I don't think most people would view the situation that way, just like there isn't an endemic of people who refuse to get off food stamps.
And yet despite that virtually every person arguing against it here is making that exact argument. It's funny how much it looks like the same argument that gets deployed against every social program ever. It's almost like the real issue is a bunch of Calvanist/Protestant cultural bullshit that is indiscriminatingly applied to anything that doesn't just shit on the poor because if you give the poor help, they will be lazy or something.
PantsB's cost argument is the only one not explicitly stemming from this crap.
I really think you need to give it out indiscriminately though. If you taper the benefit you create disincentives to work.
exactly.
If you're only willing to pay me 21K, ehh, my free time is worth more than a grand. I'll take the 20k UBI instead. Need to make like 30 minimum. Then if you're lopping off bits of the wife's because we're married, well that either means less marriage (bad) or you need to pay me even more to get us out of bed, because we're getting 40k between us and that's tolerable.
Isn't that a good thing though? Forces companies to pay more for jobs no one wants to do. It would act as a defacto minimum wage.
it's inflationary though. Your big mac now costs a buck fifty more to produce because everybody wants more to come work at McD's, which means your free money is consumed by the inflation in price which means you gotta give more to people to get the basics which means...
idk maybe econodog can explain why this is wrong? Common sense often fails in economics, except when it doesn't of course.
There are numerous studies that demonstrate that increases in minimum wage, thus increases in the basic standard of living for many, has little to no impact on inflation. Seattle has had a $15 minimum wage for around half a year now, and the city hasn't become a destitute wasteland of runaway inflation.
FYI, it hasn't, it's only $11 right now. Won't be $15 until 2017 at the earliest. Assuming the regulation stays in place.
Good to know. It is still 50% greater than the national minimum wage.
I really think you need to give it out indiscriminately though. If you taper the benefit you create disincentives to work.
exactly.
If you're only willing to pay me 21K, ehh, my free time is worth more than a grand. I'll take the 20k UBI instead. Need to make like 30 minimum. Then if you're lopping off bits of the wife's because we're married, well that either means less marriage (bad) or you need to pay me even more to get us out of bed, because we're getting 40k between us and that's tolerable.
Isn't that a good thing though? Forces companies to pay more for jobs no one wants to do. It would act as a defacto minimum wage.
it's inflationary though. Your big mac now costs a buck fifty more to produce because everybody wants more to come work at McD's, which means your free money is consumed by the inflation in price which means you gotta give more to people to get the basics which means...
idk maybe econodog can explain why this is wrong? Common sense often fails in economics, except when it doesn't of course.
There are numerous studies that demonstrate that increases in minimum wage, thus increases in the basic standard of living for many, has little to no impact on inflation. Seattle has had a $15 minimum wage for around half a year now, and the city hasn't become a destitute wasteland of runaway inflation.
Is it meaningful to talk about inflation in an area that accounts for .01% of a currency's volume and there are no tariffs or controls on money leaving the area?
Edit: not intended as sarcasm. Like the currency hasn't really devalued, local products and services cost too much? Ehh... I guess it is the same, but there isn't an increase in money supply?
It has to start somewhere. Most major social changes are started at a city/state level and can take decades to filter up to the federal level.
I fully acknowledge that it's not perfect nor representative of the US as a whole. But I think it's better than just having hypotheticals to look at.
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Nbspshe laughs, like Godher mind's like a diamondRegistered Userregular
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
Well, if you haven't looked recently, grown adults are taking those jobs not because they want to--I don't know what you're insinuating here, slack off?--but because they can't find any better jobs.
Also $15/hr in Seattle certainly isn't "making a career". It's more "just scraping by".
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't think you'll find much to enjoy here, then. This discussion has gone with "dignified existence for workers is an intrinsically worthy goal" as a premise. If you'd like to start "A God Damned Separate Thread For Judging Those Without Successful Careers", by all means feel free.
The funny thing is, we do have a form of basic income. I'd argue we have several, they are just terribly implemented. A well implemented form would be in the military (most of the time, the troops are taught skill sets that can be transferred to civilian jobs, granted some are of limited value aka infantry skills. Then we have the shitty forms. One being how the US government is subsidizing Wal-Mart, by giving Wal-Marts employees enough money to not die in the streets. Another shitty form is in government contracting (be that the BS game of replicating work because "honest guys, since we didn't make it we don't understand it and we totally promise that in two years will have something completely original, that isn't a rehash of what the last company had, when they lost the contract" or build hardware we don't need and letting it rot in the desert.
