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I don't understand how anybody can be surprised by this. You help lower income people, suddenly there's a whole new market for products that were previously out
by Kapura 3y ago
I don't understand how anybody can be surprised by this. You help lower income people, suddenly there's a whole new market for products that were previously out of their reach. You cut back investment in the lower classes (austerity), or implement "means tested" benefits, the economy suffers, and people suffer.
It seems like, idk, maybe we should do our best to put money in the pockets of the poorest people (regardless of the cost) and create the postwar great society that JFK and LBJ were championing.
- dools 3y agoYep, and the most effective way to do it is a job guarantee: http://www.jobguarantee.org/ http://www.jobguarantee.org/
- itake 3y agoI don’t see how this fixes housing problems. If there are 5k housing units available, what is the “ socially inclusive minimum wage” such that everyone can afford housing? This formula assumes all property and services are in abundance, but that is not reality.
- wbc 3y agowell clearly the solution is www.houseguarantee.lol
- dools 3y agoWell ... isn't it? If people don't have jobs, give them a job. If people don't have houses, give them a house. Social housing isn't exactly a novel concept.
- dools 3y agoThere's no reason that we shouldn't fix involuntary unemployment because the same policy doesn't also automatically fix other problems. A federal Job Guarantee does have the potential to ease housing pressures by increasing mobility and allowing people access to lower cost housing options that can ease local housing pressures in larger cities.
- idiotsecant 3y agoI think you're not stretching those mental muscles quite far enough. Keeping people fed, housed, and secured is kind of the point of having a society. If the housing doesn't exist, we build it. If the food doesn't exist, we grow it. If we don't have security, we make it. Those who don't have occupations can be enlisted to help with those efforts. The last time we did this it was called the new deal, and it revitalized america. It's time for a new new deal
- itake 3y ago> I think you're not stretching those mental muscles quite far enough. I think you're not reading the news enough... > If the housing doesn't exist, we build it. Where? Cities (and Nimbies) don't allow new housing to be built. Cities like NYC, LA, SF, Seattle are partially or fully surrounded by water. How do we "grow" the land? Why? Cities cap rent prices, so it doesn't make sense for a builder or investor to spend $1m getting permits and building property to make $1k/mo in rent. > If the food doesn't exist, we grow it. This is easy for the USA, but doesn't help for countries like Sri Lanka that physically can't grow their own food.
- sneak 3y agoThere seem to be a million different issues with a proposal like this, not the least of which is that the allocation of the labor amounts to a corporate or municipal handout. If you pay a living wage to a zillion people, they have to be assigned some sort of valuable work to do if it's not just a UBI system. The government already pays everyone to do the work the government wants done, so the target of this inflation-funded labor value would be, what, precisely? There's only so much garbage that needs picking up.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoThe amount of work that needs to be done is nearly infinite. It's just that we don't currently value the work as highly as the cash it would take to pay the worker. In a world where we decided to do this, there is plenty these people could be doing to contribute greatly to society.
- sneak 3y agoIt wasn't rhetoric - what work would they be doing? For whom? Who would assign it? Based on what priorities? We are talking about a firehose of somewhere around five hundred billion dollars a year. Where do you intend to aim it?
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoOur infrastructure is woefully out of date and remains so because it's very expensive to fix. Let's fix it. Fill pot holes, add and improve drainage canals, build damns and levees, etc.
- sneak 3y agoOk, who gets priority? Whose bridges get fixed first? Population centers? Rural places without a lot of traffic? Which states? What about the environmental considerations for the dams? Who gets the power generated? This is what I mean by a "municipal handout" - this is a firehose of value, and the people you point it at will be enriched. The allocation of that value is not trivial, as everyone who holds USD is paying for the labor via inflation of the money supply.
- mortehu 3y agoYou are not surprised, yet your explanation is entirely about indirect effects, even though the cause is removal of tax credits and that $1400 EIP checks were sent out in 2021 but not 2022.
- starik36 3y ago$1400 checks amounted to 8.8% of household income? I think the math is off here.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoOr, the Federal Government's rate of increase in debt slowed down...
- slashdev 3y agoFunny you say that since this drop was mostly caused by inflation, which in turn was partly caused by putting money in the pockets of the people. There’s no free lunch. Inflation was up above 6% and people saw their buying power drop by 8%. That’s about it right there.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoThis drop wasn't caused by inflation..it was post-tax decrease, but not a pre-tax decrease. That is, its exacly because of a change in tax policy. Inflation didn't even appear in the article, unless I'm blind.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoIt's literally the first sentence. "Real median household income" - the real means that it's inflation adjusted. "After tax" just tells us specifically what's being measured.
- Retric 3y agoAfter tax is used because inflation adjusted before tax median income only dropped by 2.3%. Inflation may have represented at most 1/4th of the drop ignoring all other causes, but 3/4 comes from changes in tax policy.
- alex_young 3y agoMost of the stimulus went to business and governments, not individuals: https://web.archive.org/web/20230920080933/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/us/how-covid-stimulus-money-was-spent.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230920080933/https://www.nytim...
- cpursley 3y agoYes, creating massive inflation.
- 3y ago
- lettergram 3y ago> postwar great society that JFK and LBJ were championing IMO most of the wealth generation at that time actually came from being (1) the only country manufacturing at scale post-war that was untouched by war and (2) cheap energy (which has the highest correlation with improving the life of the poor).
- metabagel 3y agoDon't forget the GI Bill, high marginal tax rates, and those good paying union jobs with benefits and pensions.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoWhich were afforded by 1 and 2 above.
- ramblenode 3y ago> It seems like, idk, maybe we should do our best to put money in the pockets of the poorest people (regardless of the cost) and create the postwar great society that JFK and LBJ were championing. There may never again be a Great Society middle class, regardless of economic policy. Most of the discussion I've seen about how to return to the post-war golden age misses how important the post-war aspect was for US success. The US was the only industrialized country left intact after WWII, making it an export superpower on top of being a military superpower. Confidence in the American economy lead to the Bretton Woods system, enshrining the dollar as the global reserve currency, giving Americans enormous buying power, and leading to the US controlling over two-thirds of the world's gold by the 1950s. Compared to Europe and Japan, the US also had vastly more room to grow its agricultural and mineral production, and thus its economy. Those unique advantages have dimished. Other countries have caught up in industrialization and the delta between the US and the rest of the world has shrunk. For the middle class to be rich again, the US would have to get comparatively richer relative to the rest of the world market, but the trend is in the opposite direction. Even significantly reducing the wealth gap wouldn't bring back the comparative wealth of the middle class of previous decades.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Farfignoggen 3y agoIn economics that's called the marginal propensity to spend! And on the lower rungs of the economic ladder the marginal propensity to spend versus the marginal propensity to save is nearly 100% toward spending there and nearly 0% for any savings. So any extra income given via Tax rebates and other methods of income redistribution for lower income households will almost 100% be assured to be immediately spent for some discretionary products purchases as long as the costs of Housing/Food and other necessaries is not eating up all of that beforehand.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rufus_foreman 3y ago>> maybe we should do our best to put money in the pockets of the poorest people (regardless of the cost) and create the postwar great society that JFK and LBJ were championing That's the exact opposite of what LBJ was championing. He stated that his "War on Poverty" was meant to shrink the number of people on welfare, not increase it. Referring to poor people, LBJ said he wanted to "make taxpayers out of them instead of tax-eaters". The war on poverty was not intended to be a forever war.