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It seems odd that our public discourse has settled on the following set themes: - Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits - The person's

by whack 6y ago

It seems odd that our public discourse has settled on the following set themes: - Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits - The person's employer is tasked with the above responsibility - If a corporation pays their workers less than the above baseline, they are bad. We should shame them, and pass laws to ensure that they pay their workers better - If a corporation decides not to hire someone at all, and operates with a smaller workforce by tweaking their business model, that is perfectly acceptable and even laudable Combine all of the above, and you end up with a world where corporations go above-and-beyond to reduce their headcount, and entrepreneurs specifically avoid labor-intensive business models. Firms like DE Shaw are publicly lauded for making lots of money with a tiny elite workforce, while spinoffs like Amazon are publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. All this only worsens the situation for those in the lower-middle-class in the long-term, because now they have fewer work opportunities, and less demand for their labor. Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits. But instead of heaping this responsibility on the subset of corporations that hire low-skill workers, this responsibility really should lie with everyone. Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, and use the money to strengthen the social safety net for low-skill workers. That would eliminate this entire mess.

jschwartzi 6y ago
I don’t want to subsidize Walmart with my taxes. That’s exactly what you’re proposing, and in fact what happens. Companies underpay their workers, who end up needing government assistance. In the end my taxes go to supporting a company that I would never shop at.
- cltby 6y ago
  You’re not subsidizing Walmart. You’ve decided that workers should enjoy some standard of living but are unwilling to shoulder the costs of providing it (e.g. through taxes). Instead, you’ve kicked those costs to Walmart. Walmart is subsidizing you.
  - stetrain 6y ago
    Walmart isn't going to run at a loss. They'll raise prices appropriately, or decide that expanding the same exact store into every small town in America is no longer a profitable growth strategy.
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      Amazon did exactly this recently. The costs of the new digital services tax were immediately passed on to suppliers. Amazon won't be paying a cent of it. Of course legislation could - and should - go after Amazon in other ways. But it makes the point that you don't want lawyers trying to define corporate taxation policy, because too few lawyers have the first clue how to define policy with no loopholes and real teeth.
      - tathougies 6y ago
        What is to be gained by reducing Amazon's profits? Less stuff able to be bought online?
        stetrain 6y ago
        Increase competition by allowing local businesses without megacorp productivity leverage to compete on price.
    - take_a_breath 6y ago
      That sounds ideal.
      - jschwartzi 6y ago
        This is actually what I'm asking for. Raise peoples' wages, make it illegal to offer health insurance as a benefit, and provide a single-payer option for everyone. Make sure there's a universal basic income rather than something means-tested. Or, barring that, raise the minimum wage so most people who are working don't need the safety net. Means-testing causes huge bureaucracies in the US. The rules around the means-testing make it very difficult for the social programs to actually provide anything in a reasonable amount of time. Or if they do they have byzantine requirements like you have to make X number of job-seeking contacts during the week, you have to interview, and you have to take classes from people who haven't searched for a job outside of the public sector in 20 years. Or for food stamps you're limited to only a few sections of the store.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  I agree. If we give say everyone 5 dollars an hour for no work. Livable wage is say 10. Then companies only have to pay 5. They can pocket the other 5 or lower their prices. Which is more likely? This also has other knock on effects. It is only possible in the very short term. In the long term inflation will wipe out the extra 5 and things will go back to steady state. It sounds nice, heck I would not mind it personally, but the knock-on effects for something like that could be a terrible creation that would take years to fix. Just first order effects do not seem great.
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    Why not pay them 10 and use the labour in the community? Then if Uber et al wants labour they have to bid it away from the "common good". Once everybody has an alternative job to go to outside the private sector, it no longer matters if Uber decides not to pay people and instead automates all the vehicles. Then everybody wins due to improved productivity - Uber and the people with community jobs.
    - sumtechguy 6y ago
      So uber would 'buy' from some central org? Why not just cut out the middle man then and deal directly with their employees? Why create a middle man? Middle man in any economic system tend to destroy wealth. Uber is in itself a middle man between people who want a ride and people who pay for it. They upended a middle man who was less efficient.
      - mvc 6y ago
        Don't see where parent is saying anything about Labor from a central org. He's just saying Uber has to up their bid in order to win the services of said Labor.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      Because of the problem of how to decide how they labor is used. Central planning communism has never worked. Free market with regulation and taxation has a much better record.
- untog 6y ago
  I imagine part of this would be ensuring that companies do not underpay their workers by enforcing strict standards on minimum wage and changing corporate tax obligations. Having employers provide benefits like healthcare is crazy. The US really needs to move beyond it. I’m surprised there isn’t more agreement politically, the benefit obligation is a huge drain on small companies and solo entrepreneurs.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    ==Having employers provide benefits like healthcare is crazy. The US really needs to move beyond it.== Not to mention the cost of staff needed negotiate, maintain, and explain the options to employees.
- bo1024 6y ago
  This reply comes from completely internalizing the perspective the above post describes. It only makes sense if you accept that the employer is supposed to completely care for their employees. But if you view it as society’s job, then everything changes. For one thing, small mom n pop stores can compete with Walmart a lot easier if healthcare is provided by the state. Also employees can quit if they’re not treated well, etc.
  - griffinkelly 6y ago
    From a startup perspective, I've always thought it interesting that more people in Europe/rest of the world don't take chances to create companies because of the great safety net there--at least its not as highly publicized. For whatever reason, the US is still the place to be and everyone wants to come to the US to start a company--my current company included (We have Canadian founders). I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago, I was able to stay on my parents health insurance for a meaningful amount of time. It allowed me to take the chance of starting my own company. Unsure if I would have done the same, had circumstances been different.
    - pbiggar 6y ago
      Startups are in the US because of a long chain of decisions and network effects that ultimately come from US military spending in the 60s. > I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago So you're saying that you were able to take the chance to build a startup because of the safety net?
      - griffinkelly 6y ago
        Yeah, had President Obama not made that change and extended health insurance to 26, I would have thought harder about quitting my job.
      - refurb 6y ago
        Sure, a safety net paid for by employers, not the gov’t.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Yes, that's how welfare works. When you pay taxes for a single payer healthcare system, you're absolving the company the responsibility to provide health insurance to their employees (read: "underpay their workers"). Many societies are okay with this because the end result is actually better/more efficient for everyone.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  Do you just oppose the use of tax dollars to support anyone or anything other than what you personally happen to use and like? What do you think about Medicaid, food stamps, the child tax credit (especially if you don't have children)? Assuming you aren't a student, do you oppose tax dollars going toward financial support for students? Do you oppose UBI? Do you vehemently oppose the US federal electric-vehicle tax credit of up to $7500 until the day you decide you'll buy a Tesla, when you'll switch to staunchly demanding that it be radically increased? (https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/taxevb.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/taxevb.shtml) These all represent your taxes going to support things that you are unlikely to benefit from personally, after all. If you remove the impact to other people from the calculus of where you'd want tax dollars to go, then I think most people would opt to enrich themselves rather than not. But that's just not how the world works. The reality is that any given person's tax dollars are used on all kinds of things that will never directly benefit them, or even their families or even socioeconomic class.
  - jb775 6y ago
    I don't think anyone is against your examples. The issue is WHERE the tax money is coming from and the PROPORTIONS of tax paid in relation to overall income. Unfortunately right now the middle class is being stuck with most of the bill on a PER-CAPITA income basis. And considering the wealth gap between the rich and the middle class is SUBSTANTIAL, it means we're essentially having relatively poor people (middle class) pay the bills of very poor people (lower class). When you zoom out a little (and remove irrational emotions about the topic clouding your perception), it's easier to see the disconnect.
    - justchilly 6y ago
      This is incorrect. On a per-capita basis the middle class is not being stuck with most of the bill. The bottom 50% pays less than 3% of federal income taxes (which are the largest source of federal income). That same amount of income tax is paid by the top 1,400 tax-payers. Also no need for the line about irrational emotions - lets have some proper discourse please.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  I agree with other replies that this is just a matter of perspective. Here’s an alternate one - if you hate Walmart and/or you hate the idea of unskilled workers in lower paying jobs, why do want to make them solely reliant on big employers like Walmart? A better safety net, in addition to achieving the same immediate outcome of workers living with better conditions, also means workers have more options. It might lower the supply of potential Walmart employees and actually also increase their wages or working conditions. But more importantly it would mean they could leave Walmart and still get by. Or they could work fewer hours without worrying about things like losing their employer sponsored health insurance. More people could live more fulfilling lives rather than being so reliant on their job at Walmart.
- sukilot 6y ago
  If people had more social welfare they wouldn't bother to waste their life at Walmart for tiny incremental wages. So Walmart would pay more.
- refurb 6y ago
  By that logic you’re subsidizing any company that takes a risk, fails and employees go on unemployment.
- mrnobody_67 6y ago
  THIS x 1000. Walmart used to have a page for employees telling them how to apply for food stamps. Those costs should be charged back to the company.
- bodono 6y ago
  Yes, the ideal thing would be for Walmart to go out of business and all those people who currently need partial government assistance instead requiring full government assistance. Think of the tax savings!
jfengel 6y ago
Rephrase the second point as "everyone must work for a living", and it becomes clearer. Your second point becomes a corollary: people can only be cared for if they work. Your last paragraph is only possible if we want to allow people to live without working. But many would see that as morally repugnant. Not everyone, but a majority, and especially a politically powerful plurality. That is what you will need to deal with to make a change.