So I'll agree there are some major implications, but I'd say those are going to be a mix of direct economic impacts and indirect economic effects, that are a result of non-economic implications of such a change. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of shitty places like Wal-Mart, that would go under, if people didn't have to work at them. I also think that would free up time for people to get better educated and to really start questioning some of the stupid stuff we do.
I'd rather have a basic income out in the open, then some of the current BS we have now. I want to gag anytime some rich CEO proclaims they are self made men, while downplaying all the perks they've managed to get, by playing the system.
I also laugh at the whole, "but people will stop working, if they don't have to work for the basic." The thing is most people won't be content with the basics. The other thing is employment gives people a means to achieve social interaction with individuals they would not otherwise interact with via hobby. Also if the job is one hat someone mostly enjoys, then it also gives that person some mental engagement. I've been unemployed and if the basics are equivalent to what I had during my period of unemployment, I can guarantee you that most will get bored of not working or doing volunteer work.
2. This may have been answered somewhere else in the thread, but would this policy be structured as one lump-sum payment, or over each month? In either case, what is to stop someone from taking their monthly/yearly deposit, going to their nearest casino and putting it all on Red? I have little trouble believing that a number of people that come into larger sums of money than they are used to handling do a poor job of it. Is that the point where we say, "Well tough luck, see you next month/year"? Are there regulations on how the person spends the money? Or do we keep some other social welfare programs around to help those that just refuse to help themselves?
Nothing, but what's to stop people from getting their monthly paycheque and doing the same thing?
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
Well, there WAS that one post where he proudly (maybe?) predicted millennials, which we're going to have to take his word on, I guess.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
2. This may have been answered somewhere else in the thread, but would this policy be structured as one lump-sum payment, or over each month? In either case, what is to stop someone from taking their monthly/yearly deposit, going to their nearest casino and putting it all on Red? I have little trouble believing that a number of people that come into larger sums of money than they are used to handling do a poor job of it. Is that the point where we say, "Well tough luck, see you next month/year"? Are there regulations on how the person spends the money? Or do we keep some other social welfare programs around to help those that just refuse to help themselves?
Nothing, but what's to stop people from getting their monthly paycheque and doing the same thing?
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
In what way? Are you describing a hypothetical involving ignorance or malice?
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Nbspshe laughs, like Godher mind's like a diamondRegistered Userregular
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
Not disgust. Frustration.
Frustration that because society didn't invest in these people a little more upfront we're now going to have to come up with shit like basic income and high minimum wages to support them for the rest of their lives.
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
Not disgust. Frustration.
Frustration that because society didn't invest in these people a little more upfront we're now going to have to come up with shit like basic income and high minimum wages to support them for the rest of their lives.
the funny thing about a message board is it records what you wrote dude
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
Not disgust. Frustration.
Frustration that because society didn't invest in these people a little more upfront we're now going to have to come up with shit like basic income and high minimum wages to support them for the rest of their lives.
But that's not the reason we are doing it at all.
I mean, this thread spawned from the automation replacing jobs thread. And even you admit those jobs are not the ones you are talking about here, so....
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
The only thing more deplorable than having failed to invest in a young person is recognizing that failure and then failing to invest in that person as an adult such that they might be able to raise their own children with more opportunity than they had.
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
The service industry is America's new Factory jobs
do you think factory workers had a harder or more complex job in the 1960s than a wal-mart employee has today?
Because Wal-Mart, Mcdonalds etc are beating the shit out of those old factories for how profitable they are, and yet those jobs paid their workers enough money to live
No, food insecurity doesn't just mean "you might have to skip breakfast" it means you don't have access to anything to eat for some amount of time. You can narrow it down to "Severe Food Insecurity" if you like, which the USDA says is about 6% of the population. These are the metrics the USDA uses, why? I don't know, probably the same reason that people who are displaced by a storm aren't called refugees when they live in the US.
Probably not a lot of people in this country starve to death because of poverty, we're a pretty wealthy nation and have a lot of resources to bring to the table. However, a large portion of Americans are suffering malnutrition-the food they do have access to is of poor quality and they don't get the nutrients they need and probably too much sugar and fat to go along with it.
