Actually, we don't report those jobs as filled positions because we can't report the worker there. We'd have to report an ID to indicate the worker's tax identification so as to allow them to count "number of employed", which would be impossible--and any attempt to do so would raise questions about who this worker is and why he's working for us if the United States doesn't have documentation about his existence or tax status.
The US population grew by about 3 million people from 2015 to 2016, which comes out to about 250,000/month. Adding only 180,000 jobs per month when your population grows by 250,000 people per month is not exactly sustainable.
If your labor force participation rate is 60% and 95% of that is employed, then you need to add 142,500 new jobs to account for a population growth of 250,000 to maintain current unemployment rates. Adding 180,000 will eventually lead to a labor shortage and an economic collapse because unemployment will be too low.
The average income doesn't represent income as buying power. That statistic is particularly interesting to me, but not to everyone else: nobody cares that they spend half as much of their income on all the shit they used to buy, and now load up on new stuff they couldn't afford before; what they care about is that the number of dollars hasn't gotten visibly-bigger. If people were naive to inflation, we could just instate 10% inflation per year and tell them they're getting richer, and they'd believe it even as the chocolate rations spiraled toward nothingness.
a reduction in the labor force participation rate at this time equals an increase in the actual unemployment rate, as defined by the number of people seeking employment.
4.6% unemployment in November 2016 is at 62.7% labor force participation rate. At a LFPR of 66.4%--the peak rate at 2007--that would reflect 4.87% unemployment. Comparing to Obama's peak 10% unemployment at 65% labor force participation rate, it'd be 4.77%.
Last I checked, a million new jobs hadn't made any improvement in the number of people seeking work.
A million new jobs and 1.5 million new people is a reduction in proportion of unemployed people and an increase in effectiveness and stability of economy. An economy with 1 million people seeking work and 300,000 employed is collapsing and will experience catastrophic failure very soon; an economy with 170 million people seeking work and 162 million employed is doing pretty damned well and will chug along just fine--and can even provide welfare for the other 8 million out of work!
High labor force participation rates indicate a poor society in which people are desperate for income.,
Peak labor force participation rate was 2007 at 66.4%, 4.6% unemployment; unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, 65% labor force participation rate. Adjusting these, that 10% unemployment rate in a 66.4% LFPR world would reflect 10.21%.
4.6% unemployment in November 2016 is at 62.7% LFPR. At a LFPR of 66.4%, that would reflect 4.87% unemployment. Comparing to Obama's peak 10% at 65%, it'd be 4.77%.
The thing about labor force participation rate is it includes discouraged workers and workers who otherwise want or would like but can't get jobs. Everyone who isn't in the labor force doesn't want to be there and won't magically take up a job if you hand them one--which means they're also not welfare recipients, since welfare goes to unemployed labor force.
Actually, their constitutional authority to exist is that the Executive Branch calls them into existence to execute the provisions of laws passed by the Legislative branch. Drugs are scheduled as different levels of controlled substances in different states (Florida's controlled substance schedule is hilarious--most food is illegal). In theory, the Federal Government doesn't have the power to enforce in a state which has passed law declining Federal enforcement; however, if the manufacture and sale of drugs in Colorado results in illegal smuggling drugs from Colorado to Nevada, that impacts interstate commerce, and thus gives the Federal agency jurisdiction over the activities in Colorado.
Constitutional law is weird.
In theory, none of that gives the Federal government power to enforce usage restrictions: since you're a consumer of a drug produced in your state, you aren't doing anything involving interstate commerce. Consumers are typically not considered to participate in commerce, in the sense that they consume what is within reach of them and so are not a part of the production and distribution infrastructure and not liable for products being imported across state lines--unless they knowingly traffic something from one state to another (e.g. by ordering it online!). In practice, this is a flexible concept in court.
The FDA decides if your manufactured drug is approved, and if the drug itself is approved for a use, and how to label it; the DEA decides if it's scheduled, and has to follow UN conventions--it can overschedule a drug (UN SCH3 means US SCH1-3), or schedule a non-UN-covered drug (UN uncontrolled = US SCH4 for some drugs).
It's a combination of the Paris Convention of 1931, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 (which created the Schedule 1 through Schedule 4 classifications), the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971, and so forth.
Provision for sanctions is left up to member states. Essentially, because we're all a party to many joint treaties ratified by many member states of the United Nations, we're required to play nicely with each other or else the member states of the United Nations can apply sanctions--either in the style of member state discretion or in the style of joint NATO military action. In the case of the Paris treaty and its modifications, member states who violate their duties as required by treaty to other member states who have violated the Paris treaty are not subject to sanctions: it's legal for them to take actions harming the United States, but not legal for the United States to take action harming them.
The complex network of treaties which leave sanctions up to the member states's own legislation have essentially no teeth, and are just conventions. Where these interact with mandatory sanctions, the UN body can order all participating member states to take action. That means a UN member taking an action against the US which harms the US economy can have its own economy destroyed by UN order for all member states to impose sanctions; but that same UN member taking those same actions against the US is immune to retaliatory sanctions by the UN body, because both discretionary and mandatory sanctions are illegal due to the UN member's discretion on how it will sanction the US for violating a treaty such as the Paris convention.
In other words: the practical damage is determined by a combination of how many people don't like you, how much they don't like you, and how distressing your behavior is to the UN at large.
If the UN gets into a heated, uncontrolled political argument about how marijuana travels pretty god damned freely (which would probably use faulty logic citing the United States's own problems with the drug passing the borders of Canada and Mexico--forget that there's an ocean between the US and the EU members, although you can argue Canada is affected and try to do a careful political dance about the severity of the problem), the UN could conceivably lay down unlimited sanctions against the US, damaging it in the extreme. This would be tempered by UN members with more-pressing concerns--for example, China's great economic reliance on the US for trade.
If the UN decides it simply doesn't give half a damn because Canada doesn't care and the practical impact is basically nothing, if not beneficial, then it will make ceremony and leverage that position to decrease the United States's negotiating power, which is costly in the long-run to the US, but not a disaster.
If the UN member states decide to press for the rescheduling of Marijuana and THC because they think it's less-harmful and that its classification as Schedule 1 is silly, they can use the US as a bargaining chip. All such member states would decline sanctions and most likely would ally with the US to push back against prior negotiating leverage as a way to amplify their power base in pushing for reclassification--which would be advantageous from the standpoint of reducing the cost overhead of enforcing Schedule 1 control over Marijuana.
On the one hand, you have opportunities. On the other, you have threats. Compared to a convention with formal sanctions, the risk is broader and less-controlled, ranging from catastrophic destruction to a rally of support behind the US whenever anyone brings it up at the negotiating table.
tl;dr: International politics are strange, and a lot of laws are in the uncivilized form of "this is bad and we can do any bad things we want to you if we decide we care".
My first forray into coffee was two vacuum-brewed pots of Death Wish Valhallah Java, which made me awake and mentally-scattered for like 20-30 minutes. It was euphoric and really bad, kind of like a manic episode where you don't realize how horrible it really feels and so you only know it's awesome. Then, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.
That's about 160-200mg per 8 fluid ounces, approximating 1,500-2,000mg drunk in about 15 minutes. The MTD is around 430mg/day, and I was drug-naive. Not quite an overdose, but it hit me hard and fast, then went away and left me a wreck. I didn't drink any more after that. I cannot imagine a caffeine overdose being any fun.