rmrfstar 6y ago
That is not a fair characterization of the discourse. There are a lot of people arguing that "platforms" like Uber are capturing too large a fraction of the economic surplus created by transactions on the platform. 30% for matching buy/sell orders? Do you have any idea how insane that is relative to what NYSE charges?
- sgustard 6y ago
  How would those people have found steady income driving strangers every day without Uber? My mind draws a blank. Uber does not have a monopoly like a stock market. If there's a more effecient way to do this, competitors will find it.
  - asdff 6y ago
    They would have picked up another job or shift rather than work rideshare. The whole appeal was this was something you can do for some beer money once a week, but now people who would have been working 2 jobs are working 1 job and ubering, and given you are operating your own vehicle, I'm not sure how much you actually make relative to picking up a second shift at taco bell. Honestly, transit is a tough nut to make profit on. Pacific Electrics red cars in LA failed to make a profit and folded. All the private railways in NYC failed to make a profit even during the days when people had to either take a train or walk, and still folded (these bankrupt companies were bought up cheap publicly and became the mta) Public transit looses money just like highways do, but all of this is justified because the gain is realized in other sectors of the economy. However, uber and lyft are private companies and don't benefit from general gain in other sectors, so in my mind these companies have an expiration date once vc investors finally open a history book.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Except that is what such a system costs a the price the market will pay. Uber doesn’t make money. It is only insane if it can be done for cheaper.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
Miner49er 6y ago
This isn't how I see the discourse. The way I see it is people are starting to question if executives and shareholders deserve the pay they get. Instead of the majority of profits going to them, more should go to workers. The author of this article was paid $42 million last year. Uber's top 7 executives received: "$11.4 million in salary and cash bonus, plus $71 million worth of equity awards." [0] Maybe instead of paying their CEO and executives that much, Uber should pay their workers more? [0] https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backlash-coronavirus/ https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backla...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  If we take Uber's self-reported total of 3 million drivers, that'd give them an extra $15 a year. That's not really the scale of change most people are looking for when they say workers should make more.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - aetherson 6y ago
    It's appalling to me that this basic reality check is getting downvoted.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'm used to it, unfortunately. Something's gone very wrong with the discourse in almost every forum I frequent; hopefully it's just temporary pandemic stress.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Right. Uber (single user per ride car service) is a fundamentally unsustainable business model, unless they convert into vanpool and delivery routes.
    - 6y ago
cc23 6y ago
Or solve the real issue and transition from capitalism to socialism, instead of trying to put a temporary band-aid on the issues via taxes.
rzwitserloot 6y ago
That's a nice way of thinking about labour intensive business models. But look at it from a different perspective: A bunch of jobs can theoretically be automated or otherwise designed to require no individual human to do the job. Some jobs can't be automated but aren't really necessary either; the total value add for society is quite low, and it is not necessary (defining 'necessary' as: If nobody does it, some good or service price will skyrocket and soon the wage for this job will go up considerably, possibly via a workaround, such as pressuring government to increase a budget for something). Minimum wage (or, at least, that 'baseline quality of life and benefits' you mentioned, which includes more than just a wage, but also working conditions and safety) is society's baseline for: Below this line, automate it, and if you can't, don't. One argument is that you should let each individual choose for themselves what job is beneath them, but it's not actually a fully free market unless you go out, find homeless people and shoot them, or, when someone breaks out their back doing low-pay menial work, that we just let them wallow in pain. Which no sane society ever would or should, which highlights that we don't treat fellow humans as cattle. If they are a drag on society and it costs society considerable resources just to support them.. society does pay that cost, or ought to. The flipside of that is the existence of jobs which are 'net negative' value for society: The cost of supporting the human that does it will, in the long run, cost more than the job gives society. However, because more or less by design there are externalities involved in caring for our fellow humans, the job may seem net-positive to an employer even if it is not. Society is nevertheless attempting to make sure these jobs do not exist. Minimum wage is, perhaps, a very blunt instrument to make this happen. One can imagine a completely 'safe' job (both mentally and physically) that pays half of minimum wage, and that would be better to allow that if you combine it with a social safety net _and_ the job unemployment rate is sufficient that the only real alternative is no job at all. But I don't think it is feasible to legislate a complicated 'chart' matching working conditions against allowed minimal salaries.
CPLX 6y ago
That's one way of looking at it. Here's another: - We collectively have created an economy that has generated spectacular amounts of wealth. - A small group of people is hoarding the majority of that wealth. - This is harmful to our society and needs to change. - Arguments that we can't reduce inequality without destroying that wealth are factually and historically incorrect.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  "A small group of people is hoarding the majority of that wealth." That like saying the winners of the football league have hoarded all the points and therefore nobody can now score goals. It's the playing of the game that matters. Not who owns the pitches.
  - CPLX 6y ago
    All sports leagues have been through extensive rule changes and updates to make sure the game is enjoyable and fair for all, and does not result in one team winning everything all the time.
    - neilwilson 6y ago
      Indeed. But that doesn't require deducting points from people from previous seasons and asking them to return their trophies so there is sufficient for this season. We just alter the rules and carry on issuing points as required.
      - CPLX 6y ago
        Of course they do. They make everyone start over with zero points literally every time they play. If you can imagine showing up to play a friendly football game against a rival high school and noticing they have 5,340,322 points already on the board because their families had been playing the game for decades, then you’ll start to really get it.
        6y ago
kryogen1c 6y ago
> Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, Where do you think our tax revenue is coming from? the 12% tax bracket of someone making 20k a year in government-subsidized housing, or the 37% tax bracket from someone making $10million a year paying property taxes on their 20 million dollar house? a serious, informed discussion starts with an honest recognition of reality. if you think taxes need to change thats fine, but acting like billionaires and successful companies pay no taxes when they represent the overwhelming majority of tax revenue, you sound like a blind ideologue rather than someone who knows what theyre talking about.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Agreed. The median person is a minimal contributor to government already. https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2018-update/ https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > The median person is a minimal contributor to government already. The numbers in the linked article are for high-income earners who, yes, paid the majority of Federal Income Taxes. My understanding is that the wealthiest people in the United States pay relatively little tax because their wealth accrues largely through investments not income. In addition to being taxed at a much lower rate than income, such investments also qualify for deductions which often reduce and/or eliminate any final tax obligation.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  But also look at where our tax revenue used to come from: > In 1981, Reagan significantly reduced the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, and lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1986 he further reduced the rate to 28%.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    The top marginal tax rate was in the 90%'s for much of the 1900s. Also, the estate tax was in the 80% range for much of the 1900s, now it's effectively zero. Moving huge quantities of un-earned wealth from generation to generation is a great way to create and maintain inequality.
theelous3 6y ago
> hundreds of thousands of middle class workers This gigantic exaggeration is the crux of your point, around which all else crumbles. Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it. There are other companies that are well regarded for employing low to no skill workers en masse, like Lidl, which nobody is complaining about. Most people also do not believe it's corporations who are responsible for this living baseline, but the state, so yet another either outright lie or exaggeration around which all of those points crumble. Overall, it's disheartening to see such a flawed comment at the top here in hn.
- zajd 6y ago
  New to HN? This is par for the course.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it. The median US based pay at Amazon is $36,640. That is not a poverty level wage except in a few urban centres. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-discloses-median-pay-plans-virtual-shareholder-meeting-due-to-coronavirus-climate-concerns/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-disclose...
  - theelous3 6y ago
    You could have basically just bezos and then thousands of workers working for free and the average wage would still look pretty good. Just because the elites are paid insane sums, doesn't mean the majority are making anything reasonable. Edit: I miss read and you have median. Fair enough. 35k usd is still terrible pay though, and I'd rather work somewhere that doesn't have 12 hour shifts for that semi ok pay. Can work elsewhere half as hard for the same money or better. Won't pass out from heat exhaustion, won't he fired for trying to unionize, won't have covid pay taken back, won't be denied safe working conditions in a pandemic, etc.
    - tathougies 6y ago
seanmcdirmid 6y ago
Increases in quality of life have always required increases in productivity, which intrinsically means reducing headcount. Yes, you should hire people, but hiring 10 people and paying them $100 each is more moral than hiring 100 people and paying them $10 each. The contradiction (higher productivity = fewer jobs) has been an issues since the industrial revolution at least, but we’ve seem to have gotten by so far with creating new kinds of jobs coupled with a increasing social safety net. The next step might be some kind of UBI, but we should avoid the other routes (de-focusing on higher productivity, or directly paying people more without higher productivity) as unsustainable in the long term. Some mechanisms, like a rising minimum wage, imply higher productivity with each increase, so those work out as well (though increase the need for social safety nets as some people are forced out of the work force).
- wolco 6y ago
  Is it more moral? 100 families eat tonight vs 10 families eating really well.
  - eecc 6y ago
    That’s not the right approach to this problem. The moral thing to do is is to redistribute that added productivity increasing the beneficiaries of this increased added value