But you know what, yeah, you might be food insecure. That's a probability, actually, given your situation and income. I have also been food insecure, but you are being quite reductive with your tone.
And why on Earth isn't removing food insecurity completely a worthy goal?
It totally is a good goal!
We don't have to give everybody in the country a basic income to achieve it though.
we should launch a BI program in an amenable major city instead of the existing welfare programs as a test bed and see how it works out
I suspect the net cost will be lower than existing welfare programs once you factor in new revenues, and the benefits to the local economy and the educational system would be profound
maybe like, Philly or Baltimore or something, we'd have to do it for a few years though
edit: I don't think it would cost anywhere near $2 trillion a year. Taxes could go up substantially with the "neutral point" (new taxes equaling $10,000) being somewhere in the 6 figures, but someone who makes $50k say, might get $10k but have to pay $7.5k in more in taxes (spitballing)
What the fuck is up with thinking that doing the same mindless factory task over and over was somehow ennobling Real Work while flipping burgers is Gross Bad Kid Stuff?
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
That's neither universally true nor really relevant, employment as a whole is safer and less physically demanding than jobs of the past
what I meant was that service work has taken the place of factory work for unskilled labor in the US. A 30 year old guy with a HSED in 1960 could expect to make enough money to buy a car and support his kids working at a factory with no experience, today he couldn't even support himself without government assistance working for Target
They aren't "kids jobs" anymore, the data says as much, the average employee is not 17 years old
That's neither universally true nor really relevant, employment as a whole is safer and less physically demanding than jobs of the past
what I meant was that service work has taken the place of factory work for unskilled labor in the US. A 30 year old guy with a HSED in 1960 could expect to make enough money to buy a car and support his kids working at a factory with no experience, today he couldn't even support himself without government assistance working for Target
They aren't "kids jobs" anymore, the data says as much, the average employee is not 17 years old
That's cause factory work and all its liability is disappearing, therefore adults are swarming into low income service jobs not designed to give them blue collar careers
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
Since when are jobs "designed" to do anything? Part of the reason factories paid people livable blue collar wages is because of things like the rise of unions and a shifting culture in the government. Those exact same factory jobs weren't "designed" to offer living wages and blue collar careers before the government and people forced them to after it was clear that the situation with poor working conditions and wages were untenable. Now, as people of the blue-collar variety shift from disappearing low-skill jobs to existing low-skill jobs as they did in the past, efforts have been made to undermine attempts to once again bring these new jobs to the same sort of standards of the jobs no longer available, and one of the big excuses people use to undermine the attempt to bring things like working at wal mart or mcdonalds up to a higher standard is that they aren't "designed" to be normal blue collar jobs.
No job was ever designed for that. We didn't invent factory work so people would have a low skill decently paying job, people did the jobs available to them, and the people working those jobs and the government saw fit to make them livable and decent jobs to have. Old jobs are disappearing and new jobs are not appearing with the frequency required to make up for the loss, so it's becoming increasingly clear we're going to have to do something to make up the difference and help people live while they try to find something new to do. Hence, a BIG.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
You answered yourself. Hence unions, hence benefits, hence advancement, hence etc instead of basic income. That plus these jobs needed to be done, there was security, there was availability.
I'm sure factory work was regarded as a desperate dead (literally) end job like fast food way before it had this infrastructure. Now it sort of is again, but for a while the need was there for society to allow these people to live better, not out of the goodness of our hearts but because we needed cars and skyscrapers and we didn't wanna do it. Do we really need fast food so much? Why are fast food employees so primitively provided for then? The exploitative prices are kind of the point, otherwise just make an egg salad sandwich and leave service dining to the rich
Paladin on
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
We didn't give them protections because we needed what they can provide, even with riots and unions forming in the early 20th century workers were still a dime a dozen because they didn't have protections. The protection did not arrive from the necessity of their work, as they could be easily replaced, but by society recognizing the need to protect the rights of their citizens and the government recognizing it had to help them provide a working wage for themselves. People tried to form Unions for decades until the government implicitly and explicitly stopped supporting the companies over the workers, and not because of how desperately we needed factory workers, but because of their recognition that the government has a responsibility to help people provide themselves with a basic livelihood.
