draw.
Who would you hire to do all the minimum wage jobs? Who is going to flip your burger or bus your table or put gas in your car or pick the vegetables or.... Do you really want someone who is too stupid to figure out that a free $50k/year is much better than getting minimum wage doing much of anything?
The problem would be, in the long run, that guaranteeing people $50k/year without working means that you'd have to tax those who work and make $150k so much that they might as well take the free $50k and stay home.
Unfortunately, society is made up of economies and people, not just test tubes filled with chemicals or molecules obeying rigid physical laws. A government that regards scientists as supreme is no better than one that regards them as useless.
If you want a technocracy, find a place that has no government and try to create one. As a technocrat, I expect that the people you want to claim superiority over will have a different opinion, but I'm sure you would be successful if such a form of government is truly better than all others.
That is such a horrible view, made by an idealist rather than a realist.
When both choices are unacceptable, the only logical choice is to not vote.
My view is much more realistic than yours. Neither you nor I can say why those people didn't vote. There is more than ample precedent for people not voting because they don't care, which I supported by numbers from a local election where not very many people voted, and in that election there was really just a lot of "yes/no" proposals and a lot of uncontested seats. It's very hard to claim that "yes" and "no" aren't acceptable choices to a yes/no question. It wasn't that it was too hard to vote, this was a by-mail election. It was apathy that led to those low numbers.
You can claim all you want that they didn't vote because they didn't like any of the options, but that's a guess. When someone does not vote they are not expressing an opinion of any kind. You can't count the lack of noses as anything more than a lack of noses. That makes not voting a completely illogical reaction, because in that form of election the person with the most votes wins no matter how small the turnout. By saying nothing you say nothing, you're not speaking volumes.
And when the result comes out in a way they didn't like, sure, in a country with free speech rights they technically have a right to complain about the result, but they also have a responsibility to accept the blame for the failed result. That's what the colloquial meaning of "you have no right to complain" is: you have every legal right to whine but you bear responsibility for the failure so you have no logical right to complain. "You have no right to complain" does not mean you have lost your Constitutional rights. You're making claims of censorship where none exist.
You seem to think I am defending someone. Stop. I've already said I wasn't. I was responding to TWO SPECIFIC STATEMENTS that I quoted. One was dealing with "will of the people", and the other was specific about breaking campaign promises. That's it. End of story.
That's a touch more egregious than "breaking campaign promises".
And I'm not the one who said he broke campaign promises. And I didn't say he was a prince of a fellow who is getting a bad shake. I was specific in what I quoted, I was specific in my response. Read nothing further into what I wrote than what I wrote.
I'm not defending anyone. I'm pointing out that counting noses in a mob isn't a good way to determine "will of the people", and that "breaking campaign promises" isn't sufficient to justify a coup.
That means 2/3rds of the people did not like their choices.
No, that means that 2/3rds of the people didn't vote. If they didn't vote they had no say in the result and no right to complain that it didn't wind up they way they wanted.
It sounds like the people already spoke once by boycotting the election.
Or they didn't vote for any of a thousand other reasons, just like people in the US sometimes don't vote for any number of reasons. The last election held in my area had a whopping 22% turnout. We could claim that means that 78% of the people didn't like any of the selections on the ballot and everyone and everything loses and another election has to be held, or we could admit that they just didn't care enough to vote and those who did care got to make the choices, which is much closer to the truth.
No, they won't. The uprising is because the government was a de-facto Islamic theocracy, and the majority of the people don't want that.
Measuring "will of the people" by "how big is today's mob" is a poor substitute for the ballot box. Having a military that allows the people to control things only to the extent that the military likes what is going on is a poor substitute for rule of law.
Morsi seemed the lesser danger, and to make himself more attractive he made a bunch of promises: he said "sure I'm the Islamic candidate, but I'll respect the rights of non-Islamic people." Then he broke his promises.
Oh, well, never mind then. He broke campaign promises. This is clearly sufficient grounds to have a military coup, and it has never happened in any political system prior to this. Maybe Morsi can be sent to some nice prison somewhere, like the one at Gitmo. Which apparently was closed five years ago, according to my government source. Who certainly would never lie about such a thing.
Yes, explaining why he should is usually hard. "Because I can't write web pages without javascript to do pretty things, and I expect you to look at my pretty things..." isn't much of a reason. Putting a link that says "here's how to turn it back on" with a page that covers the main browsers (and if the programmer is smart enough, is specific for the browser the user has), is easy. It could be written once and linked to by millions of other people. I would hazard a guess that each of the major browser authors already has a FAQ that covers "how do I turn javascript on" for their browsers.
Without script, how is a web site supposed to detect for which browser to display the instructions,
It's called the User-Agent header. No javascript necessary to get it. I'm running an absolutely ancient version of Apache and even IT has the ability to conditionalize responses based on User-Agent.
especially if users of different web browsers are behind a single caching proxy?