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    You don't solve that problem by creating pretend work or paying above market rate for work, instead that is what social safety nets are for (everyone should be able to eat, work just means you can eat better). Especially these days, and moving forward as automation takes over more lesser skilled tasks.
SkyBelow 6y ago
This doesn't seem so odd to me because it mirrors common human behavior to judge things based on each step and not the total outcome. One example is when people pushed for a ban on industries using child labor in SEA without first ensuring there was some fall back safety net that would help those children. The end result was children ending up working far worse jobs than the ones that the western industries were providing. Overall, there seems to be a judgment that any employment of a child is to be judged in isolation and not relative to what other options they have. Society has deemed it is ethically better for me to do nothing despite a child experiencing the ravages of extreme poverty than to intervene in a way that is better for the child but not good enough to meet our expected levels of treatment of children. Another, more IT centric example, is that it is better to not fix any bugs in a known broken part of the system than to touch it and fix one bug, because you assume responsibility for all the bugs you don't fix. Not every place has this mentality, but I've seen enough which do. So telling me that society deems it more ethical to offer a worker no option than to offer them a below satisfactory offer doesn't not surprise me at all, despite the outcome of such behavior being too painfully obvious. Though if we were to invert this, I wonder the outcome because the world over there are enough people experiencing extremely harmful situations where even being offered what we would consider a nightmare is better than leaving them in their current situation. Consider if I wanted someone to be a 24/7 live in maid/butler(cook/cleaner/gardener/etc.) and their pay was $5 a day along with a room, food, basic clothing needed for the job, and access to a computer with internet when they have free time. There are people in situations where this would be a significant improvement in their quality of life, yet I'm not sure any one reading this would approve of me having such a live in maid/butler regardless of what sort of situation they were in before I made the offer.
jdsully 6y ago
If a corporation pays less than a living wage then the state is a net subsidizer of their employees. Its not fair we have Walmart employees on welfare for example.
gonzo41 6y ago
Re Amazon, Jeff has a lot of money, he could pay people more and let the unionize so they could engage in the terms of their employ.
- devcpp 6y ago
  Why should he pay more? They signed a work contract. And if that contract says don't unionize, then maybe they shouldn't be surprised to be let go when they try that.
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    You should read into the rights you have thanks to unions. Things like weekends ans OSHA spring to mind.
- robobro 6y ago
  I'm disappointed that only one person here has said the common sense approach -- let them unionize :(
andruby 6y ago
Many European countries implement that baseline quality of life at the country/government level. What you are hinting at has a name, and it's called socialism. Some people in those European countries do complain about high taxes. But in general, as a country, most are happy with our "social safety net" which includes universal healthcare, "almost free" education system (including University), reasonable minimal wages and "liveable" unemployment benefits. Socialism seem like a dirty word in the US. It isn't one where I'm from (Belgium).
Consultant32452 6y ago
>Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits. Whenever I read this I translate it to "I don't want poor people to live near me." That's fine, but let's not feign nobility about it. The global median income is $10k/yr. Nearly half the planet lives on less than $5/day. 1/3 of people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water. What, exactly, do you mean when you say it's incumbent upon you to provide a baseline quality of life and benefits? And are you really willing to bring yourself down to that baseline so that others can be brought up to it? These Amazon warehouse workers you're so concerned about are quite rich by global standards.
op03 6y ago
Well most Billionaires have more cash in their bank than they have usable cells in their brain. So it takes a while for most of them to work it out.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
>Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits I disagree.
- troupe 6y ago
  While I agree that individuals in a society should try to provide for those who can't provide for themselves, saying that everyone deserves X, is basically a way of saying that we want to force others to pay for X and I share your disagreement on that front.
ck425 6y ago
> Combine all of the above, and you end up with a world where corporations go above-and-beyond to reduce their headcount On a macro level I think that's a good thing. We create more value with less labour. And eventually yes we'd have to address that and figure out how to move to true post-scarcity society. But it's not a 100% either or. You can recognise the need for a better social security net while also wanting to regulate corporations into giving labour their fair share of the output.
anm89 6y ago
Regarding the public discourse on these points, I think these big companies have long understood that they lost this battle. On the other hand they also understand their internal realities and that as long as they can make their own business models work, the discourse doesn't really matter, as long as it stays out of the spotlight . So they take their only logical move, they pump out a bunch of ethics marketing statements they don't believe in, but also importantly that they know the public doesn't believe that they believe in, but that give them plausible deniability and keep them out of the spot light for wrong speak and out of the news cycle. Meanwhile, they do exactly what they are incentivezed to do which is to keep head count low and make sure almost everybody is a contractor.
throwaway13337 6y ago
I agree with the set of odd concepts taken together and the normal solution being government. The issue is that the US government is unable to effectively do anything, really, as far as public welfare is concerned. We spend a ton already - our public Healthcare spend, for instance is in line with European public health but we don't get nearly as much for it. Our programs are, dollar per citizen, expensive. We then task employers with something impossible. No one, therefore, wants to be in the position of employing low skilled workers. I don't know where the real solution lies but expecting the federal government to spend effectively seems out of the question.
- reccanti 6y ago
  How efficient would the spending need to be before it's considered "effective"? Personally, I would rather the government spend "ineffectively" and cover everyone than the current situation
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
redm 6y ago
"Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits." Quality of life is subjective. The US constitution guarantees the freedom to make of life what you will but not that it will be subjectively 'good'.
mschuster91 6y ago
> while spinoffs like Amazon are publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. They (and dito Walmart and other such employers) are not paying middle class wages though. Usually it should be possible to feed a family upon a single worker's wage to call it "middle class"... but the harsh reality is that many of the workers, especially those working for subcontractors in fulfillment, are nowhere close to such wages - or to working conditions that are usually associated with "middle class", like being allowed to go on a real toilet and not piss in bottles. Big companies don't want to be shamed? Then they should not let their employees work in shameful conditions!
Barrin92 6y ago
>this responsibility really should lie with everyone some responsibility should lie with the public, but to capture the diversity of benefits and needs of every single employee with a centralised program is impossible, and it would also be an unprecedented amount of power transferred to the federal government. Not everyone requires the same benefits or same training and this is why corporations do need to have some responsibility, decentralisation of benefits is necessary. This sort of technocratic dream of taking all responsibility away from business which then functions in pure form while all social responsibility is transferred to bureaucrats who hand out benefits (but also can cut them at any point), is volatile and essentially has one single point of failure. Not to mention it completely ignores the messy reality that we can't simply "tax the billionaires and upper middle class" because of the complications of real world politics. The US is already way too dependent on this logic of having an all powerful government bail out citizens and unaccountable business. It was one of the lessons of the financial crisis and right now during the pandemic it is failing again. Yes, the government can write trillion dollar checks, but it does nothing to combat the mass unemployment and dysfunction that is the result of having no responsibility or organisational capacity within firms, who ought to be the first line of defense.
grawprog 6y ago
Why shouldn't an employer pay their employees enough to live? Why should companies be able to benefit and profit from an employee's labour without providing them enough to even have a home? You sound like you want a work force full of slaves you can drop any time you feel like they cost you too much. Maybe corporations need to understand who the people generating these millions of dollars are, they're the people down their being paid fuck all to make ceo's rich.
mbgerring 6y ago
In what sense are Amazon warehouse workers, who are not paid enough to do thing like purchase a home in the area where they work, “middle class”?
- refurb 6y ago
  There are warehouses across the US including areas where houses cost $150k.
- cellar_door 6y ago
  2 people * $15/hr minimum * 2000 hrs/year = $60,000 household income US median household income is $61,937.
  - sigwinch28 6y ago
    2000 / 52 ≈ 38 hours a week, every week of the year. That's 9am-5:30pm Mon-Fri with 30m for lunch. So basically a household of two full-time jobs to make £45k/yr gross. When exactly do these two people take holiday or sick leave?
    - grecy 6y ago
      And how do they pay for childcare, or actually enjoy their lives.
jayd16 6y ago
>Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, and use the money to strengthen the social safety net for low-skill workers. That would eliminate this entire mess. That is what we do but it doesn't reduce the mess. We have a safety net and a minimum wage, and still you see the "gig economy" type loopholes trying to get labor for even less than that.
jml78 6y ago
Every year I get an $800/month raise in September because the feds stop taking social security out of my paycheck once I have earned a certain amount. It makes zero sense. Eliminate that one thing and it would be the single largest tax increase in history. That tells me that people making $150k/year or more can live without being social security tax free every year after earning X amount
- linuxftw 6y ago
  Social Security retirement distributions are related to how much you pay in. Thus the limit. You're allegedly paying for your own retirement.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Since in reality you are paying for grandmas house and medicine and there are more of them now and will get proportionally more tomorrow I suggest we simply do away with that polite fiction.
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      No argument here, but before social security was used as the general welfare fund, it was a relatively balanced budget. Of course, it was just an inflation mechanism, the government bought it's own securities (treasuries) as 'investments' for social security. Similar to how the UAW pension was stuff full of unsecured bonds from GM, and they went crying to the government for a handout after decades of idiot-level decision making.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > No argument here, but before social security was used as the general welfare fund, it was a relatively balanced budget. Social Security has never been used as the general welfare fund, and it has better budget balance when there wasn't a large demographic bulge in retirement age. Because, duh.
jb775 6y ago