It doesn't matter if we desperately need fast food, what matters is people need to have livable wages doing the only work available to them. Workers are now, as in the past, so poorly provided for because companies can afford to get away with not providing for them and the government more often than not backs them up and allows them to get away with it. Now, as before, the government needs to take steps to ensure people are provided for and can earn a living wage or have a safety net to keep them from becoming homeless on the streets if, as is becoming more and more common, they can not find a job at all.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
I think you can say a job was "designed" for a certain class of people in that the employers pay X amount and expect a certain class of people to fill those positions based on the pay, the position, the work, where the job fits within our social hierarchy, etc. It would be better to say that there are expectations about the job itself.
From that perspective, I think neither popular culture nor the employers themselves or the law has caught up with how low-level service jobs have changed. You used to expect, at least popularly, that these positions were for kids. Factory work was man's work, fast-food was a child's. Based on pay and prestige.
But that's completely changed now, even if our perception of it hasn't. The jobs many, especially the older generations, think of as existing for low-skill low-education people just aren't there anymore. It's all service jobs. And right now they pay shit and are culturally valued as shit too.
That article Paladin links above it pretty good at talking about this sort of thing. It's a tangential point to what I'm saying above, but men most of all have not adapted well to the change in the type of work no-education low-skills can get you. And it's linked to those expectations and cultural valuations.
Why did that work out for factory workers and not other basic employment? Part of it is reigning cultural attitudes against the service industry and part the ubiquity of these jobs, but the fact remains that modern discrimination against food services isn't without explanation.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
Screw that. Someone needs to make burgers if we want to have burgers. Don't shit on people providing a service.
I guess I'm crazy, but I'd keep working despite my effective pay being lower because $80k a year is better than $18k.
I'm probably not alone.
Having a decent safety net might reduce my stress level though. And while we're at it can we talk about reducing the work week? It's been over a hundred years, might be time.
It's not even the money really.
If there were a guaranteed income I would still be going back into my career field after college. I would do it for free if we were to find ourselves in the situation that a standard of living is guaranteed.
Why did that work out for factory workers and not other basic employment? Part of it is reigning cultural attitudes against the service industry and part the ubiquity of these jobs, but the fact remains that modern discrimination against food services isn't without explanation.
It did work for other forms of basic employment, truck driving, construction, dock workers etc can still offer decent lifestyles (at least, in places that haven't been thoroughly gutted by the republican anti labor agenda)
The country doesn't have like 15 million of those jobs sitting around waiting to be given to fast food workers, the construction industry still hasn't rebounded from the housing crisis. Factory work being shipped overseas left a massive void in middle class America that a huge portion of the country doesn't want to see filled because of their inherent disdain for minimum wage workers.
the attitude of the country toward fast food workers is not so different from its attitude toward factory workers before that was turned from shit tier slave wages to an honest profession that was the backbone of a blue collar american dream
A fast food hamburger flipper getting paid $15 dollars an hour makes me sick. No one should be making a career out of a menial job meant for teens. What the hell is wrong with people?
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
Screw that. Someone needs to make burgers if we want to have burgers. Don't shit on people providing a service.
That would be a reason not to implement poorly planned basic income.
Most programs gradually decrease money received as a person earned money. IE Canada's model that decreased benefits 50 cents for every dollar earned
This is not a closed loop. It expects a person will eventually begin to earn their own money. What if that doesn't start happening fast enough?
That's how a great society ends.
Crippled.
Those people weren't earning money to begin with. So I'm not really following your logic here.
Because now it's the entire government's problem. Not the individual.
Taking care of the poor is the government's problem. This is a method of solving that problem that has been proven to work in every test program. Every time it's been implemented the local economy improved. And you've yet to provide actual reasoning as to why you think it wouldn't.
It is one of the government's problems.
That doesn't mean the government should go bankrupt trying to solve it.
No test program has been run long enough or on a large enough scale to show how eventually basic income breaks down the entire society. I'm considering programming a simulation.
No, food insecurity doesn't just mean "you might have to skip breakfast" it means you don't have access to anything to eat for some amount of time. You can narrow it down to "Severe Food Insecurity" if you like, which the USDA says is about 6% of the population. These are the metrics the USDA uses, why? I don't know, probably the same reason that people who are displaced by a storm aren't called refugees when they live in the US.
Probably not a lot of people in this country starve to death because of poverty, we're a pretty wealthy nation and have a lot of resources to bring to the table. However, a large portion of Americans are suffering malnutrition-the food they do have access to is of poor quality and they don't get the nutrients they need and probably too much sugar and fat to go along with it.