If the proxy prevents the User-Agent header from being passed, it is broken. That header is there for a reason -- for the use of the server.
Perhaps the goal is to eliminate that page entirely by merging all items on it into other pages.
Yes, the other options on that page are all anti-web-programmer's rights, too. Fonts, colors, automatically loading images, blocking pop-ups. All things that web programmers want to control and don't want the user to know about. So, probably, this is just one shot across that bow. Get rid of them all. That save SO much valuable screen real estate, for a menu that isn't displayed unless the user asks for it.
That falls right into the paradigm of "my web page must be the only thing you look at", which is enforced by creating a page that does not scale to the user-specified window size but requires full-screen windows to work right.
I make no claims about that either way, I simply state that you need a different basis than morality to argue against moving a job to a less developed nation.
How about the morality of taking the money from people in the US (by force, if necessary) and spending it someplace else so they people it was taken from don't get any benefit from their labor? That's a pretty good moral standing to prevent outsourcing of taxpayer funded jobs.
Let's add on the morality of then taking MORE money from the people in the US (again by force, if necessary) to hand over to the people who don't have the jobs because they were outsourced.
Yeah, that explains why the average price for a 3-bedroom house in Bangalore is about US$240,000.
And, of course, we know that the average Indian worker buys a three bedroom house, right? And they all live in the nicest places in the largest cities.
I guess you are being funny, but this was a bidding process, so presumably the company isn't being paid for a $100k programmer, they are being paid for the $20k programmer that was priced into their bid.
No, because it was a bid they've been able to use $80k for their cost and undercut the US company by $20k per programmer. They'll then be able to pay the worker $20k and keep $60k in profit. That's the problem with always going with the lowest bidder. One of the problems.
No, that's a pretty HTML view of web browsers. Web browsers aren't "the internet". It says a lot about you that you'd think they are.
Users just see a training course, they don't realize that it will work on any device.
If it has all the stuff you claim, then it won't work on "any device". It will work on the ones you want to support, fail miserably on everything you don't care about. That was why HTML existed, and even though it wouldn't always do the same thing on every browser, the chances were very good that it wouldn't simply puke and give the user nothing at all. I lost count a long time ago of all the websites I went to that decided to have some complicated garbage on their main page that did absolutely nothing unless you had all the right plugins and were using the right browser. Not even a simple link to get past that one page, and no hint how to get anything else from the site.
You seem to think that everything should be a web site,
Absolute nonsense, and I never said anything even close to that. In fact, I think there are a lot of things that should NOT be web sites.
That's a single well-known example of why micro transactions (like clicking a single button to send a single piece of data) should not require the entire interface to refresh.
In other words, javascript is mandatory so that people who click 'like' buttons won't be inconvenienced by a slower "web experience". Oh, my, the page refreshed. How awful. We must make javascript mandatory so I won't have a poorer experience.
As I said there are exceptions, but as a general rule it's better to live in a state where there are strong unions than one where there aren't any.
Better for whom? The union-protected workers who know the union will leap to their defense if they screw off on the job, or the people who have to pay the union workers to get something done?
I used to go to trade shows in Atlantic City. That's the epitome of a "strong labor union" area. We had a display that needed to be set up after the boxes it came in were delivered, and then the boxes needed to be taken away. We had electrical equipment that needed power. Getting all this done required the benevolence of half a dozen unions. I say "benevolence" because if we dared to plug something in ourselves the other unions would react in solidarity with the electrical union and we'd get things done -- next week, maybe, maybe later. After the show was over. If we dared to try to put up our own display, same problem. Chairs? Well, the chair moving union didn't like us moving chairs without involving them. At union rates. (I was on a TV set one time and a chair needed to be moved about a foot to the left, so I moved it. You'd think a nuclear bomb was about to go off, all the consternation and brouhaha that went on. I did a stage hand's job! And I wasn't a stage hand! The HORRORS! I would have asked the union guy standing next to me to do it, but he was an electrician and he doesn't move chairs.)
The expense of going to that show was outrageous, and most of it was due to union wages for people to do menial tasks. And to pay for the union reps who did nothing else but watch to make sure nobody did anything a union worker had to be paid to do.
Unions raise the wages paid for jobs covered by their union,
Pray tell, what is the current value of someone plugging in an extension cord, compared to the union wage of the two people required to do that task? How about the cost of having to wait until they can be found and pleaded with to pretty please come plug this in and get the job put on the schedule for later that afternoon? And what is the expense to the public when the 'extension cord plugger in' union goes on strike and all the others go out in support so that nothing can be done, and if anything is done someone will come around and cut up your extension cord because you used scab labor to plug it in?
