There is a fucking huge problem with this idea (excuse my french). The majority of jobs in this country, nobody wants to do- but they need to be done. If we just freely hand out a living wage to everybody, nobody will be working the crappy jobs and our world will fall apart.
Capitalism, hey? The garbage will pile up until somebody is willing to take away the garbage for what you are willing to pay. Then you will know what the real value of garbage removal is to you, when you can no longer use the inhumanities of poverty as a bargaining chip.
Thing is, the system is already stable. I take that as meaning it is a reasonable approximation of where most services belong.
Don't forget that the real value of garbage removal to me is not what defines the fair market price. It is the combination of what it is worth to me, and what someone will do it for. In the case of garbage removal, it is likely the latter is lower than the former, and thus where the market settled.
But again: labor supply levels are not like supply-levels for other commodities. If you want a continuous supply of fresh tomatoes, you give your plant water and sunlight, and if you want a consistent supply of willing labor, you should pay living wages.
Otherwise, you're not talking about bargaining in a fair market but about the religion of arbeit macht frei or karoshi, the worship of self-immolation through work.
(For those surprised by my turn of phrase, yes, this is in fact what "Arbeit macht frei" meant prior to WW2.)
nope, it's the combination of what it is worth to you, and what someone will do it for, when the alternative to doing it is to starve. if you remove that large influencing factor, you would get a lot closer to a fair market price, where the unpleasantness of a job factors more strongly into the value of doing it.
So you believe that not only does money have a diminishing marginal utility, the utility drop-off that comes just after not starving to death on the street is so strong that, should we abolish Slow-Death-by-Poverty, nobody would do certain jobs?
You know, as opposed to low-level employers just having to raise wages and automate more?
You're free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but it doesn't sound like Cushman is advocating giving people the absolute bare minimum simply to avoid starvation. We already have that after a fashion, it's called food stamps, and you can indeed try boostrapping a company while supporting yourself with foodstamps- it's been done. It sounds more like Cushman is advocating a number such as "$30k".
You can't pay down a debt, you can't buy shoes for that interview, you can't get a phone number, move to a better job market, afford first month/lastmonth/security on an apartment on a bus route, etc. And what is and isn't allowed is a constant political issue.
The point is cash lets some one target their own pain points while cutting down the inefficiency of needing a bureaucracy to define the aid packages.
Also a years wage from some shit retail job isn't 30k, it's more like 15k.
Not saying food stamps rock, but my parent approaches the issue as if I/we have royally decreed the poor should continue to starve in ditches. I felt it appropriate to point out that the USA generally (GENERALLY) doesn't let people starve in ditches.
Maybe not that many are starving to death, but many people in the USA don't get the food that they need.
In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States [1]
It is completely relevant. The ancestor post was making the argument that we already have a minimal support system in the USA that anyone can take advantage of a pursue their dreams. They just need to take food-stamps/etc. This doesn't seem to be working so instead, we need to give them $30k/year.
My point is that we aren't even providing minimal life support to everyone yet, so to say that it has failed is premature.
Show me a system where healthy food is accessible and free, and safe housing is also accessible, convenient and free where people are still struggling to invest and improve their situation and then I will believe that it doesn't work.
Yes, giving people the minimum to avoid starvation seems to make them dependent on that income. Giving people enough money to effectively take money off the table frees them to make intelligent decisions about how to invest not only that capital, but their remaining time and energy, greatly boosting their productivity.
To be clear, though, I advocate for evidence-based policy, and I've seen encouraging but not conclusive evidence. I've got a hunch on this one, and some notable economists seem to agree with me, but if we're wrong and it would hurt our society then... we shouldn't do that.
I was responding to the sentence, "If we just freely hand out a living wage to everybody, nobody will be working the crappy jobs and our world will fall apart."
I went with the "bare minimum" thing because a sub-living wage is a dying wage.
If they're jobs that need to be done, wages will rise until they're sufficient to either convince labor to allocate itself to the problem or convince capital to be substituted for it.
Yes, they will. Both nominal and real. That's different from the world falling apart because no one wants to clean the toilets.
What will happen to price levels? It depends on the exact level of the basic income, but here's a likely scenario for my preferred level (around $10k-$12k per adult citizen).
The effects are much more strongly seen for things that require low skilled labor than high skilled: those low skilled workers now have an alternative, of not working. Some extra number of them over today would take that option, but most still will work: everyone still has the same incentive--more money!--to work. The big difference would be everyone has a pile of so-called "fuck you" money, which helps eliminate any monopsony power employers at the lower end of the market have.
So those costs would rise, because costs on the supply side have risen. Products and services provided by highly skilled workers would see nary a change in their cost structures: most of us get paid enough in a year to consume a decade at minimum income levels, but we choose not to do that.
The pattern of consumption would also be altered, depending on how the funding tax was structured. A reasonable proposal (perhaps a flat tax on all income over the basic guaranteed one) you'd expect to result in luxuries to be demanded compared to necessities.
Overall you get higher prices and higher consumption of basic necessities, and lower prices and lower consumption of luxuries.
(This is all secondary, in my view, to the core of what a basic income would allow: a grand infusion of both market entrepreneurship and non-easily-monetizable value into the economy. )
Well, I would say we get paid a decade worth of minimum income levels pre-tax and pre-expenses, but after taxes and high cost of living in the areas we generally live in, and after repaying loans to obtain qualifications to work these jobs, I'd say there's only one or two years of minimum income left over.
Nominal prices will rise, but what you're really seeing is the fair valuation of these services when costs aren't massively depressed by the abundance of free labor in a post-industrial society where there is less and less real work to do.
Look how things work out in places with a working social safety net, state unemployment benefits pay for rent, public healthcare and gives enough money for food and basic comforts.
Basically it works pretty well, people want to feel like productive members of society and do something for a living, and employers end up having to treat employees with more respect since the threat of unemployment isn't so terrifying.