But you know what, yeah, you might be food insecure. That's a probability, actually, given your situation and income. I have also been food insecure, but you are being quite reductive with your tone.
And why on Earth isn't removing food insecurity completely a worthy goal?
It totally is a good goal!
We don't have to give everybody in the country a basic income to achieve it though.
It's needed for food, housing, electricity, internet, small luxuries, etc. I don't know why you keep ignoring large parts of the idea and what it's supposed to accomplish.
I'd imagine we'll probably see somewhere in northern europe implement mincome within 10-20 years, if it's really successful we might do so 10 years after that
or right around the time we hit 95% unemployment as the rotting cities have been abandoned and the citizenry struggles to forage off the land, the economy being all robots buying things made by other robots with a small group of trillionares
i don't think i understand what a basic income would get you that a more conventional welfare system wouldn't
is it just the guarantee that it's yours forever no matter what you do with it? making it unlike the dole in that you can openly declare your intention to never work again and the money will still roll in
People intrinsically understand factories as a category of thing that is needed. You don't have an economy without some amount of people producing stuff, fast food chains not so much. People can't wrap their mind around the idea that, those might be a large portion of the jobs there are to be had. They also have trouble with the idea that there might actually be a limited number of jobs in an economy, and that there might be less than the amount of people looking for work. Currently I have a job, but every time I've had to look for one in my life I've been told that if I was really looking I would have found one a long time ago. I was told this by family, I was told this by friends, I was told this by virtually everyone I knew except a few people I knew who were looking for work at the time. This was despite knowing that all of these people giving me these speeches had long periods of unemployment where they were extremely depressed because of their inability to work/support themselves.
Really though, fast food jobs are problematic. Without some kind of engineering, it's really hard to imagine an economy where a large number of people are fast food workers. What are we doing as a nation to get the goods and services we even need for those fast food chains to be fast food chains? People can't take these jobs seriously, because we don't want people doing them. To admit that they make up a significant enough portion of our jobs that we need to talk about them, is to more or less admit that our economy is vastly different from anything we like, and from something most of us can understand. To even be discussing better conditions for fast food workers is to open up an entire line of discussion about what we are doing as a nation for our economy, and it's a whole bunch of stuff that makes sense to few people and makes a lot of us angry. People want jobs that produce something, the idea that each adult can't work in some profession where they produce something we as a society recognize as valuable is some heavy stuff a lot of people are not ready to deal with and probably never will be.
People understand farming, they understand factories, they look at those things and see their necessity. Same with doctors, lawyers, and engineers. But they look at fast food workers, and retail workers and they see a bunch of social lepers. Having a real conversation about the welfare of people who perform the functions of these social lepers, is something people don't want to do because they might end up admitting at some point that they aren't really any better, and that's really important to a lot of peoples thinking. They need to be better than someone, and in the realm of jobs that someone is a fast food or retail workers.
i don't think i understand what a basic income would get you that a more conventional welfare system wouldn't
is it just the guarantee that it's yours forever no matter what you do with it? making it unlike the dole in that you can openly declare your intention to never work again and the money will still roll in
More or less. It allows for far more people to do what they want and forces businesses to pay what menial jobs are actually worth rather than relying on the threat of starvation.
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FaranguI am a beardy manWith a beardy planRegistered Userregular
2. This may have been answered somewhere else in the thread, but would this policy be structured as one lump-sum payment, or over each month? In either case, what is to stop someone from taking their monthly/yearly deposit, going to their nearest casino and putting it all on Red? I have little trouble believing that a number of people that come into larger sums of money than they are used to handling do a poor job of it. Is that the point where we say, "Well tough luck, see you next month/year"? Are there regulations on how the person spends the money? Or do we keep some other social welfare programs around to help those that just refuse to help themselves?
Nothing, but what's to stop people from getting their monthly paycheque and doing the same thing?
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
In what way? Are you describing a hypothetical involving ignorance or malice?
More the ignorance part. From what I've read in the thread so far, this kind of program would supersede or replace a chunk of social welfare programs already in place to assist people with few resources for food and income. I was just thinking that, if we replace programs that offer money/food along with guidance on how to best utilize those things, and replace it with a bigger share of money but no guidance, we could see a rise in the number of people that weren't even scraping by before - homeless, mentally ill - taking the money that is supposed to keep their heads just above water, make maybe one or two mistakes with it, and then they don't even have enough to do that.