Some unions do some good things. Some unions take it to extremes and cost us all a lot more money. Unfortunately, the unions that need the most protection are the ones who do the most ridiculous things in the name of protecting their members.
Because if you don't, a significant number of "dumb" people will complain loudly that your program "sucks" because it "broke the Internet" on their computer, and slowly the world's view of your software will degrade.
Rightly so, if your web page demands to run arbitrary code on other people's computers. And isn't smart enough to detect (like many sites already can) that the reason why the user isn't getting "an optimal web experience" is because he's turned javascript off, and you can't be arsed to tell him how to turn it back on and why he should.
And then leave the decision in the hands of the user, not the browser writer.
In the meantime for the 99.9% of users who will never touch that particular option it is a waste of valuable screen real estate
It's one line in a menu page that is, by default, half empty to start with. wow, such a waste of "valuable screen real estate".
Your typical tech illiterate (who vastly outnumber anyone reading this) isn't going to even know what Javascript is much less why or when they might care to disable it completely within a browser.
So, obviously, this is a reason to keep everyone from being able to disable it. Sure.
Beside completely disabling Javascript is the very definition of a crude solution.
You think having to install some plugin to stop javascript from being executed is a better solution than just having the browser itself ignore javascript? This demonstrates the twisted thinking that modern "web developers" have.
A menu option deserves prominence if it is commonly used. The option to disable Javascript is very seldom used
Perhaps in your tiny universe, but in mine I use it a lot. It deserves an easy to find menu location so I don't have to leave the web page I'm looking at to bring up "about:config" when I find a stupid web programmer who can't do simple things in a simple way and needs a javascript widget (many of which are broken) to do something. Like trying to validate email addresses, which the common scripts all fail at miserably.
The folly is assuming that the internet is still all "web pages" instead of applications.
If that's your assumption, that's your problem. I come from a time before "the web" and the Internet WAS applications. And now we have an application called a "web browser" whose job is to render a MARKUP language, not be a remote compute server for people who want to provide content that looks exactly like they want it to look and do it without consuming CPU cycles on their precious servers. The comment about turning javascript off on a browser being as stupid as turning HTML off is just ridiculous. The browser's job is to render HTML. It should be able to do that without requiring javascript on the client.
The folly is assuming that web pages have to be applications.
Google's services are the obvious screaming example of useful Javascript.
I can remember the days before javascript and we still had search engines. We had email. We had message systems. We didn't need javascript to do cutesy crap like... whatever the cutesy crap is that it commonly used for. Like limiting the user's ability to do things, or doing things just because the mouse rolled over something. Sorry, if I want your button to do something, I'll click on it. That's why it is a button.
Imagine if every time someone clicked the Like button, the entire page reloaded. That's obviously not usable.
So the argument in favor of making javascript mandatory is so that people who click 'like' buttons won't be inconvenienced by a slower "web experience"? Will the eternal September never end?
That is not an investment, it is buying power at an extra cost. You didn't send the power company ten dollars and say "invest this in hydro", they came to you and said "you can pay us extra for power that costs us less to produce". You got hoodwinked. Not to mention that once those electrons hit the wire, they mix in with all the other electrons, so you're actually using power from all the sources, dirty and clean(er), just paying extra for the privilege of bragging about it here.
Many states now work that way.
States should not be in the power business, they should be in the government business.
Slashdot Mirror
As a result you have a 2.5" disk running constantly
Anyone who uses laptop-sized drives and expects enterprise level results is ... ignorant?
But if the minimum guaranteed pay is paid by government entities, it does not have any of the damages of a minimum wage.
You must be joking. You really think that adding $3.5 trillion in taxes so you can hand out free money to anyone who wants it won't have any of the same damages that a minimum wage does? Costs are costs. It doesn't matter if the employer is forced to pay $10/hour for work that's worth only $1/hour or if he's paying an extra $9/hour in payroll taxes. It's the same $9 cost and it gets passed on to the consumer either way.
Someone may be willing to work for $3/hour
But they can't because the minimum wage is much much higher than that. You can't get rid of the minimum wage in your mythical free-money universe because there will still be people who have morals, who don't think the government owes them a living, and who want to work for their pay. You'll be cutting their throats if you get rid of the minimum wage.
if they are getting $2k/month from the government no matter what.
They're going to get $4166/month from "the government" no matter what. That's $50k/year divided by 12 months/year. Why would anyone work for $3/hour if they're getting $4k a month free? No, wait, you're $50k/year number was in current dollars, so after rampant inflation and spiraling costs of everything, that's more like $250k/year, or $20k/month.
That extra money would be like a 30% raise.
Ten hours a week at $3/hour is $30/week, or about $120/month. Even considering your mistaken claim of $2k/month, that's only a 6% raise. You really can't do math very well, can you? Given the real number is $4166/month, your "raise" is less than 3% -- one tenth of your number.