The only downside is that this mindset turns the world into a steaming pile of dog-crap and makes the problem worse. Think about what you're actually saying here. You're saying we should shift the "quality of life" compensation burden of THEIR EMPLOYEES away from businesses (who are making boatloads of money), and attempt to spread it out across a few subsets of the population. Taxing corporations or billionaires never works out as planned[1][2][3]....so how does it many any sense that the upper-middle-class gets stuck paying this bill? This is exactly why the middle class is disappearing....which is good for no one. [1] - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-... [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.... [3] - https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/
deleted 6y ago
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bubbleRefuge 6y ago
Good points. We don't even need to tax the billionaires. Lets go with the MMT jobs guarantee program creating a high floor on the labor market. The MMT jobs program provides a federally funded job to anyone above 18 paying a living wage with full benefits. As such, employers, if they want employees, have to bid up from there. Another benefit? No more unemployment. Today, we have an economic system with baked in involuntary unemployment. This skews the "game" in favor of employers because employee's have to pay rent, food, etc.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  Interesting idea. Can someone get fired from one of these jobs, for example if they don't show up or if they don't take direction?
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    Herein lies the issue. The real minimum wage is 0. You can pay people for doing nothing, but if you pay them only if they work, they can choose to not do the job. If you fire them, then you go back to the real minimum wage being 0. The other option some societies have used in the past is to make it illegal to perform poorly, which has generally led to even worse results than poverty.
  - bubbleRefuge 6y ago
    if you don't show you don't get paid. attendance is mandatory.
    - yourapostasy 6y ago
      You can enforce attendance but not intent nor performance. "They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work." Challenging to put together the kind of MMT jobs program you described. One possibility to explore is find the smallest grouping of Dunbar's number-quantity groups that can independently deliver some core set of livable quality standards, with a core set of raw material and energy inputs. This only works if the emergent redundancy is encoded as a national security policy. The redundancy is interwoven into the defense posture, making it extremely tough to hurt the nation economically or militarily. In the worst case, individual groups revert to independently supplying their own needs at a "good enough" level as long as specific raw materials and energy are nationally available. Then individual members can be voted in or out of such groups. As long as you're in such a group, the core living standard is supplied without monetary exchange. But piss off enough members and you get voted out, and you're on your own unless you can find another co-operative to accept you (with a blockchain registry of rejected members, you'll have to be pretty convincing), and you'll have to enter the more conventional monetary exchange system we're familiar with today. Basically, the vote is an evaluation of whether you fit within that specific high-trust environment.
andrepd 6y ago
So let's say where 10 people were needed to do a task, now (due to automation or what have you) you just need 1. What should you do: a) since the same thing is produced with 1/10th of the labour, reduce work hours, implement UBI, etc, or b) invent 9 bullshit jobs to keep everyone busy and working their god-ordained 8hrs a day to "deserve" their existence. Option b) is the answer that capitalism gives, but it's not the right answer in an objective sense.
- devcpp 6y ago
  Capitalism says let people do what they want. If one guy undercuts all the others and says he's ready to do it on his own for cheap, let him, he's probably better at it anyway. This lets the other 9 figure out what they want to do, maybe launch a startup or whatever, there's no shortage of things that need fixing on this planet.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Capitalism lets people with money do what they want, and lets people without do what their masters want. Also, "Yeah everybody that gets replaced by a machine can just found a startup" is probably the most irrealistic and oblivious thing I've read all week.
whiddershins 6y ago
I’m not sure anyone deserves anything. If we flourish and provide for the less fortunate that is fantastic and I am all for that. We can and do have laws and ethics about what is not permitted to do to people. That’s fantastic and I support that. For children, I would say they aren’t yet potentially self sufficient, so as a society we should all share the responsibility that they have what they need to grow and develop healthily. But no, I don’t ‘deserve’ the things you mentioned. I’m an adult human who needs to go try to manifest those things for myself. Including basics like food and water.
- zebogen 6y ago
  OK, imagine you're disabled and unable to procure your own food and water. Now what?
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  You're getting caught in semantics. Obviously no one deserves anything, the world is chaos. What OP meant by deserve is probably that they believe it's immoral for society to not provide those things. I tend to agree because I believe eliminating abject poverty raises total utility.
raiyu 6y ago
This whole tax the billionaires is misguided and won't solve anything. - US Population 2000: 280 Million - US Population 2020: 320 Million - +15% increase in population - Tax revenues 2000: $2.03 trillion - Tax revenues 2019: $3.50 trillion - +75% increase in tax revenue Population grew 15% and tax revenue grew 75% and yet we still can't solve any of the real problems we had since 2000. So what is increasing taxes going to do if we already collect 75% more and can't make a dent. Now let's say you tax the billionaires: - Jeff - $200B - Larry & Sergey - $130B - Bill Gates - $120B - Zuck - $100B - Warren Buffet - $80B - Larry Ellison - 71B - Elon Musk - $70B That's $770 Billion - let's say we double this for the remainder of billionaires to $1.5 trillion and add in a 70% tax. $1.5 trillion in wealth = $1.05 trillion in year 1 Now what about the following year? Well you reduced their wealth substantially so now you only have $500B and that would only yield $350B in tax revenue the following year. $350B in tax revenue year 2. And there after it basically trickles down to nothing. So you end up with a total of $1.5 trillion and then nothing. Well that $1.5 trillion is 42% increase over what we have today, but remember that tax revenue already increased 75% and we still couldn't get anything right. So while it may sound good to say tax the billionaires the reality is if we couldn't figure out how to spend the additional $1.5 trillion from taxes between 2000 and 2020 a one-time 2 year increase of $1.5 trillion won't do much because the underlying system is broken.
- ndespres 6y ago
  Putting a very high tax on wealth would have the benefits of a one-time infusion of tax revenues, AND a future disincentive for the ultrawealthy to seek to enrich themselves infinitely using business practices that take money from everyone else. The problem isn't just that the ultrarich have too much money. It's that they get this money by doing things that make the lives of everyone else measurably worse. Selling us poor-quality products, paying low wages to work in stores selling those products, treating real estate like an investment instead of a human need, overcharging for healthcare, invading our privacy to find ways to more efficiently get us to buy their garbage, etc. Without the incentive for the ultrarich to rip us off coming and going, we have a chance to improve our quality of life and change the things that are wrong in society, without leaving it to the rich to "fix".
briandear 6y ago
If you taxed all US billionaires at 100% it wouldn’t have even paid the bill for the recent Covid relief bill. We need more people paying taxes, not fewer people paying more taxes. The other thing is that if we have a “strong” social safety net, that will then incentivize more low wage jobs that don’t pay enough to actually support the person (sort of how Walmart paid low wages, but many of its employees were on food stamps.) Government should be less involved. Having food stamps available for low wage workers means they can accept a job for lower pay than they would have been able to accept otherwise. (I am not saying to get rid of food stamps, only to illustrate how “safety nets” actually perpetuate the very problems they are ostensibly attempting to solve.) Why should I be subsidizing Walmart workers? If we lowered costs to businesses by reducing taxes but also simultaneously reducing “safety nets,” the market would then require higher wages for a given job or the job wouldn’t get done. Right now it’s sort of some Keynesian system were I pay low prices at Walmart, but those low prices are subsidized by my tax dollars that pay safety nets that then allow Walmart to pay lower wages. So my “low prices” are really the result of a government subsidy that I pay for in taxes. You also see this in agriculture: we pay lower prices for vegetables, but due to the number of illegal alien employees who are paid less than minimum wage. The costs of a vegetable should reflect the actual cost of picking it, not a cost subsidized by illegal/below cost workers. (Just to be clear, I don’t care about the documentation of a worker, what I care about is businesses leveraging below market labor as a cost savings that really just passes the societal costs of that labor to taxpayers.) So I don’t agree that business should be taxed more, but that we eliminate the perverse incentives to pay workers less than a truly free market would support. We should, of course, have safety nets for the truly destitute, but they shouldn’t be a replacement for actual wages.. and that’s what we see in places like Walmart. Safety nets shouldn’t be generational. They should provide temporary help, not as a perpetual subsidy to businesses.
- dimator 6y ago
  Help me make the connection here. If we cut taxes to the Walmarts, why would that lead to them increasing wages? Would they see the reduction in safety nets and food stamps, and conclude that they ought to be more generous to employees? Wouldn't they rather turn that into shareholder value instead? I agree that it sucks for society to cover the gaps, but what you're describing sounds like trickle down economics, which I don't have much faith in.
vanusa 6y ago
Amazon [gets] publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. That's not what Amazon is getting shamed for - as you are perfectly aware.
- dionidium 6y ago
  You should parse the claim like this: "Amazon, on the other hand, who is publicly shamed for the wages they pay, actually employs hundreds of thousands of middle-class workers." (As you are perfectly aware.)
nathias 6y ago
great, just the thing we need for UBI, why should anyone work when their job could be automated?
xenocyon 6y ago
I want to agree with you, but: a company whose employees' lives must be subsidized by the taxpayer (because they aren't earning enough to live on from full-time wages) is a net economic negative to society. If you have a lot of such companies or such jobs then you will have a societal insolvency, won't you? And what purpose do such companies serve, privatizing gains while socializing burdens?
- yzmtf2008 6y ago
  > If you have a lot of such companies or such jobs then you will have a societal insolvency, won't you? See: Canada's free health system, or UK's NHS, or literally any other single payer system.
- d357r0y3r 6y ago
  > I want to agree with you, but: a company whose employees' lives must be subsidized by the taxpayer (because they aren't earning enough to live on from full-time wages) is a net economic negative to society. Err...is it? Some income is better than no income. The more the company pays, the less the worker's life has to be subsidized. Any pay at all reduces the necessary subsidy, not including say, unpaid transportation costs. The pay must at least match the cost of being at work, but no employee would accept payment less than the cost of getting to work.
darawk 6y ago
I couldn't agree more with this. Thanks for distilling that so well. I've been trying to articulate variations of this point for a long time.
kangaroozach 6y ago
You had me until “tax” productivity. This is counterproductive and immoral.