Cocaine I would potentially try as a prescription in an oral administration route, if the doctor had a good argument. I tried amphetamine because I had anhedonia and he wanted to do stuff with dopamine to address that; I had argued against it, but his points were solid and I understand the technical details to a reasonable degree (I am not a psychiatrist). At the time, I submitted that I was an insomniac and had recovered mostly, getting 6.5-7.5 hours per night; my FitBit was wrong. If I'd told him I'd had 2 hours of sleep every night for a year, he would have had something to say about that; I'm surprised he didn't take the amphetamine away from me when I brought in data claiming that, although I also asked about dropping the amphetamine on my own to see if remediating the sleep deprivation did anything.
Mind you, I can walk off addictions. I have a lot of undeclared psychiatric issues, and one of those allows me to operate outside the rules governing most people's behavior. Rather than dissociative identity disorder, I dissociate into many versions of myself that all share the same identity: I'm all of them, and one of them, at the same time. That means I can recognize, comment on, and decide how to deal with all kinds of impulses, errors of reasoning, stress responses, mood states, and the like while they're happening, because I'm both experiencing those things and not experiencing them--I'm separate and not separate from all of that. I use that where suppression is insufficient: I can know something and even discuss it, while not allowing myself to know it until I'm prepared to handle the information.
Addiction is just another impulse that would be interesting to examine, likely unpleasant, and obviously disconnected from my behavior. Beyond that, doctors aren't going to give me toxic doses of cocaine and amphetamine--or if they do, I'll notice, and put a stop to that (this actually happened with amphetamine; I'm a bit sensitive, and 20mg ER made me piss brown and lose 6 pounds in 1 day from muscle breakdown, along with chills, tremors, zero ability to eat or sleep, anxiety, and a hell of other painful side-effects).
I can tell you this, though: amphetamine is safe; amphetamine abuse is hilariously toxic, and will fucking wreck you. If your doctor gives you amphetamine, follow the prescription, and report back any nasty side-effects. 20mg ER starting dose did bad things to me, but is too little for clinical value for about half of all patients; 15mg works fine, aside from appetite suppression--which I can handle, since I can get sufficient nutrition in the 1200-1700 calories I get easily, and can pad with french fries or sodas if I need calories. You'll usually get severe malnutrition and sleep deprivation well before you get amphetamine poisoning.
That means using the drug recreationally is very, very bad; using it clinically is okay.
Drugs are interesting. Pharmacology, neurology, and psychiatry are all fascinating topics. That knowledge also doesn't encourage recreational use--I was never much of a recreational user anyway, instead reaching for things like skullcap, chamomile, or DLPA in an attempt to correct some problem or achieve some other goal. It does seem to encourage me to be more of a tool user, though: I'd be comfortable taki
They don't. Countries agree to certain standards of operation, such as to a moral standard by which things like freedom of speech and the rights of prisoners to not face torture are required of them by treaty. If the UK were to torture its criminals to death, for example, they would face international sanctions and possibly even military invasion by NATO forces, largely because they signed some papers saying they wouldn't do that.
The UN, international courts, via the method of economic sanctions.
Essentially imagine if you could knock out 50% of American jobs in one swing by cutting off 14% of American product demand (exports) to reduce the total products sellable by Americans, while simultaneously sharply raising the prices of 11% of American purchasing (imports) so as to reduce the total products purchasable (and thus sellable) by Americans. First, 14% of American consumer purchasing power would go away because of loss of export market, taking 14% of domestic purchasing power away with them (an immediate elimination of 26% of domestic jobs, with stabilization around 32%-35%). Then, the remaining Americans would face things like food, clothing, and electronics component costing 3-5 times as much--and for some product classes, 10-15 times as much--thus reducing the purchaseable products, eliminating the associated proportion of shipping and retail (cashier, stock, management) jobs, and the infrastructure jobs required to maintain said shipping and retail.
Ignoring the general state of employment after this economic nuclear option, your personal income would remain the same in terms of nominal dollars; but a $15 pair of pants might cost $50 instead, and electronics might be scarce and expensive even at fair market prices (the workers must get paid).
Is that a big enough stick, do you think? We did it to Cuba once.
Actually, he implied that something being safer than something which is clearly not safe enough does not mean that the first thing is safe enough. "Safe enough" could be 1/1,000,000 chance of harm, "Harmful substance" could have a 1/100 chance of harm, and your "Safer" substance could carry a 1/100,000 chance of harm.
This analysis doesn't account for opportunity costs and risks in alternatives. Caffeine is actually more addictive and damaging than Methylphenidate, for example, and less than Amphetamine on both counts; although I believe the window between the effective and lethal doses is wider (i.e. on a "physical harm" measure, Caffeine will be worse than Methylphenidate; on an "effective dose over lethal dose" measure, Methylphenidate will be worse). Cutting away caffeine or alcohol causes societal upset and economic fall-out; we'd have banned them outright if they'd just became known today.
What's funny is I've found Amphetamine more distressing than Caffeine (it harms appetite and can do bad things to my brain and body in clinical doses, but is manageable), but Caffeine more unpleasant (it causes a sickening withdrawal that's far less-tolerable than the aches, chills, nausea, and pains I got from Amphetamine, following which my doctor cut my dose back). I think Caffeine might be way more addictive and possibly more-harmful at normal doses, while high doses of Amphetamine are way more harmful than high doses of Caffeine. I like stimulants, but these two are both garbage--although I'll admit Amphetamine has reasonable potential at low doses.
No way am I going anywhere near cocaine. Khat would be interesting, for its low addictive nature and low potential for harm. I wonder about its therapeutic uses.
Actually, the United States lobbied the UN in the 1970s and 1980s to remove marijuana from Schedule 1. It's illegal under international law for the United States to reschedule marijuana and THC as Schedule II or Schedule IV.
Marijuana is big policy news because it's heavily-controlled, highly-prolific, and highly-visible. The government can't simply handwave something on the same level as Heroin and claim they think it's mislabeled and harmless without taking legislative action to reschedule it; and they can't reschedule it until the UN changes its stance.
Uh, actually, the system I designed functions based on creating profit motives and reducing government intervention in peoples's lives. It eliminates a system whereby the Government decides how much landlords can charge for HUD and if and how much you deserve, and instead replaces it with a market system.
In other words: the Universal Social Security is a system which leverages the underlying, inviolable laws of Capitalism to maximize the efficiency of markets and take advantage of the self-correcting nature of market-driven solutions.
Again: you're arguing that people should pay $2 trillion for a system of government bureaucracy which dictates how much landlords will charge (HUD) and what specific products families will buy (SNAP); I'm arguing that this system is obsoleted now by a $0.6 trillion system which creates a profit motive and allows market forces to optimize for the continuously-changing, highly-complex nature of human need and motive, which ultimately results in further effects such as an elimination of the usefulness of minimum wages.
And where and who is that "basic income/Universal Social Security" that come in whether you work or not going to come from
Oh, it comes from the same place that welfare comes from now. It's actually $1 trillion less burden on the taxpayer--accounting for the taxpayers who put in more money than they get out from the system, and calling the money that people get exceeding the money they put in a "cost". That means damn near $2 trillion flows into the hands of American consumers to be spent; but we don't count a lot of that as "cheaper" because some of it is coming out of one taxpayer's hands and going into another's--you're still paying for other people.
Prices jump as businesses see that people have more money to spend
That's an enormous fallacy that requires ignorance of the world around you and of history in gross respect.