Oh, but I accepted your statement that they'd work 10 hours a week at face value. Maybe they'll work full-time to get that 30% "raise". Let's see. To get a 30% raise out of a $3/hour job and $4166/month free, you'd need to work 416 hours a month, or about 100 hours a week. 30% of $4166 is $1250. To earn $1250 at $3/hour is 416 hours. Divide by four (weeks per month) and you get 104 hours per week. Give or take. See how simple the math is? Why don't you try it sometime? Or do you really think that someone who is getting $50k/year free will want to toil at a menial job for 100 hours a week? In case the math escapes you, that's more than 14 hours per day, seven days a week. That's spending almost 60% of your life working as someone's assistant, doing laundry or washing dishes or whatever the rich people would hire them to do.
But hold on a moment. Since this mythical fellow who is working full time to make money in addition to the free $50k actually has an income, and he needs to be taxed to pay for the $3.5 trillion in handouts, he won't be keeping most of that money. His "30% raise" will result in him keeping maybe 20% of that money, or in real terms, a 6% raise. Do you know anyone who would work 100 additional hours a week for a 6% raise? I don't.
Please, stop. You're embarrassing yourself. But you are giving the rest of us a good laugh.
I never proposed that at all. I said that the guaranteed $50k per year didn't necessarily have to be given without work
Either it requires work or it doesn't. Pick one. If work is optional, who is going to work? $50k/year free? Send me the check. $70k/year for 10 hours a week work? Wow. Send me the check.
but the basic concept of a guaranteed basic income is not a new idea.
Of course it isn't. Everyone who doesn't have money has at one time or another thought about a system of free money that would mean they don't have to work at all. You notice how successful such systems are, don't you?
We already have something similar in our current welfare system,
Welfare doesn't guarantee a payday that exceeds what more than 50% of the households have (in 2009). And if you remember, this idea of having to work for the money was met with enormous howls of pain and cries of "slavery" when the conservative leaders proposed it. It was called "workfare". Liberals hated it. And here you are proposing it again, this time with the beneficiaries being explicitly the rich people who get personal assistants out of the deal.
They won't have a choice on the tax increases ...
If we don't start handing out $3.5 TRILLION dollars in new welfare there won't need to be the massive tax increases to pay for it. You've just made a perfect circular argument in support of your slavery program. "The rich will have to pay more taxes anyway to pay for the slaves we'll provide for them, so we might as well create the slave class to work for the rich...".
I never said the employer would pay $50k/year. Most, and possibly all, would come from welfare programs.
Every employer will be paying that fee because the taxes will have to cover it. You're saying "a few dollars a day", and I'm showing you the true costs of your ridiculous idea. I even pointed out that your proposed employer "contribution" to the system would be at a $40/hour rate, which is hardly "a few dollars a day".
I use the number $50k to symbolize a lifestyle comparable to a family that makes $50k today. Obviously I wasn't talking about $50,000 physical dollars
Here's another "I didn't mean to say". Ok, A $50k/year lifestyle. That will cost vastly more in your utopian guaranteed income world. Simple math. $3.5 trillion dollars in taxes taken out of the productive people and handed to the poor. Costs to businesses will go up ($140/hour base wages in your world, productivity decimated), so prices will skyrocket. A $5 hamburger today will cost $25 then. So you trying to change the system by converting it to a "lifestyle" instead of dollar figure just makes things worse. Multiply costs by 5 and that $3.5 trillion balloons into $17.5 trillion. That's an upward spiral that has no end until the entire system crashes. Like a Ponzi scheme.
If you actually thought I meant $50,000 physical dollars, you should have at least assumed that was only $20-30k in today's dollars.
I assumed you meant what you wrote, which is apparently my mistake. You don't even know what you're writing.
I never claimed that my proposals will increase productivity.
You said that the costs would be paid for by the increased productivity. You can't claim productivity increases created by other people as an excuse to hand out astronomical sums of other people's money.
I do actually think my proposals will be more productive than the alternative,
I've already shown you how that belief is absolute nonsense, using actual numbers and something called "math". If nothing else, a $3.5 trillion dollar addition to the US budget will cause a collapse of the US economic system faster than it would take for the first checks to the freeloaders to appear in the mailboxes. If there even any mailmen left after they learn they can make $50k/year without having to do another day's work in their life.
You already have to work if you want to eat.
No, you don't. There is a thing called "welfare" and "unemployment". You are proposing a system that you now say guarantees $50k/year to a household but REQUIRES 10 hours a week of work (which your initial proposal did not), suggesting that the work would be as "assistants" to rich people. You really don't see what you're saying here, do you? You really think many smart rich people are going to want someone who is around just 10 hours a week and costs them massively in increased taxes? You don't realize that having an assistant that does 40 hours per week will cost at least $200k/year in just guaranteed "salary" and wind up being four people to manage and coordinate instead of just one? You think that would be an increase in productivity?