by whack 6y ago

jschwartzi 6y ago

I don’t want to subsidize Walmart with my taxes. That’s exactly what you’re proposing, and in fact what happens. Companies underpay their workers, who end up needing government assistance. In the end my taxes go to supporting a company that I would never shop at.

cltby 6y ago
You’re not subsidizing Walmart. You’ve decided that workers should enjoy some standard of living but are unwilling to shoulder the costs of providing it (e.g. through taxes). Instead, you’ve kicked those costs to Walmart. Walmart is subsidizing you.
- stetrain 6y ago
  Walmart isn't going to run at a loss. They'll raise prices appropriately, or decide that expanding the same exact store into every small town in America is no longer a profitable growth strategy.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Amazon did exactly this recently. The costs of the new digital services tax were immediately passed on to suppliers. Amazon won't be paying a cent of it. Of course legislation could - and should - go after Amazon in other ways. But it makes the point that you don't want lawyers trying to define corporate taxation policy, because too few lawyers have the first clue how to define policy with no loopholes and real teeth.
    - tathougies 6y ago
      What is to be gained by reducing Amazon's profits? Less stuff able to be bought online?
      - stetrain 6y ago
        Increase competition by allowing local businesses without megacorp productivity leverage to compete on price.
  - take_a_breath 6y ago
    That sounds ideal.
    - jschwartzi 6y ago
      This is actually what I'm asking for. Raise peoples' wages, make it illegal to offer health insurance as a benefit, and provide a single-payer option for everyone. Make sure there's a universal basic income rather than something means-tested. Or, barring that, raise the minimum wage so most people who are working don't need the safety net. Means-testing causes huge bureaucracies in the US. The rules around the means-testing make it very difficult for the social programs to actually provide anything in a reasonable amount of time. Or if they do they have byzantine requirements like you have to make X number of job-seeking contacts during the week, you have to interview, and you have to take classes from people who haven't searched for a job outside of the public sector in 20 years. Or for food stamps you're limited to only a few sections of the store.
sumtechguy 6y ago
I agree. If we give say everyone 5 dollars an hour for no work. Livable wage is say 10. Then companies only have to pay 5. They can pocket the other 5 or lower their prices. Which is more likely? This also has other knock on effects. It is only possible in the very short term. In the long term inflation will wipe out the extra 5 and things will go back to steady state. It sounds nice, heck I would not mind it personally, but the knock-on effects for something like that could be a terrible creation that would take years to fix. Just first order effects do not seem great.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  Why not pay them 10 and use the labour in the community? Then if Uber et al wants labour they have to bid it away from the "common good". Once everybody has an alternative job to go to outside the private sector, it no longer matters if Uber decides not to pay people and instead automates all the vehicles. Then everybody wins due to improved productivity - Uber and the people with community jobs.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    So uber would 'buy' from some central org? Why not just cut out the middle man then and deal directly with their employees? Why create a middle man? Middle man in any economic system tend to destroy wealth. Uber is in itself a middle man between people who want a ride and people who pay for it. They upended a middle man who was less efficient.
    - mvc 6y ago
      Don't see where parent is saying anything about Labor from a central org. He's just saying Uber has to up their bid in order to win the services of said Labor.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Because of the problem of how to decide how they labor is used. Central planning communism has never worked. Free market with regulation and taxation has a much better record.
untog 6y ago
I imagine part of this would be ensuring that companies do not underpay their workers by enforcing strict standards on minimum wage and changing corporate tax obligations. Having employers provide benefits like healthcare is crazy. The US really needs to move beyond it. I’m surprised there isn’t more agreement politically, the benefit obligation is a huge drain on small companies and solo entrepreneurs.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==Having employers provide benefits like healthcare is crazy. The US really needs to move beyond it.== Not to mention the cost of staff needed negotiate, maintain, and explain the options to employees.
bo1024 6y ago
This reply comes from completely internalizing the perspective the above post describes. It only makes sense if you accept that the employer is supposed to completely care for their employees. But if you view it as society’s job, then everything changes. For one thing, small mom n pop stores can compete with Walmart a lot easier if healthcare is provided by the state. Also employees can quit if they’re not treated well, etc.
- griffinkelly 6y ago
  From a startup perspective, I've always thought it interesting that more people in Europe/rest of the world don't take chances to create companies because of the great safety net there--at least its not as highly publicized. For whatever reason, the US is still the place to be and everyone wants to come to the US to start a company--my current company included (We have Canadian founders). I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago, I was able to stay on my parents health insurance for a meaningful amount of time. It allowed me to take the chance of starting my own company. Unsure if I would have done the same, had circumstances been different.
  - pbiggar 6y ago
    Startups are in the US because of a long chain of decisions and network effects that ultimately come from US military spending in the 60s. > I quit my job and thanks to the insurance changes in the US a few years ago So you're saying that you were able to take the chance to build a startup because of the safety net?
    - griffinkelly 6y ago
      Yeah, had President Obama not made that change and extended health insurance to 26, I would have thought harder about quitting my job.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Sure, a safety net paid for by employers, not the gov’t.
bhupy 6y ago
Yes, that's how welfare works. When you pay taxes for a single payer healthcare system, you're absolving the company the responsibility to provide health insurance to their employees (read: "underpay their workers"). Many societies are okay with this because the end result is actually better/more efficient for everyone.
EForEndeavour 6y ago
Do you just oppose the use of tax dollars to support anyone or anything other than what you personally happen to use and like? What do you think about Medicaid, food stamps, the child tax credit (especially if you don't have children)? Assuming you aren't a student, do you oppose tax dollars going toward financial support for students? Do you oppose UBI? Do you vehemently oppose the US federal electric-vehicle tax credit of up to $7500 until the day you decide you'll buy a Tesla, when you'll switch to staunchly demanding that it be radically increased? (https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/taxevb.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/taxevb.shtml) These all represent your taxes going to support things that you are unlikely to benefit from personally, after all. If you remove the impact to other people from the calculus of where you'd want tax dollars to go, then I think most people would opt to enrich themselves rather than not. But that's just not how the world works. The reality is that any given person's tax dollars are used on all kinds of things that will never directly benefit them, or even their families or even socioeconomic class.
- jb775 6y ago
  I don't think anyone is against your examples. The issue is WHERE the tax money is coming from and the PROPORTIONS of tax paid in relation to overall income. Unfortunately right now the middle class is being stuck with most of the bill on a PER-CAPITA income basis. And considering the wealth gap between the rich and the middle class is SUBSTANTIAL, it means we're essentially having relatively poor people (middle class) pay the bills of very poor people (lower class). When you zoom out a little (and remove irrational emotions about the topic clouding your perception), it's easier to see the disconnect.
  - justchilly 6y ago
    This is incorrect. On a per-capita basis the middle class is not being stuck with most of the bill. The bottom 50% pays less than 3% of federal income taxes (which are the largest source of federal income). That same amount of income tax is paid by the top 1,400 tax-payers. Also no need for the line about irrational emotions - lets have some proper discourse please.
cactus2093 6y ago
I agree with other replies that this is just a matter of perspective. Here’s an alternate one - if you hate Walmart and/or you hate the idea of unskilled workers in lower paying jobs, why do want to make them solely reliant on big employers like Walmart? A better safety net, in addition to achieving the same immediate outcome of workers living with better conditions, also means workers have more options. It might lower the supply of potential Walmart employees and actually also increase their wages or working conditions. But more importantly it would mean they could leave Walmart and still get by. Or they could work fewer hours without worrying about things like losing their employer sponsored health insurance. More people could live more fulfilling lives rather than being so reliant on their job at Walmart.
sukilot 6y ago
If people had more social welfare they wouldn't bother to waste their life at Walmart for tiny incremental wages. So Walmart would pay more.
refurb 6y ago
By that logic you’re subsidizing any company that takes a risk, fails and employees go on unemployment.
mrnobody_67 6y ago
THIS x 1000. Walmart used to have a page for employees telling them how to apply for food stamps. Those costs should be charged back to the company.
bodono 6y ago
Yes, the ideal thing would be for Walmart to go out of business and all those people who currently need partial government assistance instead requiring full government assistance. Think of the tax savings!

jfengel 6y ago

Rephrase the second point as "everyone must work for a living", and it becomes clearer. Your second point becomes a corollary: people can only be cared for if they work. Your last paragraph is only possible if we want to allow people to live without working. But many would see that as morally repugnant. Not everyone, but a majority, and especially a politically powerful plurality. That is what you will need to deal with to make a change.

rmrfstar 6y ago

That is not a fair characterization of the discourse. There are a lot of people arguing that "platforms" like Uber are capturing too large a fraction of the economic surplus created by transactions on the platform. 30% for matching buy/sell orders? Do you have any idea how insane that is relative to what NYSE charges?

