20 ms·

What a tragic way to frame it. The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better so they don't have to choose indentured serv

What a tragic way to frame it. The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better so they don't have to choose indentured servitude over poverty. Edit: Added the bit about all the world governments

afiori 6y ago
Yang had a nice plan for that :(
- mixedCase 6y ago
  And no sustainable way to fund it.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    I don't get how people keep saying this. A UBI is effectively a tax credit. You fund it with higher nominal rates. These mostly cancel out for working people, netting to zero in the middle. People at the top pay on net so that people at the bottom receive on net. It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means-tested benefits for low income people, but without the poverty traps, perverse incentives and excessive bureaucracy.
    - brippalcharrid 6y ago
      Are you sure this is realistic, or would it end up being a net negative for people earning above $20k-$25k? There are a lot of people who are opting out of paid employment, one way or another, under the current model.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      The people at the top will move to a tax haven.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax, like VAT, because with the UBI it's still a net transfer to lower income people. How are the people at the top going to avoid VAT? By moving all their customers to a tax haven? Also, in this context "the top" is anything above the middle. Are lawyers and petroleum engineers going to move to a tax haven?
        dllthomas 6y ago
        > The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax. I think this takes more thought. I agree that we want a progressive curve, and that UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives us a progressive curve, but I don't think we've established that it gives us the curve we want. Moving from the ideal curve to the (potentially) less than ideal curve for the sake of easier enforcement may still be worth it, and may still produce a system that we'd prefer to the current one, but we have to actually establish that.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives a very nice curve, and on top of that you can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by adjusting the amount of the UBI. A larger UBI with a higher flat tax rate is more progressive. It's mostly just not that compatible with confiscatory-level taxes on very high income people, but the cause of the trouble there was never really the taxes (once they were paying the same rates as ordinary people). The problem there is regulatory capture and inadequate antitrust enforcement leading to abusive consolidated corporate empires.
        dllthomas 6y ago
        > UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives a very nice curve It gives a family of curves, and as you say you have a knob you can turn... I don't have a strong opinion about exactly what shape the curve should have, but I do have a strong opinion that it's probably important and I've noticed a tendency (first in myself!) for UBI proponents to be satisfied having checked the "it's a progressive curve" box without having looked carefully at whether it can produce the particular progressive curve we (more broadly) want. Edited to add: I suppose if we do find that we need people to be taking home marginally more for the first N dollars earned, we could add a rebate based on reported income. Small fraud ("I reported a little more than I actually made") winds up pretty bounded in the amount it can walk off with; larger fraud ("I invented 500 people who are reporting income") isn't that much bigger a concern than it would already be with a UBI since the maximum rebate is probably much smaller than the stipend that would otherwise be expected. Note that I'm not calling for this, just exploring the space.
    - mixedCase 6y ago
      a) Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability. People who have run the numbers tend to realize how inviable it is. Those who don't, also think you can just endlessly print money or just tax people more until you get to the happy number. Which leads to b) b) Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop. Given a country's economic output, laws, culture and a thousand other factors, there's a hidden function that determines the maximum tax rate you can employ where anything more than that is counter-productive with both short-term and long-term results, the latter often including reputational damage that can be nigh impossible to repair, soft-capping your economy far below what it could've been. See: Laffer Curve, and the shining example that is Argentina.
      - lazide 6y ago
        Definitely have seen and experienced the same thing - but hey, if we succeed in banning cash, no one can dodge taxes? It also removes a huge relief valve for large segments of the population to survive that can’t meet the bar demanded of the ‘normal’ workers.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability. Mean personal income in the US is ~$54,000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N For a $12,000 UBI that would yield a flat tax rate of ~22%. In real life it's more complicated than that, but not so much more complicated that the number is going to be off by an order of magnitude. It's completely viable. People are already paying nominal rates that high. > Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop. The primary causes of this are that higher taxes give people less money to spend which hurts the economy and that higher marginal rates deter working. A UBI is a transfer payment, so on net nobody has any less money to spend and in practice people with less money would have slightly more and those people are more likely to spend it. So this factor goes in favor of economic growth. Meanwhile half the point of the UBI is to get rid of the crazy marginal rate cliffs created by means-tested benefits programs. The status quo deters work more than a UBI would, e.g. you lose unemployment if you take a job. Terrible incentives that would go away.