In 1900, the average American family spent 40% of its income on food. In 1950, this was 33%. Today it's 12%. Clothing has fallen from 12% in 1950 to 3.5% today. Expenditure for housing has risen from 28% in 1950 to 33% in 2003; yet in 1950 the single-family houses averaged 981 square feet, and in 2003 a new one averaged 2,300 square feet--for reference, my tiny little row home is 1,300sqft, and a single-bedroom apartment is around 700-800 square feet (about the size of a single-family home in 1950).
In other words: the costs to produce things went down (technical progress: less labor, so an equivalent wage divided by fewer hours and fewer people is a lower cost), so the prices went down, so people ended up with unspent income. In response, they were able to buy more, to buy new things, and to buy the same things built to a better standard. For example: the average consumer new vehicle purchase amounts to 56% of the buyer's annual salary, both today and in 1950, with the payments spread across a five-year loan; but today's cars have higher mileage, standard air conditioning, standard power windows, more-advanced suspensions, more-advanced tires, built-in satellite radio, built-in Bluetooth, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and so forth, whereas an all-transistor radio was a $150 option in 1956, and the first car with AC as standard equipment marketed in 1968.
You plainly assert that none of this ever happened, and that rickety old cars became more-expensive as their costs went down, and that any ground given here was responded to in kind by some likely non-competitor raising prices (i.e. cars get cheaper but clothing and food become expensive as living hell).
Sorry, but no one is going to pay for you, you have to grow up and take responsibility for yourself instead of expecting others to pay your way
My system: a single individual taking home $24,000 today takes home $31,000 instead. His employer pays $36,000 today and $34,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $54,000 today takes home $60,000 instead. His employer pays $87,000 today and $83,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $109,000 today takes home $113,000 instead. His employer pays $187,000 today and $177,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $4,870,000 today takes home $4,837,000 instead. His employer pays $9,952,000 today and $9,456,000 under my system (-$496,000, so they can probably offset that $33,000).
My system: A two-adult household filing jointly with an income of $90,000 takes home $73,000 today and $83,000 under my system. The cost to the employer for a single-earner household is $112,000 today and $106,000 under my system.
It looks like people will pay about a trillion dollars in excess to feed all but 50,000,000 Americans, provide assistance for 1 in 4 low-income American households, and leave 600,000 of the 1,600,000 homeless Americans out on the street without shelter.
My system completely obliterates these failures with a reduction in
CEOs and VPs have total compensation including stock options and such, which devalue the secondary security market by dilution. The actual cash portion--the part paid by company revenues (thus payable to any employee)--is usually around a quarter to a third.
In total, CEOs gain cash salary and bonuses (from revenue; pay full income tax); dividends (from revenue; pay full income tax, even if reinvested); stock options (new issue stock, cost effectively siphoned from any 401(k)s and IRAs and such holding the stock; taxed as full income when exercised); stocks (new issue stock; taxed as full income); and from stock sales (capital gains, the difference between the purchase price of the stock and its sale price; taxed at 15%). For the most part, they pay full taxes on this.
So we have cash compensation to deal with here. Moreover, stock and options are income; part of that cash compensation diverts to paying taxes, meaning $10 million of stock grabbed as an exercised option leaves you owing $4 million to the IRS out-of-pocket, so you might have to sell some stock if you don't have cash compensation to offset it. That means issuing stock to employees has some consequences on their finances which said employees might not know how to handle (along with simply devaluing their own retirement funds slightly--the compound effect of mass-issuance to employees is sort of a wash).
CFO of Ford Motor Company used to make more than their CEO. His $42M total compensation in 2012(ish?) consisted of $8 million of cash compensation. Dividing this among the 150,000 Ford Motor Co. employees gives them each $53/year, $4.44/month, or 95 cents per week. Not much. Compound all 20 executives and you could get $20/week in there--53 cents per hour, even, on top of a $21/hr paycheck. That's roughly the same 2.5% raise said employees enjoy annually--that is to say: it's the kind of impact that doesn't matter at all, and will be forgotten in two or three years.
Steve Ellis, CEO of Chipotle, took $1.5 million of cash compensation and a staggering $12 million in stocks in 2015. Per each of 45,200 employees, that's $33 per year, 64 cents per week; 20 such executives could furnish a 33 cent hourly pay raise, which is a decent 4% raise on an $8.25/hr minimum wage--and that's all it is. Decent for a raise, but nothing striking. For comparison, I make $75k, and a 4% raise would add $80 after taxes to my paycheck; it's $25 for a minimum-wage worker before taxes, and maybe $20 after.
The CEO salary argument is a desperate lashing out at people you don't like because they have more than you. It doesn't solve any problem except for your desperate need to exercise a neurotic downward social comparison to elevate your self-image. These discussions inevitably reach a conclusion where the party arguing against high CEO salaries eventually admits that it doesn't help anyone, but it at least "would be fair" or somehow otherwise makes them feel good--because poor people aren't important, rather only your own feeling that someone you don't like got hammered is the big issue here.
$1 million driver insurance? Granted, it's lower cost: Uber's driver insurance kicks in after any existing liability insurance, and pays the difference; that shields the insurer from a significant cost share, even accounting for many insurers not paying for liability in a claim under Uber driving (most insurers actually will, although they've given statements that this might not exactly fit into your policy).
Legal fees, development, security audits (PCI-DSS, SAS70, SOX), and the like all add up. A lot of people talk about the trivial cost of maintaining a few android apps without considering the cost to maintain developers and designers. Granted, something like Uber's app could cost around $150,000/year, and Uber is stated as having $102 million of income in 2013, nearly twice that in 2014, and $1.5 billion in 2015.
The most significant cost is Uber trying to displace taxis in China by paying drivers more than their fares. To gain market dominance, Uber gets investor money and hands it out to drivers, taking a loss. Once that drops off, Uber hopes to see revenues taking a portion of fares instead of paying additional on top of them.
In theory, the job doesn't pay enough to offset your time.
In reality, people without jobs are desperate. When welfare runs out, they face homelessness, hunger, and death. Half enough can dull the pain and give them time to look for twice more again, at the very least.
This is partly why people on unemployment turn up jobs early in the cycle, and then will take lower-paying jobs later. Unemployment paid me $10.25/hr full-time wages, and Fedex's $10.55/hr counter-offer... zero hours working, or forty hours working at $0.30/hr? Come time for unemployment to stop paying me, Panera's $8.50/hr offer looks compelling, next to $0/hr.
One of the complex considerations in a basic income is the offset of work. When you get a job, unemployment goes away; but what if I'd had $5/hr worth of income, and I'd keep receiving that $5/hr even if I got a $50,000,000/year salary? When somebody offers me $2/hr, I might consider that pointless and stupid; and when they offer me $5/hr on top of my existing $5/hr, I might be more-inclined to seek the standard-of-living boost that comes with doubling my existing income. A person with no money and food coming out of the trash might see $2/hr as just barely enough to scrape together some semblance of actual food, if not to slow the bleeding of their bank accounts in a desperate attempt to avoid eviction and eventual death.
Minimum wages inherently require an argument that people don't have sufficient negotiating power to support themselves in wage bidding.
Minimum wage does create unemployment. It's largely a device to balance employment against the viability of employment in a market where individuals don't have sufficient negotiating power to obtain a sustainable wage. People are taken in by the ideal that paying someone just materializes dollars out of thin air, and divorce labor from cost; it doesn't work that way, but nor does paying laborers so little that our entire society absorbs the cost of its workforce dying off and being replaced (children are worthless and have to be fed and clothed and cared for for a decade and a half before they can start producing).