sgustard 6y ago
How would those people have found steady income driving strangers every day without Uber? My mind draws a blank. Uber does not have a monopoly like a stock market. If there's a more effecient way to do this, competitors will find it.
- asdff 6y ago
  They would have picked up another job or shift rather than work rideshare. The whole appeal was this was something you can do for some beer money once a week, but now people who would have been working 2 jobs are working 1 job and ubering, and given you are operating your own vehicle, I'm not sure how much you actually make relative to picking up a second shift at taco bell. Honestly, transit is a tough nut to make profit on. Pacific Electrics red cars in LA failed to make a profit and folded. All the private railways in NYC failed to make a profit even during the days when people had to either take a train or walk, and still folded (these bankrupt companies were bought up cheap publicly and became the mta) Public transit looses money just like highways do, but all of this is justified because the gain is realized in other sectors of the economy. However, uber and lyft are private companies and don't benefit from general gain in other sectors, so in my mind these companies have an expiration date once vc investors finally open a history book.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Except that is what such a system costs a the price the market will pay. Uber doesn’t make money. It is only insane if it can be done for cheaper.
- rmrfstar 6y ago

Miner49er 6y ago

This isn't how I see the discourse. The way I see it is people are starting to question if executives and shareholders deserve the pay they get. Instead of the majority of profits going to them, more should go to workers. The author of this article was paid $42 million last year. Uber's top 7 executives received: "$11.4 million in salary and cash bonus, plus $71 million worth of equity awards." [0] Maybe instead of paying their CEO and executives that much, Uber should pay their workers more? [0] https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backlash-coronavirus/ https://observer.com/2020/05/uber-ceo-pay-shareholder-backla...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
If we take Uber's self-reported total of 3 million drivers, that'd give them an extra $15 a year. That's not really the scale of change most people are looking for when they say workers should make more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aetherson 6y ago
  It's appalling to me that this basic reality check is getting downvoted.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm used to it, unfortunately. Something's gone very wrong with the discourse in almost every forum I frequent; hopefully it's just temporary pandemic stress.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Right. Uber (single user per ride car service) is a fundamentally unsustainable business model, unless they convert into vanpool and delivery routes.
  - 6y ago

cc23 6y ago

Or solve the real issue and transition from capitalism to socialism, instead of trying to put a temporary band-aid on the issues via taxes.

rzwitserloot 6y ago

That's a nice way of thinking about labour intensive business models. But look at it from a different perspective: A bunch of jobs can theoretically be automated or otherwise designed to require no individual human to do the job. Some jobs can't be automated but aren't really necessary either; the total value add for society is quite low, and it is not necessary (defining 'necessary' as: If nobody does it, some good or service price will skyrocket and soon the wage for this job will go up considerably, possibly via a workaround, such as pressuring government to increase a budget for something). Minimum wage (or, at least, that 'baseline quality of life and benefits' you mentioned, which includes more than just a wage, but also working conditions and safety) is society's baseline for: Below this line, automate it, and if you can't, don't. One argument is that you should let each individual choose for themselves what job is beneath them, but it's not actually a fully free market unless you go out, find homeless people and shoot them, or, when someone breaks out their back doing low-pay menial work, that we just let them wallow in pain. Which no sane society ever would or should, which highlights that we don't treat fellow humans as cattle. If they are a drag on society and it costs society considerable resources just to support them.. society does pay that cost, or ought to. The flipside of that is the existence of jobs which are 'net negative' value for society: The cost of supporting the human that does it will, in the long run, cost more than the job gives society. However, because more or less by design there are externalities involved in caring for our fellow humans, the job may seem net-positive to an employer even if it is not. Society is nevertheless attempting to make sure these jobs do not exist. Minimum wage is, perhaps, a very blunt instrument to make this happen. One can imagine a completely 'safe' job (both mentally and physically) that pays half of minimum wage, and that would be better to allow that if you combine it with a social safety net _and_ the job unemployment rate is sufficient that the only real alternative is no job at all. But I don't think it is feasible to legislate a complicated 'chart' matching working conditions against allowed minimal salaries.

CPLX 6y ago

That's one way of looking at it. Here's another: - We collectively have created an economy that has generated spectacular amounts of wealth. - A small group of people is hoarding the majority of that wealth. - This is harmful to our society and needs to change. - Arguments that we can't reduce inequality without destroying that wealth are factually and historically incorrect.

neilwilson 6y ago
"A small group of people is hoarding the majority of that wealth." That like saying the winners of the football league have hoarded all the points and therefore nobody can now score goals. It's the playing of the game that matters. Not who owns the pitches.
- CPLX 6y ago
  All sports leagues have been through extensive rule changes and updates to make sure the game is enjoyable and fair for all, and does not result in one team winning everything all the time.
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    Indeed. But that doesn't require deducting points from people from previous seasons and asking them to return their trophies so there is sufficient for this season. We just alter the rules and carry on issuing points as required.
    - CPLX 6y ago
      Of course they do. They make everyone start over with zero points literally every time they play. If you can imagine showing up to play a friendly football game against a rival high school and noticing they have 5,340,322 points already on the board because their families had been playing the game for decades, then you’ll start to really get it.
      - 6y ago

kryogen1c 6y ago

> Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, Where do you think our tax revenue is coming from? the 12% tax bracket of someone making 20k a year in government-subsidized housing, or the 37% tax bracket from someone making $10million a year paying property taxes on their 20 million dollar house? a serious, informed discussion starts with an honest recognition of reality. if you think taxes need to change thats fine, but acting like billionaires and successful companies pay no taxes when they represent the overwhelming majority of tax revenue, you sound like a blind ideologue rather than someone who knows what theyre talking about.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Agreed. The median person is a minimal contributor to government already. https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2018-update/ https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > The median person is a minimal contributor to government already. The numbers in the linked article are for high-income earners who, yes, paid the majority of Federal Income Taxes. My understanding is that the wealthiest people in the United States pay relatively little tax because their wealth accrues largely through investments not income. In addition to being taxed at a much lower rate than income, such investments also qualify for deductions which often reduce and/or eliminate any final tax obligation.
wlesieutre 6y ago
But also look at where our tax revenue used to come from: > In 1981, Reagan significantly reduced the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, and lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1986 he further reduced the rate to 28%.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  The top marginal tax rate was in the 90%'s for much of the 1900s. Also, the estate tax was in the 80% range for much of the 1900s, now it's effectively zero. Moving huge quantities of un-earned wealth from generation to generation is a great way to create and maintain inequality.

theelous3 6y ago

> hundreds of thousands of middle class workers This gigantic exaggeration is the crux of your point, around which all else crumbles. Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it. There are other companies that are well regarded for employing low to no skill workers en masse, like Lidl, which nobody is complaining about. Most people also do not believe it's corporations who are responsible for this living baseline, but the state, so yet another either outright lie or exaggeration around which all of those points crumble. Overall, it's disheartening to see such a flawed comment at the top here in hn.

zajd 6y ago
New to HN? This is par for the course.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> Most of Amazon's workers are badly treated and either actually in poverty or less than a month's pay away from it. The median US based pay at Amazon is $36,640. That is not a poverty level wage except in a few urban centres. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-discloses-median-pay-plans-virtual-shareholder-meeting-due-to-coronavirus-climate-concerns/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-disclose...
- theelous3 6y ago
  You could have basically just bezos and then thousands of workers working for free and the average wage would still look pretty good. Just because the elites are paid insane sums, doesn't mean the majority are making anything reasonable. Edit: I miss read and you have median. Fair enough. 35k usd is still terrible pay though, and I'd rather work somewhere that doesn't have 12 hour shifts for that semi ok pay. Can work elsewhere half as hard for the same money or better. Won't pass out from heat exhaustion, won't he fired for trying to unionize, won't have covid pay taken back, won't be denied safe working conditions in a pandemic, etc.
  - tathougies 6y ago

seanmcdirmid 6y ago

Increases in quality of life have always required increases in productivity, which intrinsically means reducing headcount. Yes, you should hire people, but hiring 10 people and paying them $100 each is more moral than hiring 100 people and paying them $10 each. The contradiction (higher productivity = fewer jobs) has been an issues since the industrial revolution at least, but we’ve seem to have gotten by so far with creating new kinds of jobs coupled with a increasing social safety net. The next step might be some kind of UBI, but we should avoid the other routes (de-focusing on higher productivity, or directly paying people more without higher productivity) as unsustainable in the long term. Some mechanisms, like a rising minimum wage, imply higher productivity with each increase, so those work out as well (though increase the need for social safety nets as some people are forced out of the work force).

wolco 6y ago
Is it more moral? 100 families eat tonight vs 10 families eating really well.
- eecc 6y ago
  That’s not the right approach to this problem. The moral thing to do is is to redistribute that added productivity increasing the beneficiaries of this increased added value
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  You don't solve that problem by creating pretend work or paying above market rate for work, instead that is what social safety nets are for (everyone should be able to eat, work just means you can eat better). Especially these days, and moving forward as automation takes over more lesser skilled tasks.