I wouldn't do my own dishes or my own laundry if it only cost a few dollars per day to have these things done for you.
Neither would I. But $50k/year is a lot more than "a few dollars a day". That's $136 dollars per day, every day, weekends included. That money has to come from somewhere. And then you want to pay them $20k on top of that, which is $54/day, every day, weekends included. But let's use more correct numbers. Those workers will work 50 weeks, or 250 days per year, at best. That turns the actual rates into $200/day and $80/day. Total: $280/day. That's $1400 per week for a ten hour work week, or $140/hour. Yeah, I think I would like a system like that. (in fact, I make about that much in salary, so if I only had to work ten hours a week that would be great! Sign me up! My "productivity", which you claim would increase, would be less than 1/4 of what it used to be, however.)
Even if all you personally had to pay your "assistant" who does your laundry was the $20k/year number and let the taxpayers foot the bill for the rest, you are personally paying $40/hour for that assistant, while he watches the dryer spin so he can do the next load. This is what you call "a few dollars per day"? If you can't find someone today to do your laundry for $20/hour you must have some pretty seriously disgusting laundry, and I can see why you'd want to have a government system providing labor to do it for you.
I'd love it, until I realized what would happen to the society as a whole, and to those poor schmucks left paying taxes to support that. Looking at the 2009 numbers from the IRS, there were about 69 million people in the bottom 50% of AGI. That's a good estimate of "households". The AGI cutoff was about $32k, so I expect that all of these people would love to join your guaranteed $50k/year bandwagon. That's $3,450,000,000,000 dollars you'd need to come up with to pay them from somewhere. Almost $3.5 TRILLION dollars. Per year. Now, what makes this number interesting is that if there were 69 million people in the bottom 50%, there are the same number in the top 50%. That means that those people would need to pay, on average, $50k/year MORE in taxes to fund this massive guaranteed payout scheme. And even more interesting, that extra $3.5 trillion would be on top of the $850 billion they already pay in taxes.
In reality, the split point wouldn't be at 50% and $32k AGI currently, it would be more like the bottom 75% would sign up. They (in 2009) were making less than $63k/year. Now you've got 100 million "households" getting $5 trillion dollars per year due to the generosity of the taxpayers.
And this will all work out in the end due to "increased productivity"?
You may call them servants, but they would probably far prefer that lifestyle over working two jobs at McDonalds and Wal-Mart just to make ends meet like many do today.
Heck yeah, $50k/year free is a lot better than working ANY jobs. That's why people will choose that option. Even people who are currently working 40 hour weeks and paying taxes, which means you lose 30 hours of their productivity every week and all of their input to the income tax
It sounds like you need some controls on who can own guns.
We have controls on who can buy guns.
We have controls on who can own guns.
We have very little control on who steals guns, which is why the first two sets of controls do very little to stop anyone except honest, law abiding citizens from having guns.
Guaranteed doesn't necessarily mean you don't work at all.
Uhhh, yeah, it kinda does. That's what "guarantee" means.
It could mean that there are a large number of part time 10-20 hour per week jobs. Probably personal assistant jobs for the wealthy and upper-middle class that are too hard to do with robotics.
Do you not realize what you just proposed? An involuntary servitude system where the poor get to work as "assistants" to the rich. Not involuntary? If you want to eat ...
I meant $50k per household.
You said "$50k per family". If you meant per household, you should have said so. The problem still exists, however. How do you define "household"? Two unrelated adults living in the same apartment are not a "household" in too many people's opinions. And even if you write a set of exemptions and definitions that make it so, then it becomes an enforcement nightmare.
but my point had nothing to do with the details of how the money is distributed.
Yes, I know, you ignored the blatantly obvious problem with handing out money for free. If you're going to propose something like this, the least you could do is consider how easily it will be abused and how much of a suck it will be on the economy.
The people willing to do menial jobs like flipping a burger (if that isn't done by robots) will get a standard of living higher than $50k/year.
Why would they? They don't get that now. Are companies in your universe going to start paying well above minimum wage for entry-level part time jobs?
$50k would come from welfare and $20k from their paychecks.
Wow. $70k for flipping burgers. You do realize that those burgers will cost triple what they cost today, don't you?
Wages would rise to whatever level is necessary to get people to do the job,
And costs would go up with them. TANSTAAFL.
No, in the long run productivity increases
Here's those mythical productivity increases that I corrected you on in another post. Having a bunch of 10 hour per week employees isn't going to boost productivity and it will increase costs.
so that the average person only has to work 10 hours per week to live a decent life.
Well, other than the horrific inflation that your system would create and the daily price increases, your guaranteed $50k person is going to be doing pretty well, especially if three or four of them get together to share an apartment.