  - bit_logic 6y ago
    Are you just saying that or did you look at his proposed plan? It included VAT and other ways to make it sustainable.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      And hard to evade too!
kukx 6y ago
The people need to take care of themselves first, then their family, then their immediate surrounding, then their region and their country. Reversing the dependency on a large scale is not sustainable. Someone's right is someone else responsibility, for someone to receive money, someone else has to provide it. The government is a middleman in this transaction that wastes a substantial share of the value in the process.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  The problem with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking is that it ignores being born into the problem. Sure, some people can work their way out of a rut that their parents were in, but the majority can’t.
  - fartcannon 6y ago
    Not just that, but if we rank everyone, some people will inevitably be worse than others. Should those at the bottom be condemned to poverty?
    - suprfsat 6y ago
      That's pretty much the main political divide in our country. Should poor people have it better off, or worse off?
      - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
        That is an argument and such bad spirit. The actual discussion is about the degree of which government should handle re-distributing wealth to the lower class and to what degree the middle and upper class is responsible. The “divide” is that politicians on both sides who’s actions don’t always match their stated positions.
        clevergadget 6y ago
        yeah as long as they keep the conversation on the extremes they never have to give up anything. If you ask them to give up a 4th car for someone to have food then they are evil for saying no. So they say "Oh we have to give up EVERYTHING and live in the DIRT because of your RADICAL EXTREMISM!"
flavius29663 6y ago
$15 an hour is more than you can get in almost any place in Europe or the world for unskilled labor, what are you talking about?
- specialist 6y ago
  Why are you comparing absolute dollar amounts? Is the cost of living the same every where?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Cost of living in the middle of nowhere in the US is almost certainly less than nearly anywhere in Western Europe. The media home value in Bessemer is like $90,000.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Go on... Food? Health care? Transportation?
      - DC1350 6y ago
        Food and housing is extremely cheap in America. Americans have an extremely low cost of living and low taxes compared to every other wealthy country. Also higher wages for similar jobs.
        astrange 6y ago
        One reason everyone thinks it's bad is journalists are 1. naturally neurotic people 2. all have student debt 3. all live in expensive cities like NYC and 4. their industry has fewer people earning less than they did 10 years ago. Similar for some other activist classes, though not all.
        astrange 6y ago
        > their industry has fewer people earning less than they did 10 years ago has fewer people and they earn less, not fewer people who earn less.
ActorNightly 6y ago
USA needs better education so that people understand economics and labor markets, so they wont calling paid positions indentured servitude.
- diag 6y ago
  How long do you think people will survive if they aren't working? Not calling employment servitude is dishonest.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    By that definition, who on this entire planet is not an indentured servant?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  I imagine GP is being facetious
- fartcannon 6y ago
  I'm from Canada, but certainly education on economics would be amazingly helpful, I agree.
- psychometry 6y ago
  We need better education so that people stop voting against their own self-interest, in union elections and generally.
  - gruez 6y ago
    ...or maybe they just have differences in opinion to you?
    - claudiawerner 6y ago
      That's entirely possible, and very likely. However, that does not do away with rationality completely. For some given situations, with data on the situation and a set of options, we can deduce pretty quickly what is rational to do, what is right to do, and what is in one's interest to do. This is how we (and that includes me and you) are able to criticize people on those grounds all the time. If someone is poor and has a choice between buying a stereo system and saving the money in a high-interest bank account, I doubt you'd have any problem saying that it's in their self interest to do one of those options and not the other. Economists talk about the principles of economic rationality all the time. So yeah, you can have your own opinion. That doesn't mean that the opinion is beyond criticism, nor does it mean it's a rational thought out opinion from all points of view, considering all the facts.
dominotw 6y ago
> The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better I believe The USA spends most on social welfare than any other country.
- metters 6y ago