SkyBelow 6y ago

This doesn't seem so odd to me because it mirrors common human behavior to judge things based on each step and not the total outcome. One example is when people pushed for a ban on industries using child labor in SEA without first ensuring there was some fall back safety net that would help those children. The end result was children ending up working far worse jobs than the ones that the western industries were providing. Overall, there seems to be a judgment that any employment of a child is to be judged in isolation and not relative to what other options they have. Society has deemed it is ethically better for me to do nothing despite a child experiencing the ravages of extreme poverty than to intervene in a way that is better for the child but not good enough to meet our expected levels of treatment of children. Another, more IT centric example, is that it is better to not fix any bugs in a known broken part of the system than to touch it and fix one bug, because you assume responsibility for all the bugs you don't fix. Not every place has this mentality, but I've seen enough which do. So telling me that society deems it more ethical to offer a worker no option than to offer them a below satisfactory offer doesn't not surprise me at all, despite the outcome of such behavior being too painfully obvious. Though if we were to invert this, I wonder the outcome because the world over there are enough people experiencing extremely harmful situations where even being offered what we would consider a nightmare is better than leaving them in their current situation. Consider if I wanted someone to be a 24/7 live in maid/butler(cook/cleaner/gardener/etc.) and their pay was $5 a day along with a room, food, basic clothing needed for the job, and access to a computer with internet when they have free time. There are people in situations where this would be a significant improvement in their quality of life, yet I'm not sure any one reading this would approve of me having such a live in maid/butler regardless of what sort of situation they were in before I made the offer.

jdsully 6y ago

If a corporation pays less than a living wage then the state is a net subsidizer of their employees. Its not fair we have Walmart employees on welfare for example.

gonzo41 6y ago

Re Amazon, Jeff has a lot of money, he could pay people more and let the unionize so they could engage in the terms of their employ.

devcpp 6y ago
Why should he pay more? They signed a work contract. And if that contract says don't unionize, then maybe they shouldn't be surprised to be let go when they try that.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  You should read into the rights you have thanks to unions. Things like weekends ans OSHA spring to mind.
robobro 6y ago
I'm disappointed that only one person here has said the common sense approach -- let them unionize :(

andruby 6y ago

Many European countries implement that baseline quality of life at the country/government level. What you are hinting at has a name, and it's called socialism. Some people in those European countries do complain about high taxes. But in general, as a country, most are happy with our "social safety net" which includes universal healthcare, "almost free" education system (including University), reasonable minimal wages and "liveable" unemployment benefits. Socialism seem like a dirty word in the US. It isn't one where I'm from (Belgium).

Consultant32452 6y ago

>Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits. Whenever I read this I translate it to "I don't want poor people to live near me." That's fine, but let's not feign nobility about it. The global median income is $10k/yr. Nearly half the planet lives on less than $5/day. 1/3 of people on the planet do not have access to clean drinking water. What, exactly, do you mean when you say it's incumbent upon you to provide a baseline quality of life and benefits? And are you really willing to bring yourself down to that baseline so that others can be brought up to it? These Amazon warehouse workers you're so concerned about are quite rich by global standards.

op03 6y ago

Well most Billionaires have more cash in their bank than they have usable cells in their brain. So it takes a while for most of them to work it out.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

>Every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits I disagree.

troupe 6y ago
While I agree that individuals in a society should try to provide for those who can't provide for themselves, saying that everyone deserves X, is basically a way of saying that we want to force others to pay for X and I share your disagreement on that front.

ck425 6y ago

> Combine all of the above, and you end up with a world where corporations go above-and-beyond to reduce their headcount On a macro level I think that's a good thing. We create more value with less labour. And eventually yes we'd have to address that and figure out how to move to true post-scarcity society. But it's not a 100% either or. You can recognise the need for a better social security net while also wanting to regulate corporations into giving labour their fair share of the output.

anm89 6y ago

Regarding the public discourse on these points, I think these big companies have long understood that they lost this battle. On the other hand they also understand their internal realities and that as long as they can make their own business models work, the discourse doesn't really matter, as long as it stays out of the spotlight . So they take their only logical move, they pump out a bunch of ethics marketing statements they don't believe in, but also importantly that they know the public doesn't believe that they believe in, but that give them plausible deniability and keep them out of the spot light for wrong speak and out of the news cycle. Meanwhile, they do exactly what they are incentivezed to do which is to keep head count low and make sure almost everybody is a contractor.

throwaway13337 6y ago

I agree with the set of odd concepts taken together and the normal solution being government. The issue is that the US government is unable to effectively do anything, really, as far as public welfare is concerned. We spend a ton already - our public Healthcare spend, for instance is in line with European public health but we don't get nearly as much for it. Our programs are, dollar per citizen, expensive. We then task employers with something impossible. No one, therefore, wants to be in the position of employing low skilled workers. I don't know where the real solution lies but expecting the federal government to spend effectively seems out of the question.

reccanti 6y ago
How efficient would the spending need to be before it's considered "effective"? Personally, I would rather the government spend "ineffectively" and cover everyone than the current situation
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redm 6y ago

"Clearly every person deserves a baseline quality of life and benefits." Quality of life is subjective. The US constitution guarantees the freedom to make of life what you will but not that it will be subjectively 'good'.

mschuster91 6y ago

> while spinoffs like Amazon are publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. They (and dito Walmart and other such employers) are not paying middle class wages though. Usually it should be possible to feed a family upon a single worker's wage to call it "middle class"... but the harsh reality is that many of the workers, especially those working for subcontractors in fulfillment, are nowhere close to such wages - or to working conditions that are usually associated with "middle class", like being allowed to go on a real toilet and not piss in bottles. Big companies don't want to be shamed? Then they should not let their employees work in shameful conditions!

Barrin92 6y ago

>this responsibility really should lie with everyone some responsibility should lie with the public, but to capture the diversity of benefits and needs of every single employee with a centralised program is impossible, and it would also be an unprecedented amount of power transferred to the federal government. Not everyone requires the same benefits or same training and this is why corporations do need to have some responsibility, decentralisation of benefits is necessary. This sort of technocratic dream of taking all responsibility away from business which then functions in pure form while all social responsibility is transferred to bureaucrats who hand out benefits (but also can cut them at any point), is volatile and essentially has one single point of failure. Not to mention it completely ignores the messy reality that we can't simply "tax the billionaires and upper middle class" because of the complications of real world politics. The US is already way too dependent on this logic of having an all powerful government bail out citizens and unaccountable business. It was one of the lessons of the financial crisis and right now during the pandemic it is failing again. Yes, the government can write trillion dollar checks, but it does nothing to combat the mass unemployment and dysfunction that is the result of having no responsibility or organisational capacity within firms, who ought to be the first line of defense.

grawprog 6y ago

Why shouldn't an employer pay their employees enough to live? Why should companies be able to benefit and profit from an employee's labour without providing them enough to even have a home? You sound like you want a work force full of slaves you can drop any time you feel like they cost you too much. Maybe corporations need to understand who the people generating these millions of dollars are, they're the people down their being paid fuck all to make ceo's rich.

mbgerring 6y ago

In what sense are Amazon warehouse workers, who are not paid enough to do thing like purchase a home in the area where they work, “middle class”?

refurb 6y ago
There are warehouses across the US including areas where houses cost $150k.
cellar_door 6y ago
2 people * $15/hr minimum * 2000 hrs/year = $60,000 household income US median household income is $61,937.
- sigwinch28 6y ago
  2000 / 52 ≈ 38 hours a week, every week of the year. That's 9am-5:30pm Mon-Fri with 30m for lunch. So basically a household of two full-time jobs to make £45k/yr gross. When exactly do these two people take holiday or sick leave?
  - grecy 6y ago
    And how do they pay for childcare, or actually enjoy their lives.

jayd16 6y ago

>Tax billionaires, tax the upper-middle-class, tax profitable corporations, and use the money to strengthen the social safety net for low-skill workers. That would eliminate this entire mess. That is what we do but it doesn't reduce the mess. We have a safety net and a minimum wage, and still you see the "gig economy" type loopholes trying to get labor for even less than that.

jml78 6y ago

Every year I get an $800/month raise in September because the feds stop taking social security out of my paycheck once I have earned a certain amount. It makes zero sense. Eliminate that one thing and it would be the single largest tax increase in history. That tells me that people making $150k/year or more can live without being social security tax free every year after earning X amount

linuxftw 6y ago
Social Security retirement distributions are related to how much you pay in. Thus the limit. You're allegedly paying for your own retirement.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Since in reality you are paying for grandmas house and medicine and there are more of them now and will get proportionally more tomorrow I suggest we simply do away with that polite fiction.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    No argument here, but before social security was used as the general welfare fund, it was a relatively balanced budget. Of course, it was just an inflation mechanism, the government bought it's own securities (treasuries) as 'investments' for social security. Similar to how the UAW pension was stuff full of unsecured bonds from GM, and they went crying to the government for a handout after decades of idiot-level decision making.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > No argument here, but before social security was used as the general welfare fund, it was a relatively balanced budget. Social Security has never been used as the general welfare fund, and it has better budget balance when there wasn't a large demographic bulge in retirement age. Because, duh.

jb775 6y ago

The only downside is that this mindset turns the world into a steaming pile of dog-crap and makes the problem worse. Think about what you're actually saying here. You're saying we should shift the "quality of life" compensation burden of THEIR EMPLOYEES away from businesses (who are making boatloads of money), and attempt to spread it out across a few subsets of the population. Taxing corporations or billionaires never works out as planned[1][2][3]....so how does it many any sense that the upper-middle-class gets stuck paying this bill? This is exactly why the middle class is disappearing....which is good for no one. [1] - https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-... [2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey.... [3] - https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/

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bubbleRefuge 6y ago

Good points. We don't even need to tax the billionaires. Lets go with the MMT jobs guarantee program creating a high floor on the labor market. The MMT jobs program provides a federally funded job to anyone above 18 paying a living wage with full benefits. As such, employers, if they want employees, have to bid up from there. Another benefit? No more unemployment. Today, we have an economic system with baked in involuntary unemployment. This skews the "game" in favor of employers because employee's have to pay rent, food, etc.