But increased safety nets (welfare program) would be necessary to stop quality of life from decreasing as the number of hours worked decrease (paid for by the increased productivity of the general economy).
What? You think it is an increase in productivity to have three people working 30 hr/wk jobs instead of 2 working 45 hrs/wk? Benefits for three people vs. two. Training for three people vs. two. Three people who want time off instead of two. Maternity/paternity leave for three instead of two. Three desks instead of two?
Taxation on three people making just enough to have to pay taxes to start with vs. two who are making significantly more and thus pay significantly more?
You throw out this "increased productivity" like you thought it would really happen, but you've ignored the costs. Well, though, now that we have a significant distortion to the market due to mandatory insurance systems, yes, there is some savings to having three part timers who don't get health insurance vs. two that would. Are you happy with your three workers not getting health insurance because they are less than 40 hr workers?
If you had a system where everyone was guaranteed a family income of $50k, but the average working family has a family income of $150k, I think most people capable of being productive in tomorrow's economy will decide to work instead of staying home (or working crappy part time jobs).
If you guaranteed me $50k/year for the rest of my life, I'd walk out tomorrow.
If you told two teenaged kids that you'd give them $50k each without having to work for it, or $50k per "family" if they get married, you'd see a lot more unmarried couples. You must be horribly naive if you think that $100k per year tax free isn't going to be a huge draw.
Who would you hire to do all the minimum wage jobs? Who is going to flip your burger or bus your table or put gas in your car or pick the vegetables or .... Do you really want someone who is too stupid to figure out that a free $50k/year is much better than getting minimum wage doing much of anything?
The problem would be, in the long run, that guaranteeing people $50k/year without working means that you'd have to tax those who work and make $150k so much that they might as well take the free $50k and stay home.
If you want a technocracy, find a place that has no government and try to create one. As a technocrat, I expect that the people you want to claim superiority over will have a different opinion, but I'm sure you would be successful if such a form of government is truly better than all others.
That is such a horrible view, made by an idealist rather than a realist. When both choices are unacceptable, the only logical choice is to not vote.
My view is much more realistic than yours. Neither you nor I can say why those people didn't vote. There is more than ample precedent for people not voting because they don't care, which I supported by numbers from a local election where not very many people voted, and in that election there was really just a lot of "yes/no" proposals and a lot of uncontested seats. It's very hard to claim that "yes" and "no" aren't acceptable choices to a yes/no question. It wasn't that it was too hard to vote, this was a by-mail election. It was apathy that led to those low numbers.
You can claim all you want that they didn't vote because they didn't like any of the options, but that's a guess. When someone does not vote they are not expressing an opinion of any kind. You can't count the lack of noses as anything more than a lack of noses. That makes not voting a completely illogical reaction, because in that form of election the person with the most votes wins no matter how small the turnout. By saying nothing you say nothing, you're not speaking volumes.
And when the result comes out in a way they didn't like, sure, in a country with free speech rights they technically have a right to complain about the result, but they also have a responsibility to accept the blame for the failed result. That's what the colloquial meaning of "you have no right to complain" is: you have every legal right to whine but you bear responsibility for the failure so you have no logical right to complain. "You have no right to complain" does not mean you have lost your Constitutional rights. You're making claims of censorship where none exist.
He made a power grab.
You seem to think I am defending someone. Stop. I've already said I wasn't. I was responding to TWO SPECIFIC STATEMENTS that I quoted. One was dealing with "will of the people", and the other was specific about breaking campaign promises. That's it. End of story.
That's a touch more egregious than "breaking campaign promises".
And I'm not the one who said he broke campaign promises. And I didn't say he was a prince of a fellow who is getting a bad shake. I was specific in what I quoted, I was specific in my response. Read nothing further into what I wrote than what I wrote.
Quick Q. Why are you defending a leader...
I'm not defending anyone. I'm pointing out that counting noses in a mob isn't a good way to determine "will of the people", and that "breaking campaign promises" isn't sufficient to justify a coup.
That means 2/3rds of the people did not like their choices.
No, that means that 2/3rds of the people didn't vote. If they didn't vote they had no say in the result and no right to complain that it didn't wind up they way they wanted.
It sounds like the people already spoke once by boycotting the election.
Or they didn't vote for any of a thousand other reasons, just like people in the US sometimes don't vote for any number of reasons. The last election held in my area had a whopping 22% turnout. We could claim that means that 78% of the people didn't like any of the selections on the ballot and everyone and everything loses and another election has to be held, or we could admit that they just didn't care enough to vote and those who did care got to make the choices, which is much closer to the truth.
No, they won't. The uprising is because the government was a de-facto Islamic theocracy, and the majority of the people don't want that.
Measuring "will of the people" by "how big is today's mob" is a poor substitute for the ballot box. Having a military that allows the people to control things only to the extent that the military likes what is going on is a poor substitute for rule of law.