  You believe so, but at least Wikipedia says the US are 22nd per capita (which is more relevant than the total spending) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > Wikipedia says the US are 22nd per capita I see USA at 10 in per capita section in your wiki link.
    - weaksauce 6y ago
      so either way the us is not at position number 1... at that point it doesn't matter.
      - dominotw 6y ago
        ok
    - metters 6y ago
      You are right, I have made a mistake there. The USA are 10th in spending per capita and 22nd in spending in percentage of the GDP.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The amount of money spent doesn't mean anything. The US also pays insane amounts for their health system but the result is a system that's far more expensive than in other countries.
at-fates-hands 6y ago
I agree though. If we ever want to have a chance at closing the gap between low and middle classes, then we need a basic income for people making under a certain income. Taking away the hardships of deciding whether to put gas in your car or get groceries isn't a decision someone should have to make. An extra $500-1K per month for those people would make a world of difference and ease a lot of those everyday decisions. The utopia would be having low income housing running on solar with affordable EV's for people under a certain income level as well. Combined with a basic income, it would certainly make a huge decrease in poverty and allow these people to bootstrap themselves into the middle class. EDIT: for poor math skills. lol
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Can I ask where you heard that we could have given every person in the country a million each? I've seen that quoted all over the place, and can't figure out why, given that it's off by a factor of about a hundred.
- repsilat 6y ago
  > could've given every person in the country a million dollars each That'd be $329 trillion[1], which is on the order of 100x what we spent. 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+*+population+of+UsA https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+...
- ptomato 6y ago
  > we just had several trillion dollar stimulus bills that could've given every person in the country a million dollars damn, didn't know covid killed 99% of the US population. rough.
- geitir 6y ago
  That's completely incorrect. If you take the us population over 18, that is 209 million. If we assumed 5% are wealthy, that's 198 million who would need to get 1 million dollars. If you multiply 1 million by 198 million, you 198 trillion dollars.
- FredPret 6y ago
macrowhat 6y ago
Wikipedia: Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person (an indenture) agrees to work without salary for a specific number of years for eventual compensation or debt repayment. "Without salary" "WITHOUT SALARY" And no, the government isn't your nanny. What a bunch of leftist doo-doo. Learn a bit about how horrible unions were in the 70s, and maybe I'll be convinced that "education" is actually a pathway to knowing what's best for yourself (as others suggest) They make the right choice.
- durkie 6y ago
  if you're worried about how bad certain organizations were in the 70s i've got bad news for you about corporations
  - macrowhat 6y ago
    Just get the hell out of my country
xwolfi 6y ago
Well reality so far is that things will stay unbalanced for a while. I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago. Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...
rogerdickey 6y ago
Where does the money come from? What would the unskilled labor produce?
rmk 6y ago
Most rich countries take good care of their poor. In the US, most states will pay for food, heating, sometimes even internet access, not to mention healthcare, if you are poor. Indigent children also have separate healthcare programs targeted towards them and receive free lunches at school to encourage them to concentrate on school. Furthermore, there is also Unemployment Insurance which provides for months of basic income if you become unemployed. Finally, there is disability payments. This is the situation where you are severely disabled and can't work, in which case, the government will pay you a basic income for the rest of your life. Most of these programs are well-run and disburse money efficiently. Fraud to get disability payments is very high. People who are unable to rejoin the job market sometimes make the difficult decision to connive with sympathetic doctors to get this. But once you do this, you can never go back to work in any official capacity. This is the one case where people who are chronically unemployed give up and become wards of the state. So the 'desperately poor' are actually taken care of in some fashion in the US. The problem is that the people who are the 'working poor' often get shafted. These are the janitors who are working all hours of the day, the baggers at the grocery store, the short order cooks, the security people who patrol industrial and residential facilities, etc. Even though their children are eligible for all the benefits above in many cases, it's still difficult to raise a family if there is one breadwinner who makes minimum wage. These people are not eligible for many benefits programs and also do not generally get healthcare from their employers (employers deliberately keep hours/week down to avoid this expense). The problem is, 'taking care' of these people is very hard: they are the majority of the workforce, and I suspect that there is not enough money to fund programs for these people because of the sheer size of this workforce. Also remember that this group oftentimes does not have powerful unions (many subgroups do), which means politicians do not have to listen to them.