We have alternatives now, finally. They haven't been taken up, and they're rather delicate; but we have them.
It's complicated. You'll get some conservative-side arguments about pay raises being the devil in disguise and causing inflation or destroying our moral fiber; and you'll get liberal-side arguments about pay raises being fair and somehow creating jobs. It's neither.
Wages are paid from revenue, which is paid of the income of consumers. In any given time frame, there's a fixed amount of income: the Fed increases this by issuing cash, adjusting treasury interest rates, and changing the fractional reserve system, allowing consumers to take on bigger loans and spend more money now with (devalued) income earned later (thus they spend $10,000 today and pay it off with $8,000 tomorrow--just that $8,000 is called $14,000 by then, even if it buys no more). The Fed tries to adjust for population growth, trade, and technical progress to grow the money supply 2% faster than production--that is, to maintain 2% inflation, thus widening the gap between your loan payments and your income.
This means a number of things.
For one, it means increasing wages paid doesn't create new jobs. Wage inequality means I can work 1 hour at $20/hr and make you work 2 hours at $10/hr when I buy your stuff; and it means my 40 hours of work pays two of your low-wage comrades for their 40 hours. Increasing lower wages actually reduces the number of jobs. Higher-wage workers--mainly the middle-class (90% of workers today make under $152k/year)--who don't receive an increase spend a larger proportion of their income on those lower-wage jobs which raised their costs (and thus prices); that means fewer things are bought, and thus fewer jobs are required to make and sell, while the revenue to pay those workers stops flowing. The lower-wage workers get a buying power increase; this concentrates that income into fewer hands, rather than creating new income. There's an often-repeated myth that every $1 gets spent 6 times and so creates 6 jobs on wage increases, and it's a brilliant move of handwaving away a bunch of economic facts in favor of pointing out that certain people end the week with additional spending money while ignoring the consequences of that change.
At the same time, an economic system which keeps its minimum standard of living based on a minimum wage must raise its minimum wage to keep up with inflation. That means we accept that some jobs are lost so as to ensure that workers at the bottom--but not the unemployed or underemployed--are receiving sufficient income. Alternate systems, such as my Universal Social Security (a form of basic income), carve off a portion of all income to establish a baseline, which largely obviates minimum wages by giving the worker a stronger position to negotiate for his own wages (with the same impact: if he gets higher wages, it's the same as a minimum-wage raise); and this is itself an extension of the current type of welfare system which covers the unemployed and underemployed with a form of insurance, itself a small portion of our total production.
So we have arguments for and against increasing minimum wages and, by extension, any subset of wages. We also have a system of wage increases called "inflation", designed largely to decay the impact of long-term loans on consumer spending power even when banks gain interest larger than inflation. Wages themselves represent labor time in one way or another (the same way taxes all represent a proportion of income, however you want to collect them--this is why a sales tax is regressive, for example), so only the relative dollar amount of wages matters. Trade and technical progress reduce the price of products relative to the wage of laborers, increasing consumer purchasing power.
The simple explanation of all this is that someone must have less if someone else is to have more. In large populations, that "less" tends to be a hell of a lot, and it tends to be measured in job loss among the poorest as well as in standard-of-living of the middle-class; targeting the upper income earners doesn't work for
Major medical associations use scientific conclusions to engineer a position. Scientific conclusions from decades ago were based on poor methodology; modern science has punched holes in those conclusions. If your major medical associations changed positions every time the wind blew, they'd give conflicting advice on a daily basis; part of their job is to resist change as a means to buffer hype, and that does put them behind the curve of inertia.
Most people are kind of shocked to learn a poorly-tuned fast food diet (yes, even McDonalds) is actually as healthy (or more) as a heavy-tuned fruits-and-vegetables diet, so long as you avoid eating too god damned much. The problem is meats and complex foods in general (that is: hamburgers with ketchup and onions and lettuce) contain an average amount of nearly all nutrients; various plant-based foods are high in specific nutrients, although have to average out in a mixture and so equate to similar (or lower) levels of micronutrients than fast foods; and people generally eat 1000-1800 calories in a single fast-food meal, including nutritionally-devoid sodas and french fries.
Vegetables are mainly the only source of vitamin C (great and important) and fiber (not important), along with resistant starch (highly supportive of important gut bacteria). Meats are a better source of minerals like zinc and silicon, as well as several vitamins, notably Vitamin B12 (the form in plant-based foods isn't metabolically-available to humans) and Vitamin A (Retinol is six times as active as Beta-Carotine, which itself is greatly more-active than other plant-based vitamin A vitamers). There's some debate over whether plant-based food or animal-based food provides more calcium, except for seafood of any sort (fish or seaweed) being superior in that regard; and nobody seems to mention that meat contains a surprising amount of potassium, which is actually hard to get even from a plant-based diet.
I'm kind of unsurprised, considering people claim a home-grilled hamburger or a bagel sandwich with sausage, egg, and cheese is a healthy, home-cooked meal, while a hamburger from McDonalds or a nearly-identical sausage, egg, and cheese bagel sandwich is "unhealthy fast food". It's the kind of double-think Orwell warned us about.
Tl;dr the foods that give the most nutrients per calorie are debatable. Typically meat seems to fill that if you want to consider a broad spectrum of nutrients at average levels; vegetables can fill that for single nutrients, but lose nutrient density when attempting to include all nutrients, to the point that even fast food burgers are more nutritionally-complete with higher levels of individual nutrients than a balanced vegan diet.
Oh, and low-fat diets have been shown to have severe negative health effects on and off, but nothing so alarming as to break the back of the campaign completely. Most research shows that the benefits of a low-fat diet are dubious; some research shows lower testosterone in men on low-fat diets, and other research shows no benefit to cardiovascular health or cancer rates in women on low-fat diets. Science is having a hard time lauding the virtues of a low-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet; although the low-carbohydrate diets (10% or less of calories) are also not well-backed. There's a great span of distance between carbohydrates as 70% of your calories and as 10% of your calories, though.
That sounds a lot like going back to the poverty-stricken days of the 1700s, where the women had to knit clothes and make odd trinkets as a secondary source of productive income--basically household trade. So damned poor everyone had to work themselves to the bone.
Mind you, it's valid. Women making little things at home with their knitting kits are productive--although wastefully so, compared to manufactories--and can get paid for their time; though I can't see why it would work out, considering how costly it'd be compared to mass-manufactured goods. Anyone buying those things would become poorer.
Medicare and medicaid are kind of inefficient, but steered in the right direction in that they try to target market prices (poorly). You could convert it to a single-payer system--a sort of merging of the ACA (with some corrections) with the Medicare system might work, although you'd need to deal with the funding source.
I'll comment on healthcare, but I don't want to mess with it. I can fix our welfare system in major; medical care is beyond my grasp, and is an enormously-complex task compared to simply ensuring that people have a social safety net that actually works. The cost of food, housing, and so forth is rather consistent, compared to the risk-sharing inherent in medical coverage; and as much as I'm a very risk-focused individual fully-capable of minimizing threats and maximizing opportunities, insurance adjustment isn't my field.
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Actually, we don't report those jobs as filled positions because we can't report the worker there. We'd have to report an ID to indicate the worker's tax identification so as to allow them to count "number of employed", which would be impossible--and any attempt to do so would raise questions about who this worker is and why he's working for us if the United States doesn't have documentation about his existence or tax status.