As an admittedly-anecdotal example, my current apartment in my area(suburban Chicago) is widely held by both myself and my friends/family as a good deal. It's a modest size one-bedroom. Currently the rent is $9000 a year. If we assume that we are sticking with the $10K per year figure given earlier, that's really not leaving people much. And if someone receives this amount of money, and in a moment of weakness splurges on a small luxury, then they have almost nothing left for their time period.
And at some point, I argue that people should be held responsible for their decisions and to live with the consequences. A basic income just changes so much about our cultural landscape that I think it needs to change where we paint that line. (Also re-reading what I've said so far, since it's early and I'm probably not being very clear, I can see an argument that depending on where a person is, a basic income could get less for a person than in other places which is also something to consider)
2. This may have been answered somewhere else in the thread, but would this policy be structured as one lump-sum payment, or over each month? In either case, what is to stop someone from taking their monthly/yearly deposit, going to their nearest casino and putting it all on Red? I have little trouble believing that a number of people that come into larger sums of money than they are used to handling do a poor job of it. Is that the point where we say, "Well tough luck, see you next month/year"? Are there regulations on how the person spends the money? Or do we keep some other social welfare programs around to help those that just refuse to help themselves?
Nothing, but what's to stop people from getting their monthly paycheque and doing the same thing?
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
In what way? Are you describing a hypothetical involving ignorance or malice?
More the ignorance part. From what I've read in the thread so far, this kind of program would supersede or replace a chunk of social welfare programs already in place to assist people with few resources for food and income. I was just thinking that, if we replace programs that offer money/food along with guidance on how to best utilize those things, and replace it with a bigger share of money but no guidance, we could see a rise in the number of people that weren't even scraping by before - homeless, mentally ill - taking the money that is supposed to keep their heads just above water, make maybe one or two mistakes with it, and then they don't even have enough to do that.
As an admittedly-anecdotal example, my current apartment in my area(suburban Chicago) is widely held by both myself and my friends/family as a good deal. It's a modest size one-bedroom. Currently the rent is $9000 a year. If we assume that we are sticking with the $10K per year figure given earlier, that's really not leaving people much. And if someone receives this amount of money, and in a moment of weakness splurges on a small luxury, then they have almost nothing left for their time period.
And at some point, I argue that people should be held responsible for their decisions and to live with the consequences. A basic income just changes so much about our cultural landscape that I think it needs to change where we paint that line. (Also re-reading what I've said so far, since it's early and I'm probably not being very clear, I can see an argument that depending on where a person is, a basic income could get less for a person than in other places which is also something to consider)
So you're saying, if instead of giving people $5 a day for food, we give them ~$450 cash every two weeks
Posts
And yet despite that virtually every person arguing against it here is making that exact argument. It's funny how much it looks like the same argument that gets deployed against every social program ever. It's almost like the real issue is a bunch of Calvanist/Protestant cultural bullshit that is indiscriminatingly applied to anything that doesn't just shit on the poor because if you give the poor help, they will be lazy or something.
PantsB's cost argument is the only one not explicitly stemming from this crap.
Good to know. It is still 50% greater than the national minimum wage.
It has to start somewhere. Most major social changes are started at a city/state level and can take decades to filter up to the federal level.
I fully acknowledge that it's not perfect nor representative of the US as a whole. But I think it's better than just having hypotheticals to look at.
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
Well, if you haven't looked recently, grown adults are taking those jobs not because they want to--I don't know what you're insinuating here, slack off?--but because they can't find any better jobs.
Also $15/hr in Seattle certainly isn't "making a career". It's more "just scraping by".
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
I don't think you'll find much to enjoy here, then. This discussion has gone with "dignified existence for workers is an intrinsically worthy goal" as a premise. If you'd like to start "A God Damned Separate Thread For Judging Those Without Successful Careers", by all means feel free.
So I'll agree there are some major implications, but I'd say those are going to be a mix of direct economic impacts and indirect economic effects, that are a result of non-economic implications of such a change. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of shitty places like Wal-Mart, that would go under, if people didn't have to work at them. I also think that would free up time for people to get better educated and to really start questioning some of the stupid stuff we do.
I'd rather have a basic income out in the open, then some of the current BS we have now. I want to gag anytime some rich CEO proclaims they are self made men, while downplaying all the perks they've managed to get, by playing the system.