afiori 6y ago

Yang had a nice plan for that :(

mixedCase 6y ago
And no sustainable way to fund it.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  I don't get how people keep saying this. A UBI is effectively a tax credit. You fund it with higher nominal rates. These mostly cancel out for working people, netting to zero in the middle. People at the top pay on net so that people at the bottom receive on net. It's completely sustainable and is effectively just a simplification and improvement of the status quo of having unemployment insurance and a bunch of means-tested benefits for low income people, but without the poverty traps, perverse incentives and excessive bureaucracy.
  - brippalcharrid 6y ago
    Are you sure this is realistic, or would it end up being a net negative for people earning above $20k-$25k? There are a lot of people who are opting out of paid employment, one way or another, under the current model.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    The people at the top will move to a tax haven.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax, like VAT, because with the UBI it's still a net transfer to lower income people. How are the people at the top going to avoid VAT? By moving all their customers to a tax haven? Also, in this context "the top" is anything above the middle. Are lawyers and petroleum engineers going to move to a tax haven?
      - dllthomas 6y ago
        > The nice thing about a UBI is that it's still progressive even if funded by a flat tax. I think this takes more thought. I agree that we want a progressive curve, and that UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives us a progressive curve, but I don't think we've established that it gives us the curve we want. Moving from the ideal curve to the (potentially) less than ideal curve for the sake of easier enforcement may still be worth it, and may still produce a system that we'd prefer to the current one, but we have to actually establish that.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives a very nice curve, and on top of that you can make it arbitrarily more or less progressive by adjusting the amount of the UBI. A larger UBI with a higher flat tax rate is more progressive. It's mostly just not that compatible with confiscatory-level taxes on very high income people, but the cause of the trouble there was never really the taxes (once they were paying the same rates as ordinary people). The problem there is regulatory capture and inadequate antitrust enforcement leading to abusive consolidated corporate empires.
        dllthomas 6y ago
        > UBI-with-a-flat-tax gives a very nice curve It gives a family of curves, and as you say you have a knob you can turn... I don't have a strong opinion about exactly what shape the curve should have, but I do have a strong opinion that it's probably important and I've noticed a tendency (first in myself!) for UBI proponents to be satisfied having checked the "it's a progressive curve" box without having looked carefully at whether it can produce the particular progressive curve we (more broadly) want. Edited to add: I suppose if we do find that we need people to be taking home marginally more for the first N dollars earned, we could add a rebate based on reported income. Small fraud ("I reported a little more than I actually made") winds up pretty bounded in the amount it can walk off with; larger fraud ("I invented 500 people who are reporting income") isn't that much bigger a concern than it would already be with a UBI since the maximum rebate is probably much smaller than the stipend that would otherwise be expected. Note that I'm not calling for this, just exploring the space.
  - mixedCase 6y ago
    a) Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability. People who have run the numbers tend to realize how inviable it is. Those who don't, also think you can just endlessly print money or just tax people more until you get to the happy number. Which leads to b) b) Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop. Given a country's economic output, laws, culture and a thousand other factors, there's a hidden function that determines the maximum tax rate you can employ where anything more than that is counter-productive with both short-term and long-term results, the latter often including reputational damage that can be nigh impossible to repair, soft-capping your economy far below what it could've been. See: Laffer Curve, and the shining example that is Argentina.
    - lazide 6y ago
      Definitely have seen and experienced the same thing - but hey, if we succeed in banning cash, no one can dodge taxes? It also removes a huge relief valve for large segments of the population to survive that can’t meet the bar demanded of the ‘normal’ workers.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Crunch the numbers, find out how much you need. If you don't have exact, precise numbers and a precise plan on how to get to that number, the idea is worth nothing since you don't even have a starting point to analyze viability. Mean personal income in the US is ~$54,000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N For a $12,000 UBI that would yield a flat tax rate of ~22%. In real life it's more complicated than that, but not so much more complicated that the number is going to be off by an order of magnitude. It's completely viable. People are already paying nominal rates that high. > Observe the real world, see what happens when you "just increase tax rate". You'll find that very often when you increase taxes you actually end up collecting less, as more people decide to illegally dodge taxes or simply close up shop. The primary causes of this are that higher taxes give people less money to spend which hurts the economy and that higher marginal rates deter working. A UBI is a transfer payment, so on net nobody has any less money to spend and in practice people with less money would have slightly more and those people are more likely to spend it. So this factor goes in favor of economic growth. Meanwhile half the point of the UBI is to get rid of the crazy marginal rate cliffs created by means-tested benefits programs. The status quo deters work more than a UBI would, e.g. you lose unemployment if you take a job. Terrible incentives that would go away.
- bit_logic 6y ago
  Are you just saying that or did you look at his proposed plan? It included VAT and other ways to make it sustainable.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    And hard to evade too!