The US population grew by about 3 million people from 2015 to 2016, which comes out to about 250,000/month. Adding only 180,000 jobs per month when your population grows by 250,000 people per month is not exactly sustainable.
If your labor force participation rate is 60% and 95% of that is employed, then you need to add 142,500 new jobs to account for a population growth of 250,000 to maintain current unemployment rates. Adding 180,000 will eventually lead to a labor shortage and an economic collapse because unemployment will be too low.
The average income doesn't represent income as buying power. That statistic is particularly interesting to me, but not to everyone else: nobody cares that they spend half as much of their income on all the shit they used to buy, and now load up on new stuff they couldn't afford before; what they care about is that the number of dollars hasn't gotten visibly-bigger. If people were naive to inflation, we could just instate 10% inflation per year and tell them they're getting richer, and they'd believe it even as the chocolate rations spiraled toward nothingness.
a reduction in the labor force participation rate at this time equals an increase in the actual unemployment rate, as defined by the number of people seeking employment.
4.6% unemployment in November 2016 is at 62.7% labor force participation rate. At a LFPR of 66.4%--the peak rate at 2007--that would reflect 4.87% unemployment. Comparing to Obama's peak 10% unemployment at 65% labor force participation rate, it'd be 4.77%.
Last I checked, a million new jobs hadn't made any improvement in the number of people seeking work.
A million new jobs and 1.5 million new people is a reduction in proportion of unemployed people and an increase in effectiveness and stability of economy. An economy with 1 million people seeking work and 300,000 employed is collapsing and will experience catastrophic failure very soon; an economy with 170 million people seeking work and 162 million employed is doing pretty damned well and will chug along just fine--and can even provide welfare for the other 8 million out of work!
People who stop looking are in UE4, which includes discouraged workers. U4 is 5.0.
High labor force participation rates indicate a poor society in which people are desperate for income.,
Peak labor force participation rate was 2007 at 66.4%, 4.6% unemployment; unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009, 65% labor force participation rate. Adjusting these, that 10% unemployment rate in a 66.4% LFPR world would reflect 10.21%.
4.6% unemployment in November 2016 is at 62.7% LFPR. At a LFPR of 66.4%, that would reflect 4.87% unemployment. Comparing to Obama's peak 10% at 65%, it'd be 4.77%.
The thing about labor force participation rate is it includes discouraged workers and workers who otherwise want or would like but can't get jobs. Everyone who isn't in the labor force doesn't want to be there and won't magically take up a job if you hand them one--which means they're also not welfare recipients, since welfare goes to unemployed labor force.
Actually, their constitutional authority to exist is that the Executive Branch calls them into existence to execute the provisions of laws passed by the Legislative branch. Drugs are scheduled as different levels of controlled substances in different states (Florida's controlled substance schedule is hilarious--most food is illegal). In theory, the Federal Government doesn't have the power to enforce in a state which has passed law declining Federal enforcement; however, if the manufacture and sale of drugs in Colorado results in illegal smuggling drugs from Colorado to Nevada, that impacts interstate commerce, and thus gives the Federal agency jurisdiction over the activities in Colorado.
Constitutional law is weird.
In theory, none of that gives the Federal government power to enforce usage restrictions: since you're a consumer of a drug produced in your state, you aren't doing anything involving interstate commerce. Consumers are typically not considered to participate in commerce, in the sense that they consume what is within reach of them and so are not a part of the production and distribution infrastructure and not liable for products being imported across state lines--unless they knowingly traffic something from one state to another (e.g. by ordering it online!). In practice, this is a flexible concept in court.
The FDA decides if your manufactured drug is approved, and if the drug itself is approved for a use, and how to label it; the DEA decides if it's scheduled, and has to follow UN conventions--it can overschedule a drug (UN SCH3 means US SCH1-3), or schedule a non-UN-covered drug (UN uncontrolled = US SCH4 for some drugs).
Decades ago, the United States was lobbying to reschedule Marijuana to Schedule 4. The UN banned it because it was becoming popular internationally.
It's a combination of the Paris Convention of 1931, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 (which created the Schedule 1 through Schedule 4 classifications), the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971, and so forth.
Provision for sanctions is left up to member states. Essentially, because we're all a party to many joint treaties ratified by many member states of the United Nations, we're required to play nicely with each other or else the member states of the United Nations can apply sanctions--either in the style of member state discretion or in the style of joint NATO military action. In the case of the Paris treaty and its modifications, member states who violate their duties as required by treaty to other member states who have violated the Paris treaty are not subject to sanctions: it's legal for them to take actions harming the United States, but not legal for the United States to take action harming them.
The complex network of treaties which leave sanctions up to the member states's own legislation have essentially no teeth, and are just conventions. Where these interact with mandatory sanctions, the UN body can order all participating member states to take action. That means a UN member taking an action against the US which harms the US economy can have its own economy destroyed by UN order for all member states to impose sanctions; but that same UN member taking those same actions against the US is immune to retaliatory sanctions by the UN body, because both discretionary and mandatory sanctions are illegal due to the UN member's discretion on how it will sanction the US for violating a treaty such as the Paris convention.
In other words: the practical damage is determined by a combination of how many people don't like you, how much they don't like you, and how distressing your behavior is to the UN at large.
If the UN gets into a heated, uncontrolled political argument about how marijuana travels pretty god damned freely (which would probably use faulty logic citing the United States's own problems with the drug passing the borders of Canada and Mexico--forget that there's an ocean between the US and the EU members, although you can argue Canada is affected and try to do a careful political dance about the severity of the problem), the UN could conceivably lay down unlimited sanctions against the US, damaging it in the extreme. This would be tempered by UN members with more-pressing concerns--for example, China's great economic reliance on the US for trade.
If the UN decides it simply doesn't give half a damn because Canada doesn't care and the practical impact is basically nothing, if not beneficial, then it will make ceremony and leverage that position to decrease the United States's negotiating power, which is costly in the long-run to the US, but not a disaster.
If the UN member states decide to press for the rescheduling of Marijuana and THC because they think it's less-harmful and that its classification as Schedule 1 is silly, they can use the US as a bargaining chip. All such member states would decline sanctions and most likely would ally with the US to push back against prior negotiating leverage as a way to amplify their power base in pushing for reclassification--which would be advantageous from the standpoint of reducing the cost overhead of enforcing Schedule 1 control over Marijuana.
On the one hand, you have opportunities. On the other, you have threats. Compared to a convention with formal sanctions, the risk is broader and less-controlled, ranging from catastrophic destruction to a rally of support behind the US whenever anyone brings it up at the negotiating table.
tl;dr: International politics are strange, and a lot of laws are in the uncivilized form of "this is bad and we can do any bad things we want to you if we decide we care".
My first forray into coffee was two vacuum-brewed pots of Death Wish Valhallah Java, which made me awake and mentally-scattered for like 20-30 minutes. It was euphoric and really bad, kind of like a manic episode where you don't realize how horrible it really feels and so you only know it's awesome. Then, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck.
That's about 160-200mg per 8 fluid ounces, approximating 1,500-2,000mg drunk in about 15 minutes. The MTD is around 430mg/day, and I was drug-naive. Not quite an overdose, but it hit me hard and fast, then went away and left me a wreck. I didn't drink any more after that. I cannot imagine a caffeine overdose being any fun.