Morsi seemed the lesser danger, and to make himself more attractive he made a bunch of promises: he said "sure I'm the Islamic candidate, but I'll respect the rights of non-Islamic people." Then he broke his promises.
Oh, well, never mind then. He broke campaign promises. This is clearly sufficient grounds to have a military coup, and it has never happened in any political system prior to this. Maybe Morsi can be sent to some nice prison somewhere, like the one at Gitmo. Which apparently was closed five years ago, according to my government source. Who certainly would never lie about such a thing.
That's the hard part.
Yes, explaining why he should is usually hard. "Because I can't write web pages without javascript to do pretty things, and I expect you to look at my pretty things..." isn't much of a reason. Putting a link that says "here's how to turn it back on" with a page that covers the main browsers (and if the programmer is smart enough, is specific for the browser the user has), is easy. It could be written once and linked to by millions of other people. I would hazard a guess that each of the major browser authors already has a FAQ that covers "how do I turn javascript on" for their browsers.
Without script, how is a web site supposed to detect for which browser to display the instructions,
It's called the User-Agent header. No javascript necessary to get it. I'm running an absolutely ancient version of Apache and even IT has the ability to conditionalize responses based on User-Agent.
especially if users of different web browsers are behind a single caching proxy?
If the proxy prevents the User-Agent header from being passed, it is broken. That header is there for a reason -- for the use of the server.
Perhaps the goal is to eliminate that page entirely by merging all items on it into other pages.
Yes, the other options on that page are all anti-web-programmer's rights, too. Fonts, colors, automatically loading images, blocking pop-ups. All things that web programmers want to control and don't want the user to know about. So, probably, this is just one shot across that bow. Get rid of them all. That save SO much valuable screen real estate, for a menu that isn't displayed unless the user asks for it.
That falls right into the paradigm of "my web page must be the only thing you look at", which is enforced by creating a page that does not scale to the user-specified window size but requires full-screen windows to work right.
I make no claims about that either way, I simply state that you need a different basis than morality to argue against moving a job to a less developed nation.
How about the morality of taking the money from people in the US (by force, if necessary) and spending it someplace else so they people it was taken from don't get any benefit from their labor? That's a pretty good moral standing to prevent outsourcing of taxpayer funded jobs.
Let's add on the morality of then taking MORE money from the people in the US (again by force, if necessary) to hand over to the people who don't have the jobs because they were outsourced.
Yeah, that explains why the average price for a 3-bedroom house in Bangalore is about US$240,000.
And, of course, we know that the average Indian worker buys a three bedroom house, right? And they all live in the nicest places in the largest cities.
I guess you are being funny, but this was a bidding process, so presumably the company isn't being paid for a $100k programmer, they are being paid for the $20k programmer that was priced into their bid.
No, because it was a bid they've been able to use $80k for their cost and undercut the US company by $20k per programmer. They'll then be able to pay the worker $20k and keep $60k in profit. That's the problem with always going with the lowest bidder. One of the problems.
That's a pretty Mosaic-era view of the internet.
No, that's a pretty HTML view of web browsers. Web browsers aren't "the internet". It says a lot about you that you'd think they are.
Users just see a training course, they don't realize that it will work on any device.
If it has all the stuff you claim, then it won't work on "any device". It will work on the ones you want to support, fail miserably on everything you don't care about. That was why HTML existed, and even though it wouldn't always do the same thing on every browser, the chances were very good that it wouldn't simply puke and give the user nothing at all. I lost count a long time ago of all the websites I went to that decided to have some complicated garbage on their main page that did absolutely nothing unless you had all the right plugins and were using the right browser. Not even a simple link to get past that one page, and no hint how to get anything else from the site.
You seem to think that everything should be a web site,
Absolute nonsense, and I never said anything even close to that. In fact, I think there are a lot of things that should NOT be web sites.
That's a single well-known example of why micro transactions (like clicking a single button to send a single piece of data) should not require the entire interface to refresh.
In other words, javascript is mandatory so that people who click 'like' buttons won't be inconvenienced by a slower "web experience". Oh, my, the page refreshed. How awful. We must make javascript mandatory so I won't have a poorer experience.
Union won't cover embezzlement? Oh deary me, how cruel.
How is keeping petty cash on hand for things that need to be done quickly "embezzlement"? The money isn't stolen.
This is, however, a wonderful example of a fine union acting in the best interests of the dues-paying members. Hmph.
As I said there are exceptions, but as a general rule it's better to live in a state where there are strong unions than one where there aren't any.
Better for whom? The union-protected workers who know the union will leap to their defense if they screw off on the job, or the people who have to pay the union workers to get something done?