I also laugh at the whole, "but people will stop working, if they don't have to work for the basic." The thing is most people won't be content with the basics. The other thing is employment gives people a means to achieve social interaction with individuals they would not otherwise interact with via hobby. Also if the job is one hat someone mostly enjoys, then it also gives that person some mental engagement. I've been unemployed and if the basics are equivalent to what I had during my period of unemployment, I can guarantee you that most will get bored of not working or doing volunteer work.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
In what way? Are you describing a hypothetical involving ignorance or malice?
Not disgust. Frustration.
Frustration that because society didn't invest in these people a little more upfront we're now going to have to come up with shit like basic income and high minimum wages to support them for the rest of their lives.
the funny thing about a message board is it records what you wrote dude
But that's not the reason we are doing it at all.
I mean, this thread spawned from the automation replacing jobs thread. And even you admit those jobs are not the ones you are talking about here, so....
The service industry is America's new Factory jobs
do you think factory workers had a harder or more complex job in the 1960s than a wal-mart employee has today?
Because Wal-Mart, Mcdonalds etc are beating the shit out of those old factories for how profitable they are, and yet those jobs paid their workers enough money to live
It totally is a good goal!
We don't have to give everybody in the country a basic income to achieve it though.
I suspect the net cost will be lower than existing welfare programs once you factor in new revenues, and the benefits to the local economy and the educational system would be profound
maybe like, Philly or Baltimore or something, we'd have to do it for a few years though
edit: I don't think it would cost anywhere near $2 trillion a year. Taxes could go up substantially with the "neutral point" (new taxes equaling $10,000) being somewhere in the 6 figures, but someone who makes $50k say, might get $10k but have to pay $7.5k in more in taxes (spitballing)
It's just work.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I don't think that can be said across the board.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
That's neither universally true nor really relevant, employment as a whole is safer and less physically demanding than jobs of the past
what I meant was that service work has taken the place of factory work for unskilled labor in the US. A 30 year old guy with a HSED in 1960 could expect to make enough money to buy a car and support his kids working at a factory with no experience, today he couldn't even support himself without government assistance working for Target
They aren't "kids jobs" anymore, the data says as much, the average employee is not 17 years old
That's cause factory work and all its liability is disappearing, therefore adults are swarming into low income service jobs not designed to give them blue collar careers
There's a lot of other reasons and many are in this article I read
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
No job was ever designed for that. We didn't invent factory work so people would have a low skill decently paying job, people did the jobs available to them, and the people working those jobs and the government saw fit to make them livable and decent jobs to have. Old jobs are disappearing and new jobs are not appearing with the frequency required to make up for the loss, so it's becoming increasingly clear we're going to have to do something to make up the difference and help people live while they try to find something new to do. Hence, a BIG.
I'm sure factory work was regarded as a desperate dead (literally) end job like fast food way before it had this infrastructure. Now it sort of is again, but for a while the need was there for society to allow these people to live better, not out of the goodness of our hearts but because we needed cars and skyscrapers and we didn't wanna do it. Do we really need fast food so much? Why are fast food employees so primitively provided for then? The exploitative prices are kind of the point, otherwise just make an egg salad sandwich and leave service dining to the rich
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It doesn't matter if we desperately need fast food, what matters is people need to have livable wages doing the only work available to them. Workers are now, as in the past, so poorly provided for because companies can afford to get away with not providing for them and the government more often than not backs them up and allows them to get away with it. Now, as before, the government needs to take steps to ensure people are provided for and can earn a living wage or have a safety net to keep them from becoming homeless on the streets if, as is becoming more and more common, they can not find a job at all.
From that perspective, I think neither popular culture nor the employers themselves or the law has caught up with how low-level service jobs have changed. You used to expect, at least popularly, that these positions were for kids. Factory work was man's work, fast-food was a child's. Based on pay and prestige.
But that's completely changed now, even if our perception of it hasn't. The jobs many, especially the older generations, think of as existing for low-skill low-education people just aren't there anymore. It's all service jobs. And right now they pay shit and are culturally valued as shit too.
That article Paladin links above it pretty good at talking about this sort of thing. It's a tangential point to what I'm saying above, but men most of all have not adapted well to the change in the type of work no-education low-skills can get you. And it's linked to those expectations and cultural valuations.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Screw that. Someone needs to make burgers if we want to have burgers. Don't shit on people providing a service.