Cocaine I would potentially try as a prescription in an oral administration route, if the doctor had a good argument. I tried amphetamine because I had anhedonia and he wanted to do stuff with dopamine to address that; I had argued against it, but his points were solid and I understand the technical details to a reasonable degree (I am not a psychiatrist). At the time, I submitted that I was an insomniac and had recovered mostly, getting 6.5-7.5 hours per night; my FitBit was wrong. If I'd told him I'd had 2 hours of sleep every night for a year, he would have had something to say about that; I'm surprised he didn't take the amphetamine away from me when I brought in data claiming that, although I also asked about dropping the amphetamine on my own to see if remediating the sleep deprivation did anything.
Mind you, I can walk off addictions. I have a lot of undeclared psychiatric issues, and one of those allows me to operate outside the rules governing most people's behavior. Rather than dissociative identity disorder, I dissociate into many versions of myself that all share the same identity: I'm all of them, and one of them, at the same time. That means I can recognize, comment on, and decide how to deal with all kinds of impulses, errors of reasoning, stress responses, mood states, and the like while they're happening, because I'm both experiencing those things and not experiencing them--I'm separate and not separate from all of that. I use that where suppression is insufficient: I can know something and even discuss it, while not allowing myself to know it until I'm prepared to handle the information.
Addiction is just another impulse that would be interesting to examine, likely unpleasant, and obviously disconnected from my behavior. Beyond that, doctors aren't going to give me toxic doses of cocaine and amphetamine--or if they do, I'll notice, and put a stop to that (this actually happened with amphetamine; I'm a bit sensitive, and 20mg ER made me piss brown and lose 6 pounds in 1 day from muscle breakdown, along with chills, tremors, zero ability to eat or sleep, anxiety, and a hell of other painful side-effects).
I can tell you this, though: amphetamine is safe; amphetamine abuse is hilariously toxic, and will fucking wreck you. If your doctor gives you amphetamine, follow the prescription, and report back any nasty side-effects. 20mg ER starting dose did bad things to me, but is too little for clinical value for about half of all patients; 15mg works fine, aside from appetite suppression--which I can handle, since I can get sufficient nutrition in the 1200-1700 calories I get easily, and can pad with french fries or sodas if I need calories. You'll usually get severe malnutrition and sleep deprivation well before you get amphetamine poisoning.
That means using the drug recreationally is very, very bad; using it clinically is okay.
Drugs are interesting. Pharmacology, neurology, and psychiatry are all fascinating topics. That knowledge also doesn't encourage recreational use--I was never much of a recreational user anyway, instead reaching for things like skullcap, chamomile, or DLPA in an attempt to correct some problem or achieve some other goal. It does seem to encourage me to be more of a tool user, though: I'd be comfortable taki
They don't. Countries agree to certain standards of operation, such as to a moral standard by which things like freedom of speech and the rights of prisoners to not face torture are required of them by treaty. If the UK were to torture its criminals to death, for example, they would face international sanctions and possibly even military invasion by NATO forces, largely because they signed some papers saying they wouldn't do that.
The UN, international courts, via the method of economic sanctions.
Essentially imagine if you could knock out 50% of American jobs in one swing by cutting off 14% of American product demand (exports) to reduce the total products sellable by Americans, while simultaneously sharply raising the prices of 11% of American purchasing (imports) so as to reduce the total products purchasable (and thus sellable) by Americans. First, 14% of American consumer purchasing power would go away because of loss of export market, taking 14% of domestic purchasing power away with them (an immediate elimination of 26% of domestic jobs, with stabilization around 32%-35%). Then, the remaining Americans would face things like food, clothing, and electronics component costing 3-5 times as much--and for some product classes, 10-15 times as much--thus reducing the purchaseable products, eliminating the associated proportion of shipping and retail (cashier, stock, management) jobs, and the infrastructure jobs required to maintain said shipping and retail.
Ignoring the general state of employment after this economic nuclear option, your personal income would remain the same in terms of nominal dollars; but a $15 pair of pants might cost $50 instead, and electronics might be scarce and expensive even at fair market prices (the workers must get paid).
Is that a big enough stick, do you think? We did it to Cuba once.
Actually, he implied that something being safer than something which is clearly not safe enough does not mean that the first thing is safe enough. "Safe enough" could be 1/1,000,000 chance of harm, "Harmful substance" could have a 1/100 chance of harm, and your "Safer" substance could carry a 1/100,000 chance of harm.
This analysis doesn't account for opportunity costs and risks in alternatives. Caffeine is actually more addictive and damaging than Methylphenidate, for example, and less than Amphetamine on both counts; although I believe the window between the effective and lethal doses is wider (i.e. on a "physical harm" measure, Caffeine will be worse than Methylphenidate; on an "effective dose over lethal dose" measure, Methylphenidate will be worse). Cutting away caffeine or alcohol causes societal upset and economic fall-out; we'd have banned them outright if they'd just became known today.
What's funny is I've found Amphetamine more distressing than Caffeine (it harms appetite and can do bad things to my brain and body in clinical doses, but is manageable), but Caffeine more unpleasant (it causes a sickening withdrawal that's far less-tolerable than the aches, chills, nausea, and pains I got from Amphetamine, following which my doctor cut my dose back). I think Caffeine might be way more addictive and possibly more-harmful at normal doses, while high doses of Amphetamine are way more harmful than high doses of Caffeine. I like stimulants, but these two are both garbage--although I'll admit Amphetamine has reasonable potential at low doses.
No way am I going anywhere near cocaine. Khat would be interesting, for its low addictive nature and low potential for harm. I wonder about its therapeutic uses.
Actually, the United States lobbied the UN in the 1970s and 1980s to remove marijuana from Schedule 1. It's illegal under international law for the United States to reschedule marijuana and THC as Schedule II or Schedule IV.
Marijuana is big policy news because it's heavily-controlled, highly-prolific, and highly-visible. The government can't simply handwave something on the same level as Heroin and claim they think it's mislabeled and harmless without taking legislative action to reschedule it; and they can't reschedule it until the UN changes its stance.
Uh, actually, the system I designed functions based on creating profit motives and reducing government intervention in peoples's lives. It eliminates a system whereby the Government decides how much landlords can charge for HUD and if and how much you deserve, and instead replaces it with a market system.
In other words: the Universal Social Security is a system which leverages the underlying, inviolable laws of Capitalism to maximize the efficiency of markets and take advantage of the self-correcting nature of market-driven solutions.
Again: you're arguing that people should pay $2 trillion for a system of government bureaucracy which dictates how much landlords will charge (HUD) and what specific products families will buy (SNAP); I'm arguing that this system is obsoleted now by a $0.6 trillion system which creates a profit motive and allows market forces to optimize for the continuously-changing, highly-complex nature of human need and motive, which ultimately results in further effects such as an elimination of the usefulness of minimum wages.
It looks to me like you're the Marxist here.
And where and who is that "basic income/Universal Social Security" that come in whether you work or not going to come from
Oh, it comes from the same place that welfare comes from now. It's actually $1 trillion less burden on the taxpayer--accounting for the taxpayers who put in more money than they get out from the system, and calling the money that people get exceeding the money they put in a "cost". That means damn near $2 trillion flows into the hands of American consumers to be spent; but we don't count a lot of that as "cheaper" because some of it is coming out of one taxpayer's hands and going into another's--you're still paying for other people.