kukx 6y ago

The people need to take care of themselves first, then their family, then their immediate surrounding, then their region and their country. Reversing the dependency on a large scale is not sustainable. Someone's right is someone else responsibility, for someone to receive money, someone else has to provide it. The government is a middleman in this transaction that wastes a substantial share of the value in the process.

colejohnson66 6y ago
The problem with the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” thinking is that it ignores being born into the problem. Sure, some people can work their way out of a rut that their parents were in, but the majority can’t.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Not just that, but if we rank everyone, some people will inevitably be worse than others. Should those at the bottom be condemned to poverty?
  - suprfsat 6y ago
    That's pretty much the main political divide in our country. Should poor people have it better off, or worse off?
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      That is an argument and such bad spirit. The actual discussion is about the degree of which government should handle re-distributing wealth to the lower class and to what degree the middle and upper class is responsible. The “divide” is that politicians on both sides who’s actions don’t always match their stated positions.
      - clevergadget 6y ago
        yeah as long as they keep the conversation on the extremes they never have to give up anything. If you ask them to give up a 4th car for someone to have food then they are evil for saying no. So they say "Oh we have to give up EVERYTHING and live in the DIRT because of your RADICAL EXTREMISM!"

flavius29663 6y ago

$15 an hour is more than you can get in almost any place in Europe or the world for unskilled labor, what are you talking about?

specialist 6y ago
Why are you comparing absolute dollar amounts? Is the cost of living the same every where?
- rayiner 6y ago
  Cost of living in the middle of nowhere in the US is almost certainly less than nearly anywhere in Western Europe. The media home value in Bessemer is like $90,000.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Go on... Food? Health care? Transportation?
    - DC1350 6y ago
      Food and housing is extremely cheap in America. Americans have an extremely low cost of living and low taxes compared to every other wealthy country. Also higher wages for similar jobs.
      - astrange 6y ago
        One reason everyone thinks it's bad is journalists are 1. naturally neurotic people 2. all have student debt 3. all live in expensive cities like NYC and 4. their industry has fewer people earning less than they did 10 years ago. Similar for some other activist classes, though not all.
        astrange 6y ago
        > their industry has fewer people earning less than they did 10 years ago has fewer people and they earn less, not fewer people who earn less.

ActorNightly 6y ago

USA needs better education so that people understand economics and labor markets, so they wont calling paid positions indentured servitude.

diag 6y ago
How long do you think people will survive if they aren't working? Not calling employment servitude is dishonest.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  By that definition, who on this entire planet is not an indentured servant?
tomc1985 6y ago
I imagine GP is being facetious
fartcannon 6y ago
I'm from Canada, but certainly education on economics would be amazingly helpful, I agree.
psychometry 6y ago
We need better education so that people stop voting against their own self-interest, in union elections and generally.
- gruez 6y ago
  ...or maybe they just have differences in opinion to you?
  - claudiawerner 6y ago
    That's entirely possible, and very likely. However, that does not do away with rationality completely. For some given situations, with data on the situation and a set of options, we can deduce pretty quickly what is rational to do, what is right to do, and what is in one's interest to do. This is how we (and that includes me and you) are able to criticize people on those grounds all the time. If someone is poor and has a choice between buying a stereo system and saving the money in a high-interest bank account, I doubt you'd have any problem saying that it's in their self interest to do one of those options and not the other. Economists talk about the principles of economic rationality all the time. So yeah, you can have your own opinion. That doesn't mean that the opinion is beyond criticism, nor does it mean it's a rational thought out opinion from all points of view, considering all the facts.

dominotw 6y ago

> The USA (and all the world governments) need to take care of it's poor people better I believe The USA spends most on social welfare than any other country.

metters 6y ago
You believe so, but at least Wikipedia says the US are 22nd per capita (which is more relevant than the total spending) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_...
- dominotw 6y ago
  > Wikipedia says the US are 22nd per capita I see USA at 10 in per capita section in your wiki link.
  - weaksauce 6y ago
    so either way the us is not at position number 1... at that point it doesn't matter.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      ok
  - metters 6y ago
    You are right, I have made a mistake there. The USA are 10th in spending per capita and 22nd in spending in percentage of the GDP.
alpaca128 6y ago
The amount of money spent doesn't mean anything. The US also pays insane amounts for their health system but the result is a system that's far more expensive than in other countries.