It's not even the money really.
If there were a guaranteed income I would still be going back into my career field after college. I would do it for free if we were to find ourselves in the situation that a standard of living is guaranteed.
Edited for clarity.
It did work for other forms of basic employment, truck driving, construction, dock workers etc can still offer decent lifestyles (at least, in places that haven't been thoroughly gutted by the republican anti labor agenda)
The country doesn't have like 15 million of those jobs sitting around waiting to be given to fast food workers, the construction industry still hasn't rebounded from the housing crisis. Factory work being shipped overseas left a massive void in middle class America that a huge portion of the country doesn't want to see filled because of their inherent disdain for minimum wage workers.
the attitude of the country toward fast food workers is not so different from its attitude toward factory workers before that was turned from shit tier slave wages to an honest profession that was the backbone of a blue collar american dream
or retail/grocery store employees
still waiting on this simulation tbh
It's needed for food, housing, electricity, internet, small luxuries, etc. I don't know why you keep ignoring large parts of the idea and what it's supposed to accomplish.
or right around the time we hit 95% unemployment as the rotting cities have been abandoned and the citizenry struggles to forage off the land, the economy being all robots buying things made by other robots with a small group of trillionares
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/beta-universal-basic-income-calculator
direct link: https://91990d906718a1b66896d27b38cf3179775d4c68.googledrive.com/host/0B68HCFLtgK_QTHRGWGZBTkRNQjQ/UBI_calculator.html
is it just the guarantee that it's yours forever no matter what you do with it? making it unlike the dole in that you can openly declare your intention to never work again and the money will still roll in
this is pretty neat
Really though, fast food jobs are problematic. Without some kind of engineering, it's really hard to imagine an economy where a large number of people are fast food workers. What are we doing as a nation to get the goods and services we even need for those fast food chains to be fast food chains? People can't take these jobs seriously, because we don't want people doing them. To admit that they make up a significant enough portion of our jobs that we need to talk about them, is to more or less admit that our economy is vastly different from anything we like, and from something most of us can understand. To even be discussing better conditions for fast food workers is to open up an entire line of discussion about what we are doing as a nation for our economy, and it's a whole bunch of stuff that makes sense to few people and makes a lot of us angry. People want jobs that produce something, the idea that each adult can't work in some profession where they produce something we as a society recognize as valuable is some heavy stuff a lot of people are not ready to deal with and probably never will be.
People understand farming, they understand factories, they look at those things and see their necessity. Same with doctors, lawyers, and engineers. But they look at fast food workers, and retail workers and they see a bunch of social lepers. Having a real conversation about the welfare of people who perform the functions of these social lepers, is something people don't want to do because they might end up admitting at some point that they aren't really any better, and that's really important to a lot of peoples thinking. They need to be better than someone, and in the realm of jobs that someone is a fast food or retail workers.
More or less. It allows for far more people to do what they want and forces businesses to pay what menial jobs are actually worth rather than relying on the threat of starvation.
More the ignorance part. From what I've read in the thread so far, this kind of program would supersede or replace a chunk of social welfare programs already in place to assist people with few resources for food and income. I was just thinking that, if we replace programs that offer money/food along with guidance on how to best utilize those things, and replace it with a bigger share of money but no guidance, we could see a rise in the number of people that weren't even scraping by before - homeless, mentally ill - taking the money that is supposed to keep their heads just above water, make maybe one or two mistakes with it, and then they don't even have enough to do that.
As an admittedly-anecdotal example, my current apartment in my area(suburban Chicago) is widely held by both myself and my friends/family as a good deal. It's a modest size one-bedroom. Currently the rent is $9000 a year. If we assume that we are sticking with the $10K per year figure given earlier, that's really not leaving people much. And if someone receives this amount of money, and in a moment of weakness splurges on a small luxury, then they have almost nothing left for their time period.
And at some point, I argue that people should be held responsible for their decisions and to live with the consequences. A basic income just changes so much about our cultural landscape that I think it needs to change where we paint that line. (Also re-reading what I've said so far, since it's early and I'm probably not being very clear, I can see an argument that depending on where a person is, a basic income could get less for a person than in other places which is also something to consider)
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
So you're saying, if instead of giving people $5 a day for food, we give them ~$450 cash every two weeks
they might starve to death