Prices jump as businesses see that people have more money to spend
That's an enormous fallacy that requires ignorance of the world around you and of history in gross respect.
In 1900, the average American family spent 40% of its income on food. In 1950, this was 33%. Today it's 12%. Clothing has fallen from 12% in 1950 to 3.5% today. Expenditure for housing has risen from 28% in 1950 to 33% in 2003; yet in 1950 the single-family houses averaged 981 square feet, and in 2003 a new one averaged 2,300 square feet--for reference, my tiny little row home is 1,300sqft, and a single-bedroom apartment is around 700-800 square feet (about the size of a single-family home in 1950).
In other words: the costs to produce things went down (technical progress: less labor, so an equivalent wage divided by fewer hours and fewer people is a lower cost), so the prices went down, so people ended up with unspent income. In response, they were able to buy more, to buy new things, and to buy the same things built to a better standard. For example: the average consumer new vehicle purchase amounts to 56% of the buyer's annual salary, both today and in 1950, with the payments spread across a five-year loan; but today's cars have higher mileage, standard air conditioning, standard power windows, more-advanced suspensions, more-advanced tires, built-in satellite radio, built-in Bluetooth, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and so forth, whereas an all-transistor radio was a $150 option in 1956, and the first car with AC as standard equipment marketed in 1968.
You plainly assert that none of this ever happened, and that rickety old cars became more-expensive as their costs went down, and that any ground given here was responded to in kind by some likely non-competitor raising prices (i.e. cars get cheaper but clothing and food become expensive as living hell).
Sorry, but no one is going to pay for you, you have to grow up and take responsibility for yourself instead of expecting others to pay your way
My system: a single individual taking home $24,000 today takes home $31,000 instead. His employer pays $36,000 today and $34,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $54,000 today takes home $60,000 instead. His employer pays $87,000 today and $83,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $109,000 today takes home $113,000 instead. His employer pays $187,000 today and $177,000 under my system.
My system: a single individual taking home $4,870,000 today takes home $4,837,000 instead. His employer pays $9,952,000 today and $9,456,000 under my system (-$496,000, so they can probably offset that $33,000).
My system: A two-adult household filing jointly with an income of $90,000 takes home $73,000 today and $83,000 under my system. The cost to the employer for a single-earner household is $112,000 today and $106,000 under my system.
It looks like people will pay about a trillion dollars in excess to feed all but 50,000,000 Americans, provide assistance for 1 in 4 low-income American households, and leave 600,000 of the 1,600,000 homeless Americans out on the street without shelter.
My system completely obliterates these failures with a reduction in
CEOs and VPs have total compensation including stock options and such, which devalue the secondary security market by dilution. The actual cash portion--the part paid by company revenues (thus payable to any employee)--is usually around a quarter to a third.
In total, CEOs gain cash salary and bonuses (from revenue; pay full income tax); dividends (from revenue; pay full income tax, even if reinvested); stock options (new issue stock, cost effectively siphoned from any 401(k)s and IRAs and such holding the stock; taxed as full income when exercised); stocks (new issue stock; taxed as full income); and from stock sales (capital gains, the difference between the purchase price of the stock and its sale price; taxed at 15%). For the most part, they pay full taxes on this.
So we have cash compensation to deal with here. Moreover, stock and options are income; part of that cash compensation diverts to paying taxes, meaning $10 million of stock grabbed as an exercised option leaves you owing $4 million to the IRS out-of-pocket, so you might have to sell some stock if you don't have cash compensation to offset it. That means issuing stock to employees has some consequences on their finances which said employees might not know how to handle (along with simply devaluing their own retirement funds slightly--the compound effect of mass-issuance to employees is sort of a wash).
CFO of Ford Motor Company used to make more than their CEO. His $42M total compensation in 2012(ish?) consisted of $8 million of cash compensation. Dividing this among the 150,000 Ford Motor Co. employees gives them each $53/year, $4.44/month, or 95 cents per week. Not much. Compound all 20 executives and you could get $20/week in there--53 cents per hour, even, on top of a $21/hr paycheck. That's roughly the same 2.5% raise said employees enjoy annually--that is to say: it's the kind of impact that doesn't matter at all, and will be forgotten in two or three years.
Steve Ellis, CEO of Chipotle, took $1.5 million of cash compensation and a staggering $12 million in stocks in 2015. Per each of 45,200 employees, that's $33 per year, 64 cents per week; 20 such executives could furnish a 33 cent hourly pay raise, which is a decent 4% raise on an $8.25/hr minimum wage--and that's all it is. Decent for a raise, but nothing striking. For comparison, I make $75k, and a 4% raise would add $80 after taxes to my paycheck; it's $25 for a minimum-wage worker before taxes, and maybe $20 after.
The CEO salary argument is a desperate lashing out at people you don't like because they have more than you. It doesn't solve any problem except for your desperate need to exercise a neurotic downward social comparison to elevate your self-image. These discussions inevitably reach a conclusion where the party arguing against high CEO salaries eventually admits that it doesn't help anyone, but it at least "would be fair" or somehow otherwise makes them feel good--because poor people aren't important, rather only your own feeling that someone you don't like got hammered is the big issue here.
$1 million driver insurance? Granted, it's lower cost: Uber's driver insurance kicks in after any existing liability insurance, and pays the difference; that shields the insurer from a significant cost share, even accounting for many insurers not paying for liability in a claim under Uber driving (most insurers actually will, although they've given statements that this might not exactly fit into your policy).
Legal fees, development, security audits (PCI-DSS, SAS70, SOX), and the like all add up. A lot of people talk about the trivial cost of maintaining a few android apps without considering the cost to maintain developers and designers. Granted, something like Uber's app could cost around $150,000/year, and Uber is stated as having $102 million of income in 2013, nearly twice that in 2014, and $1.5 billion in 2015.
The most significant cost is Uber trying to displace taxis in China by paying drivers more than their fares. To gain market dominance, Uber gets investor money and hands it out to drivers, taking a loss. Once that drops off, Uber hopes to see revenues taking a portion of fares instead of paying additional on top of them.
In theory, the job doesn't pay enough to offset your time.
In reality, people without jobs are desperate. When welfare runs out, they face homelessness, hunger, and death. Half enough can dull the pain and give them time to look for twice more again, at the very least.
This is partly why people on unemployment turn up jobs early in the cycle, and then will take lower-paying jobs later. Unemployment paid me $10.25/hr full-time wages, and Fedex's $10.55/hr counter-offer ... zero hours working, or forty hours working at $0.30/hr? Come time for unemployment to stop paying me, Panera's $8.50/hr offer looks compelling, next to $0/hr.
One of the complex considerations in a basic income is the offset of work. When you get a job, unemployment goes away; but what if I'd had $5/hr worth of income, and I'd keep receiving that $5/hr even if I got a $50,000,000/year salary? When somebody offers me $2/hr, I might consider that pointless and stupid; and when they offer me $5/hr on top of my existing $5/hr, I might be more-inclined to seek the standard-of-living boost that comes with doubling my existing income. A person with no money and food coming out of the trash might see $2/hr as just barely enough to scrape together some semblance of actual food, if not to slow the bleeding of their bank accounts in a desperate attempt to avoid eviction and eventual death.
Minimum wages inherently require an argument that people don't have sufficient negotiating power to support themselves in wage bidding.
