4 ms·

How about instead of offering everybody $20,000 a year, we offer everyone a government job that pays $20,000 a year? There's no sense in paying people without

How about instead of offering everybody $20,000 a year, we offer everyone a government job that pays $20,000 a year? There's no sense in paying people without receiving something in return and there are always infrastructure improvements that could be made.

gojomo 16y ago
With a stipend, the money is theirs. With a government job, some of their salary would go to a politically-potent union that constantly lobbies for raises. Might not be worth the 'work' they're doing!
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  >With a government job, some of their salary would go to a politically-potent union that constantly lobbies for raises. That sounds like a separate unrelated issue. Hand each worker a check for $1,666 each month they work, and leave it up to them how to spend it. It would (obviously) be untaxed...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
_delirium 16y ago
Well, proponents from a libertarianish direction hope that it would be a way to structure a social safety net with minimal economic distortion. Instead of a whole bunch of programs (food stamps, welfare, medicare, employment insurance, etc.), just have one transfer of cash money. But if all those people become government employees, that hardly reduces economic distortion, because now you have a giant state workforce. Some libertarian-leaning folks, like Hayek, also think that people would be able to better self-direct their labor than the government could, e.g. by using the minimum payment to bootstrap small businesses.
semanticist 16y ago
That's too simplistic: How do you handle someone who has a low-paid job that earns $10,000 a year? Make them quit their job? Part of the benefit of this approach versus a minimum wage is that it can make low-paid jobs viable. With your suggestion it wouldn't make sense for any job to pay less than $20,000 a year. How about people that simply can't work, due to long-term illness, disability, or age? Another benefit to this approach is that it simplifies administration of welfare/benefits so that you don't need to prove illness/disability to get the money. This also helps to remove stigma associated with disability, which is a Good Thing for society. What if there's no need for your government labour where you live, but there is elsewhere? Do you create busy work for people - which will incur capital/material costs and management costs - or do you start forcing people to relocate? Pretty much the entire point of this way of handling welfare is that you do pay people without receiving anything directly in return or enforcing how the money is spent. That way people can gain the freedom to decide how to spend it themselves and will largely make good choices. (And even when they make bad choices, the state is no worse off than under the current system.)
jhrobert 16y ago
OTOH, what is the "sense" of so called "working poors"? "slavery" comes to mind.
sedachv 16y ago
What would you have people do? We've pretty much run out of ideas for how to use poorly educated labor. The current US unemployment numbers illustrate this problem. Paying people to receive an education would be much more worthwhile IMO. Let a million grad students bloom.

gojomo 16y ago

With a stipend, the money is theirs. With a government job, some of their salary would go to a politically-potent union that constantly lobbies for raises. Might not be worth the 'work' they're doing!

burgerbrain 16y ago
>With a government job, some of their salary would go to a politically-potent union that constantly lobbies for raises. That sounds like a separate unrelated issue. Hand each worker a check for $1,666 each month they work, and leave it up to them how to spend it. It would (obviously) be untaxed...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

_delirium 16y ago

Well, proponents from a libertarianish direction hope that it would be a way to structure a social safety net with minimal economic distortion. Instead of a whole bunch of programs (food stamps, welfare, medicare, employment insurance, etc.), just have one transfer of cash money. But if all those people become government employees, that hardly reduces economic distortion, because now you have a giant state workforce. Some libertarian-leaning folks, like Hayek, also think that people would be able to better self-direct their labor than the government could, e.g. by using the minimum payment to bootstrap small businesses.

semanticist 16y ago

That's too simplistic: How do you handle someone who has a low-paid job that earns $10,000 a year? Make them quit their job? Part of the benefit of this approach versus a minimum wage is that it can make low-paid jobs viable. With your suggestion it wouldn't make sense for any job to pay less than $20,000 a year. How about people that simply can't work, due to long-term illness, disability, or age? Another benefit to this approach is that it simplifies administration of welfare/benefits so that you don't need to prove illness/disability to get the money. This also helps to remove stigma associated with disability, which is a Good Thing for society. What if there's no need for your government labour where you live, but there is elsewhere? Do you create busy work for people - which will incur capital/material costs and management costs - or do you start forcing people to relocate? Pretty much the entire point of this way of handling welfare is that you do pay people without receiving anything directly in return or enforcing how the money is spent. That way people can gain the freedom to decide how to spend it themselves and will largely make good choices. (And even when they make bad choices, the state is no worse off than under the current system.)

jhrobert 16y ago

OTOH, what is the "sense" of so called "working poors"? "slavery" comes to mind.

sedachv 16y ago

What would you have people do? We've pretty much run out of ideas for how to use poorly educated labor. The current US unemployment numbers illustrate this problem. Paying people to receive an education would be much more worthwhile IMO. Let a million grad students bloom.