at-fates-hands 6y ago

I agree though. If we ever want to have a chance at closing the gap between low and middle classes, then we need a basic income for people making under a certain income. Taking away the hardships of deciding whether to put gas in your car or get groceries isn't a decision someone should have to make. An extra $500-1K per month for those people would make a world of difference and ease a lot of those everyday decisions. The utopia would be having low income housing running on solar with affordable EV's for people under a certain income level as well. Combined with a basic income, it would certainly make a huge decrease in poverty and allow these people to bootstrap themselves into the middle class. EDIT: for poor math skills. lol

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
Can I ask where you heard that we could have given every person in the country a million each? I've seen that quoted all over the place, and can't figure out why, given that it's off by a factor of about a hundred.
repsilat 6y ago
> could've given every person in the country a million dollars each That'd be $329 trillion[1], which is on the order of 100x what we spent. 1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+*+population+of+UsA https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%241+million%2Fperson+...
ptomato 6y ago
> we just had several trillion dollar stimulus bills that could've given every person in the country a million dollars damn, didn't know covid killed 99% of the US population. rough.
geitir 6y ago
That's completely incorrect. If you take the us population over 18, that is 209 million. If we assumed 5% are wealthy, that's 198 million who would need to get 1 million dollars. If you multiply 1 million by 198 million, you 198 trillion dollars.
FredPret 6y ago

macrowhat 6y ago

Wikipedia: Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person (an indenture) agrees to work without salary for a specific number of years for eventual compensation or debt repayment. "Without salary" "WITHOUT SALARY" And no, the government isn't your nanny. What a bunch of leftist doo-doo. Learn a bit about how horrible unions were in the 70s, and maybe I'll be convinced that "education" is actually a pathway to knowing what's best for yourself (as others suggest) They make the right choice.

durkie 6y ago
if you're worried about how bad certain organizations were in the 70s i've got bad news for you about corporations
- macrowhat 6y ago
  Just get the hell out of my country

xwolfi 6y ago

Well reality so far is that things will stay unbalanced for a while. I come from a shit city in France, a former textile powerhouse that lost everthing after the war when it became automated abroad and we couldnt compete. And I moved to Hong Kong years ago. Well... between this city and my new one, there's such an imbalance, I think I wish a few companies were trying to enslave people back home to teach them something else than shooting heroin and cheating on social insurance... And the French gov cant fix it, they can't make people clever and useful just with money and will...

rogerdickey 6y ago

Where does the money come from? What would the unskilled labor produce?

rmk 6y ago

Most rich countries take good care of their poor. In the US, most states will pay for food, heating, sometimes even internet access, not to mention healthcare, if you are poor. Indigent children also have separate healthcare programs targeted towards them and receive free lunches at school to encourage them to concentrate on school. Furthermore, there is also Unemployment Insurance which provides for months of basic income if you become unemployed. Finally, there is disability payments. This is the situation where you are severely disabled and can't work, in which case, the government will pay you a basic income for the rest of your life. Most of these programs are well-run and disburse money efficiently. Fraud to get disability payments is very high. People who are unable to rejoin the job market sometimes make the difficult decision to connive with sympathetic doctors to get this. But once you do this, you can never go back to work in any official capacity. This is the one case where people who are chronically unemployed give up and become wards of the state. So the 'desperately poor' are actually taken care of in some fashion in the US. The problem is that the people who are the 'working poor' often get shafted. These are the janitors who are working all hours of the day, the baggers at the grocery store, the short order cooks, the security people who patrol industrial and residential facilities, etc. Even though their children are eligible for all the benefits above in many cases, it's still difficult to raise a family if there is one breadwinner who makes minimum wage. These people are not eligible for many benefits programs and also do not generally get healthcare from their employers (employers deliberately keep hours/week down to avoid this expense). The problem is, 'taking care' of these people is very hard: they are the majority of the workforce, and I suspect that there is not enough money to fund programs for these people because of the sheer size of this workforce. Also remember that this group oftentimes does not have powerful unions (many subgroups do), which means politicians do not have to listen to them.