titanomachy 6y ago
Interesting idea. Can someone get fired from one of these jobs, for example if they don't show up or if they don't take direction?
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  Herein lies the issue. The real minimum wage is 0. You can pay people for doing nothing, but if you pay them only if they work, they can choose to not do the job. If you fire them, then you go back to the real minimum wage being 0. The other option some societies have used in the past is to make it illegal to perform poorly, which has generally led to even worse results than poverty.
- bubbleRefuge 6y ago
  if you don't show you don't get paid. attendance is mandatory.
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    You can enforce attendance but not intent nor performance. "They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work." Challenging to put together the kind of MMT jobs program you described. One possibility to explore is find the smallest grouping of Dunbar's number-quantity groups that can independently deliver some core set of livable quality standards, with a core set of raw material and energy inputs. This only works if the emergent redundancy is encoded as a national security policy. The redundancy is interwoven into the defense posture, making it extremely tough to hurt the nation economically or militarily. In the worst case, individual groups revert to independently supplying their own needs at a "good enough" level as long as specific raw materials and energy are nationally available. Then individual members can be voted in or out of such groups. As long as you're in such a group, the core living standard is supplied without monetary exchange. But piss off enough members and you get voted out, and you're on your own unless you can find another co-operative to accept you (with a blockchain registry of rejected members, you'll have to be pretty convincing), and you'll have to enter the more conventional monetary exchange system we're familiar with today. Basically, the vote is an evaluation of whether you fit within that specific high-trust environment.

andrepd 6y ago

So let's say where 10 people were needed to do a task, now (due to automation or what have you) you just need 1. What should you do: a) since the same thing is produced with 1/10th of the labour, reduce work hours, implement UBI, etc, or b) invent 9 bullshit jobs to keep everyone busy and working their god-ordained 8hrs a day to "deserve" their existence. Option b) is the answer that capitalism gives, but it's not the right answer in an objective sense.

devcpp 6y ago
Capitalism says let people do what they want. If one guy undercuts all the others and says he's ready to do it on his own for cheap, let him, he's probably better at it anyway. This lets the other 9 figure out what they want to do, maybe launch a startup or whatever, there's no shortage of things that need fixing on this planet.
- andrepd 6y ago
  Capitalism lets people with money do what they want, and lets people without do what their masters want. Also, "Yeah everybody that gets replaced by a machine can just found a startup" is probably the most irrealistic and oblivious thing I've read all week.

whiddershins 6y ago

I’m not sure anyone deserves anything. If we flourish and provide for the less fortunate that is fantastic and I am all for that. We can and do have laws and ethics about what is not permitted to do to people. That’s fantastic and I support that. For children, I would say they aren’t yet potentially self sufficient, so as a society we should all share the responsibility that they have what they need to grow and develop healthily. But no, I don’t ‘deserve’ the things you mentioned. I’m an adult human who needs to go try to manifest those things for myself. Including basics like food and water.

zebogen 6y ago
OK, imagine you're disabled and unable to procure your own food and water. Now what?
colinmhayes 6y ago
You're getting caught in semantics. Obviously no one deserves anything, the world is chaos. What OP meant by deserve is probably that they believe it's immoral for society to not provide those things. I tend to agree because I believe eliminating abject poverty raises total utility.

raiyu 6y ago

This whole tax the billionaires is misguided and won't solve anything. - US Population 2000: 280 Million - US Population 2020: 320 Million - +15% increase in population - Tax revenues 2000: $2.03 trillion - Tax revenues 2019: $3.50 trillion - +75% increase in tax revenue Population grew 15% and tax revenue grew 75% and yet we still can't solve any of the real problems we had since 2000. So what is increasing taxes going to do if we already collect 75% more and can't make a dent. Now let's say you tax the billionaires: - Jeff - $200B - Larry & Sergey - $130B - Bill Gates - $120B - Zuck - $100B - Warren Buffet - $80B - Larry Ellison - 71B - Elon Musk - $70B That's $770 Billion - let's say we double this for the remainder of billionaires to $1.5 trillion and add in a 70% tax. $1.5 trillion in wealth = $1.05 trillion in year 1 Now what about the following year? Well you reduced their wealth substantially so now you only have $500B and that would only yield $350B in tax revenue the following year. $350B in tax revenue year 2. And there after it basically trickles down to nothing. So you end up with a total of $1.5 trillion and then nothing. Well that $1.5 trillion is 42% increase over what we have today, but remember that tax revenue already increased 75% and we still couldn't get anything right. So while it may sound good to say tax the billionaires the reality is if we couldn't figure out how to spend the additional $1.5 trillion from taxes between 2000 and 2020 a one-time 2 year increase of $1.5 trillion won't do much because the underlying system is broken.

ndespres 6y ago
Putting a very high tax on wealth would have the benefits of a one-time infusion of tax revenues, AND a future disincentive for the ultrawealthy to seek to enrich themselves infinitely using business practices that take money from everyone else. The problem isn't just that the ultrarich have too much money. It's that they get this money by doing things that make the lives of everyone else measurably worse. Selling us poor-quality products, paying low wages to work in stores selling those products, treating real estate like an investment instead of a human need, overcharging for healthcare, invading our privacy to find ways to more efficiently get us to buy their garbage, etc. Without the incentive for the ultrarich to rip us off coming and going, we have a chance to improve our quality of life and change the things that are wrong in society, without leaving it to the rich to "fix".

briandear 6y ago

If you taxed all US billionaires at 100% it wouldn’t have even paid the bill for the recent Covid relief bill. We need more people paying taxes, not fewer people paying more taxes. The other thing is that if we have a “strong” social safety net, that will then incentivize more low wage jobs that don’t pay enough to actually support the person (sort of how Walmart paid low wages, but many of its employees were on food stamps.) Government should be less involved. Having food stamps available for low wage workers means they can accept a job for lower pay than they would have been able to accept otherwise. (I am not saying to get rid of food stamps, only to illustrate how “safety nets” actually perpetuate the very problems they are ostensibly attempting to solve.) Why should I be subsidizing Walmart workers? If we lowered costs to businesses by reducing taxes but also simultaneously reducing “safety nets,” the market would then require higher wages for a given job or the job wouldn’t get done. Right now it’s sort of some Keynesian system were I pay low prices at Walmart, but those low prices are subsidized by my tax dollars that pay safety nets that then allow Walmart to pay lower wages. So my “low prices” are really the result of a government subsidy that I pay for in taxes. You also see this in agriculture: we pay lower prices for vegetables, but due to the number of illegal alien employees who are paid less than minimum wage. The costs of a vegetable should reflect the actual cost of picking it, not a cost subsidized by illegal/below cost workers. (Just to be clear, I don’t care about the documentation of a worker, what I care about is businesses leveraging below market labor as a cost savings that really just passes the societal costs of that labor to taxpayers.) So I don’t agree that business should be taxed more, but that we eliminate the perverse incentives to pay workers less than a truly free market would support. We should, of course, have safety nets for the truly destitute, but they shouldn’t be a replacement for actual wages.. and that’s what we see in places like Walmart. Safety nets shouldn’t be generational. They should provide temporary help, not as a perpetual subsidy to businesses.

dimator 6y ago
Help me make the connection here. If we cut taxes to the Walmarts, why would that lead to them increasing wages? Would they see the reduction in safety nets and food stamps, and conclude that they ought to be more generous to employees? Wouldn't they rather turn that into shareholder value instead? I agree that it sucks for society to cover the gaps, but what you're describing sounds like trickle down economics, which I don't have much faith in.

vanusa 6y ago

Amazon [gets] publicly shamed for actually employing hundreds of thousands of middle class workers. That's not what Amazon is getting shamed for - as you are perfectly aware.

dionidium 6y ago
You should parse the claim like this: "Amazon, on the other hand, who is publicly shamed for the wages they pay, actually employs hundreds of thousands of middle-class workers." (As you are perfectly aware.)

nathias 6y ago

great, just the thing we need for UBI, why should anyone work when their job could be automated?

xenocyon 6y ago

I want to agree with you, but: a company whose employees' lives must be subsidized by the taxpayer (because they aren't earning enough to live on from full-time wages) is a net economic negative to society. If you have a lot of such companies or such jobs then you will have a societal insolvency, won't you? And what purpose do such companies serve, privatizing gains while socializing burdens?

yzmtf2008 6y ago
> If you have a lot of such companies or such jobs then you will have a societal insolvency, won't you? See: Canada's free health system, or UK's NHS, or literally any other single payer system.
d357r0y3r 6y ago
> I want to agree with you, but: a company whose employees' lives must be subsidized by the taxpayer (because they aren't earning enough to live on from full-time wages) is a net economic negative to society. Err...is it? Some income is better than no income. The more the company pays, the less the worker's life has to be subsidized. Any pay at all reduces the necessary subsidy, not including say, unpaid transportation costs. The pay must at least match the cost of being at work, but no employee would accept payment less than the cost of getting to work.

darawk 6y ago

I couldn't agree more with this. Thanks for distilling that so well. I've been trying to articulate variations of this point for a long time.

kangaroozach 6y ago

You had me until “tax” productivity. This is counterproductive and immoral.