I used to go to trade shows in Atlantic City. That's the epitome of a "strong labor union" area. We had a display that needed to be set up after the boxes it came in were delivered, and then the boxes needed to be taken away. We had electrical equipment that needed power. Getting all this done required the benevolence of half a dozen unions. I say "benevolence" because if we dared to plug something in ourselves the other unions would react in solidarity with the electrical union and we'd get things done -- next week, maybe, maybe later. After the show was over. If we dared to try to put up our own display, same problem. Chairs? Well, the chair moving union didn't like us moving chairs without involving them. At union rates. (I was on a TV set one time and a chair needed to be moved about a foot to the left, so I moved it. You'd think a nuclear bomb was about to go off, all the consternation and brouhaha that went on. I did a stage hand's job! And I wasn't a stage hand! The HORRORS! I would have asked the union guy standing next to me to do it, but he was an electrician and he doesn't move chairs.)
The expense of going to that show was outrageous, and most of it was due to union wages for people to do menial tasks. And to pay for the union reps who did nothing else but watch to make sure nobody did anything a union worker had to be paid to do.
Unions raise the wages paid for jobs covered by their union,
Pray tell, what is the current value of someone plugging in an extension cord, compared to the union wage of the two people required to do that task? How about the cost of having to wait until they can be found and pleaded with to pretty please come plug this in and get the job put on the schedule for later that afternoon? And what is the expense to the public when the 'extension cord plugger in' union goes on strike and all the others go out in support so that nothing can be done, and if anything is done someone will come around and cut up your extension cord because you used scab labor to plug it in?
Some unions do some good things. Some unions take it to extremes and cost us all a lot more money. Unfortunately, the unions that need the most protection are the ones who do the most ridiculous things in the name of protecting their members.
Because if you don't, a significant number of "dumb" people will complain loudly that your program "sucks" because it "broke the Internet" on their computer, and slowly the world's view of your software will degrade.
Rightly so, if your web page demands to run arbitrary code on other people's computers. And isn't smart enough to detect (like many sites already can) that the reason why the user isn't getting "an optimal web experience" is because he's turned javascript off, and you can't be arsed to tell him how to turn it back on and why he should.
And then leave the decision in the hands of the user, not the browser writer.
In the meantime for the 99.9% of users who will never touch that particular option it is a waste of valuable screen real estate
It's one line in a menu page that is, by default, half empty to start with. wow, such a waste of "valuable screen real estate".
Your typical tech illiterate (who vastly outnumber anyone reading this) isn't going to even know what Javascript is much less why or when they might care to disable it completely within a browser.
So, obviously, this is a reason to keep everyone from being able to disable it. Sure.
Beside completely disabling Javascript is the very definition of a crude solution.
You think having to install some plugin to stop javascript from being executed is a better solution than just having the browser itself ignore javascript? This demonstrates the twisted thinking that modern "web developers" have.
A menu option deserves prominence if it is commonly used. The option to disable Javascript is very seldom used
Perhaps in your tiny universe, but in mine I use it a lot. It deserves an easy to find menu location so I don't have to leave the web page I'm looking at to bring up "about:config" when I find a stupid web programmer who can't do simple things in a simple way and needs a javascript widget (many of which are broken) to do something. Like trying to validate email addresses, which the common scripts all fail at miserably.
The folly is assuming that the internet is still all "web pages" instead of applications.
If that's your assumption, that's your problem. I come from a time before "the web" and the Internet WAS applications. And now we have an application called a "web browser" whose job is to render a MARKUP language, not be a remote compute server for people who want to provide content that looks exactly like they want it to look and do it without consuming CPU cycles on their precious servers. The comment about turning javascript off on a browser being as stupid as turning HTML off is just ridiculous. The browser's job is to render HTML. It should be able to do that without requiring javascript on the client.
The folly is assuming that web pages have to be applications.
Google's services are the obvious screaming example of useful Javascript.
I can remember the days before javascript and we still had search engines. We had email. We had message systems. We didn't need javascript to do cutesy crap like ... whatever the cutesy crap is that it commonly used for. Like limiting the user's ability to do things, or doing things just because the mouse rolled over something. Sorry, if I want your button to do something, I'll click on it. That's why it is a button.
Imagine if every time someone clicked the Like button, the entire page reloaded. That's obviously not usable.
So the argument in favor of making javascript mandatory is so that people who click 'like' buttons won't be inconvenienced by a slower "web experience"? Will the eternal September never end?
I buy my power by the source.
That is not an investment, it is buying power at an extra cost. You didn't send the power company ten dollars and say "invest this in hydro", they came to you and said "you can pay us extra for power that costs us less to produce". You got hoodwinked. Not to mention that once those electrons hit the wire, they mix in with all the other electrons, so you're actually using power from all the sources, dirty and clean(er), just paying extra for the privilege of bragging about it here.
Many states now work that way.
States should not be in the power business, they should be in the government business.