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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 pro

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.
villahousut 6y ago
MMT is a fringe view considered unscientific by the vast majority of economists.

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.

villahousut 6y ago

MMT is a fringe view considered unscientific by the vast majority of economists.