Minimum wage does create unemployment. It's largely a device to balance employment against the viability of employment in a market where individuals don't have sufficient negotiating power to obtain a sustainable wage. People are taken in by the ideal that paying someone just materializes dollars out of thin air, and divorce labor from cost; it doesn't work that way, but nor does paying laborers so little that our entire society absorbs the cost of its workforce dying off and being replaced (children are worthless and have to be fed and clothed and cared for for a decade and a half before they can start producing).
We have alternatives now, finally. They haven't been taken up, and they're rather delicate; but we have them.
It's complicated. You'll get some conservative-side arguments about pay raises being the devil in disguise and causing inflation or destroying our moral fiber; and you'll get liberal-side arguments about pay raises being fair and somehow creating jobs. It's neither.
Wages are paid from revenue, which is paid of the income of consumers. In any given time frame, there's a fixed amount of income: the Fed increases this by issuing cash, adjusting treasury interest rates, and changing the fractional reserve system, allowing consumers to take on bigger loans and spend more money now with (devalued) income earned later (thus they spend $10,000 today and pay it off with $8,000 tomorrow--just that $8,000 is called $14,000 by then, even if it buys no more). The Fed tries to adjust for population growth, trade, and technical progress to grow the money supply 2% faster than production--that is, to maintain 2% inflation, thus widening the gap between your loan payments and your income.
This means a number of things.
For one, it means increasing wages paid doesn't create new jobs. Wage inequality means I can work 1 hour at $20/hr and make you work 2 hours at $10/hr when I buy your stuff; and it means my 40 hours of work pays two of your low-wage comrades for their 40 hours. Increasing lower wages actually reduces the number of jobs. Higher-wage workers--mainly the middle-class (90% of workers today make under $152k/year)--who don't receive an increase spend a larger proportion of their income on those lower-wage jobs which raised their costs (and thus prices); that means fewer things are bought, and thus fewer jobs are required to make and sell, while the revenue to pay those workers stops flowing. The lower-wage workers get a buying power increase; this concentrates that income into fewer hands, rather than creating new income. There's an often-repeated myth that every $1 gets spent 6 times and so creates 6 jobs on wage increases, and it's a brilliant move of handwaving away a bunch of economic facts in favor of pointing out that certain people end the week with additional spending money while ignoring the consequences of that change.
At the same time, an economic system which keeps its minimum standard of living based on a minimum wage must raise its minimum wage to keep up with inflation. That means we accept that some jobs are lost so as to ensure that workers at the bottom--but not the unemployed or underemployed--are receiving sufficient income. Alternate systems, such as my Universal Social Security (a form of basic income), carve off a portion of all income to establish a baseline, which largely obviates minimum wages by giving the worker a stronger position to negotiate for his own wages (with the same impact: if he gets higher wages, it's the same as a minimum-wage raise); and this is itself an extension of the current type of welfare system which covers the unemployed and underemployed with a form of insurance, itself a small portion of our total production.
So we have arguments for and against increasing minimum wages and, by extension, any subset of wages. We also have a system of wage increases called "inflation", designed largely to decay the impact of long-term loans on consumer spending power even when banks gain interest larger than inflation. Wages themselves represent labor time in one way or another (the same way taxes all represent a proportion of income, however you want to collect them--this is why a sales tax is regressive, for example), so only the relative dollar amount of wages matters. Trade and technical progress reduce the price of products relative to the wage of laborers, increasing consumer purchasing power.
The simple explanation of all this is that someone must have less if someone else is to have more. In large populations, that "less" tends to be a hell of a lot, and it tends to be measured in job loss among the poorest as well as in standard-of-living of the middle-class; targeting the upper income earners doesn't work for
Major medical associations use scientific conclusions to engineer a position. Scientific conclusions from decades ago were based on poor methodology; modern science has punched holes in those conclusions. If your major medical associations changed positions every time the wind blew, they'd give conflicting advice on a daily basis; part of their job is to resist change as a means to buffer hype, and that does put them behind the curve of inertia.
Oh look, unprocessed whole food woo. We should avoid vaccines too?
Most people are kind of shocked to learn a poorly-tuned fast food diet (yes, even McDonalds) is actually as healthy (or more) as a heavy-tuned fruits-and-vegetables diet, so long as you avoid eating too god damned much. The problem is meats and complex foods in general (that is: hamburgers with ketchup and onions and lettuce) contain an average amount of nearly all nutrients; various plant-based foods are high in specific nutrients, although have to average out in a mixture and so equate to similar (or lower) levels of micronutrients than fast foods; and people generally eat 1000-1800 calories in a single fast-food meal, including nutritionally-devoid sodas and french fries.
Vegetables are mainly the only source of vitamin C (great and important) and fiber (not important), along with resistant starch (highly supportive of important gut bacteria). Meats are a better source of minerals like zinc and silicon, as well as several vitamins, notably Vitamin B12 (the form in plant-based foods isn't metabolically-available to humans) and Vitamin A (Retinol is six times as active as Beta-Carotine, which itself is greatly more-active than other plant-based vitamin A vitamers). There's some debate over whether plant-based food or animal-based food provides more calcium, except for seafood of any sort (fish or seaweed) being superior in that regard; and nobody seems to mention that meat contains a surprising amount of potassium, which is actually hard to get even from a plant-based diet.
I'm kind of unsurprised, considering people claim a home-grilled hamburger or a bagel sandwich with sausage, egg, and cheese is a healthy, home-cooked meal, while a hamburger from McDonalds or a nearly-identical sausage, egg, and cheese bagel sandwich is "unhealthy fast food". It's the kind of double-think Orwell warned us about.
Tl;dr the foods that give the most nutrients per calorie are debatable. Typically meat seems to fill that if you want to consider a broad spectrum of nutrients at average levels; vegetables can fill that for single nutrients, but lose nutrient density when attempting to include all nutrients, to the point that even fast food burgers are more nutritionally-complete with higher levels of individual nutrients than a balanced vegan diet.
Oh, and low-fat diets have been shown to have severe negative health effects on and off, but nothing so alarming as to break the back of the campaign completely. Most research shows that the benefits of a low-fat diet are dubious; some research shows lower testosterone in men on low-fat diets, and other research shows no benefit to cardiovascular health or cancer rates in women on low-fat diets. Science is having a hard time lauding the virtues of a low-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet; although the low-carbohydrate diets (10% or less of calories) are also not well-backed. There's a great span of distance between carbohydrates as 70% of your calories and as 10% of your calories, though.
That sounds a lot like going back to the poverty-stricken days of the 1700s, where the women had to knit clothes and make odd trinkets as a secondary source of productive income--basically household trade. So damned poor everyone had to work themselves to the bone.
Mind you, it's valid. Women making little things at home with their knitting kits are productive--although wastefully so, compared to manufactories--and can get paid for their time; though I can't see why it would work out, considering how costly it'd be compared to mass-manufactured goods. Anyone buying those things would become poorer.
Medicare and medicaid are kind of inefficient, but steered in the right direction in that they try to target market prices (poorly). You could convert it to a single-payer system--a sort of merging of the ACA (with some corrections) with the Medicare system might work, although you'd need to deal with the funding source.
I'll comment on healthcare, but I don't want to mess with it. I can fix our welfare system in major; medical care is beyond my grasp, and is an enormously-complex task compared to simply ensuring that people have a social safety net that actually works. The cost of food, housing, and so forth is rather consistent, compared to the risk-sharing inherent in medical coverage; and as much as I'm a very risk-focused individual fully-capable of minimizing threats and maximizing opportunities, insurance adjustment isn't my field.