7 ms·

This is how our system works. The government subsidizes corporate low wage work, and everyone pats themselves on the back for being so enormously virtuous, trul

• gruez 2y ago
  >It prevents competition How does food stamps/medicaid prevent competition?
  • notatoad 2y ago
    because small companies can't get away with paying poverty wages. amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring. companies that don't operate on the same scale aren't constantly hiring, so they can't get the same benefit of being the fallback option for people and have to offer wages that are high enough to actually attract employees.
    • ilya_m 2y ago
      Is this really? If foodstamps were to suddenly disappear, would Amazon increase their wages? I doubt it. In fact, there would be _more_ desperate people scrambling for some paying jobs, which would depress wages further. Right?
    • gruez 2y ago
      > amazon jobs are ubiquitous and well-known enough that people treat it as a fallback. if you can't find a better job, you go work in the amazon warehouse or as a wal-mart cashier, because they're always hiring. I agree that larger companies are better capitalized and therefore can better withstand economic shocks than smaller companies, but how does that mean that foodstamps "prevents competition"? Foodstamps aren't tied to a specific employer, so it doesn't favor large companies over smaller one, because employees can continue to get benefits even after switching jobs.
    • Nasrudith 2y ago
      Why can't smaller companies get away with paying poverty wages? I don't quite see the connection.
      • onion2k 2y ago
        Poverty wages comes with the cost of constantly hiring, and hiring is a relatively expensive thing to do, mostly in terms of time, unless you're big enough to make it a fixed cost (eg an internal team and a job marketing budget).
    • Aunche 2y ago
      Of course small businesses can always pay poverty wages or constantly hire. Amazon actually actively advocates for more than doubling the minimum wage because it would be beneficial for them. https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Who bears the blame for this though? If social programs are cut then voters freak. If the price of goods increase then voters freak. If taxes increase then voters freak. It seems that we get exactly what we vote for.
  • wcarron 2y ago
    I think your question carries the seeds of the answer within it.
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    We collectively bear the blame for allowing a system where government subsidizes shareholders and the wealthiest owners of these companies by not paying a living wage. In this case, these are Amazon government subsidies by way of the disadvantaged. "Why are consumers receiving low prices and shareholder profits more important than workers receiving a wage they can survive on?" seems to be a question no one wants to answer. As Galloway showed, we don't love our children, or even fellow humans in this context. We love line goes up more. At least we're making progress with the fertility rate going off the cliff, less humans to suffer under this regime in the future. https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_young_people_s_future https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
    • gruez 2y ago
      >In this case, these are Amazon government subsidies by way of the disadvantaged. "Why are consumers receiving low prices and shareholder profits more important than workers receiving a wage they can survive on?" seems to be a question no one wants to answer. If this is a "subsidy" to Amazon, what do you think would happen if they were pulled? Would amazon be forced to raise wages, or would the wages stay the same (because labor supply and demand is still the same) and the people starve instead?
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
• OgsyedIE 2y ago
  Supposing that fulfillment industry in general went without these labor subsidies - the industry would pass the costs on in some proportion p and 1-p to dividends and customer prices, resulting in lower investment and smaller sales volumes. Sounds alright, but then you have noticeably less unskilled and semi-skilled labor demand (possibly as much as 1-4%) in an environment where: * the long struggle of delegitimising explicit political violence is waning, * nobody outside of the Club of Rome wants to so much as touch the application of the framing of subsidies and overbuild to the topic of population * and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable.
  • astrange 2y ago
    > * and the math for how UBI interacts with the primary sector is intractable. There have been lots of empirical studies of UBI and the evidence from them is pretty clear that… they don't actually affect employment much either way. Which I don't think is an answer that advocates or opponents like, as seemingly everyone thinks it would cause people to retire and write a book or something.
• no_wizard 2y ago
  >The government subsidizes corporate low wage work But importantly only the lowest of the low wages There is a huge swath of workers that can't get benefits like food stamps or medicaid because they don't qualify via the means testing formula and they can't really afford to live where they live, afford medical insurance etc. Its those folks that have it the worst, IMO. Cost of living keeps you from building any wealth, even in the form of cash savings, but the government has arbitrarily decided you make too much or some other form of disqualification[0]. To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients. EDIT: To those whom have questions on the fact that means test cost more than the fraud of social benefit programs, Last Week Tonight did a break down on Medicaid[3] (linked to below) that explains all this better than I can. [0]: often by declaring some aspect of the filing paperwork invalid or the beneficiary unresponsive, more often than not due to errors by the agency rather than the individual(s)[1] [1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2024/04/12/vulnerable-florida-patients-scramble-after-abrupt-medicaid-termination/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2024/04/12/vulnerable-f... [2]: How an applicant/recipient is screened and continually screened for eligibility [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVIsnOfNfCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVIsnOfNfCo
  • VS1999 2y ago
    >To add insult to injury, means testing[2] often costs more than the cost of fraud in social benefit programs! Not to mention, the biggest fraudsters with Medicaid are providers not recipients. Intuitively, I'd expect fraud to go up (at least to some degree) as means testing goes down like a differential equation. The depressing part of this is that it doesn't matter what is actually true, or what either of us are convinced is true, as the system will do its own thing.
    • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      "Eliminate means testing" doesn't mean that you stop verifying if someone qualifies for the program, it means that you stop imposing conditions on qualifying for the program, i.e. turn it into a tax credit that everybody gets unconditionally, and adjust rates to compensate. In principle you can do this without affecting the budget at all -- if there is a benefit that phases out at, say, 20% up to $30,000 in income, this is equivalent to paying the benefit unconditionally and increasing the marginal tax rate by 20% in the same income range. All it does is eliminate the application paperwork. In practice the problem is that there are multiple overlapping programs like this, so the poor aren't paying a 20% marginal rate (on top of any formal taxes), it's more like 60-80% and in some cases it even exceeds 100%. This is a poverty trap. But to get out of it while balancing the budget you'd have to use a lower total phase out rate, requiring higher marginal rates on people who make more money. These people -- as much upper middle-class doctors and computer programmers as Jeff Bezos -- then object to this, and so here we are. Of course, another way to do it would be to cut some other government spending and use the money for this.
• yyyyybb 2y ago
  This is free speech, the GOP is still the problem. This is free speech.
• mrweasel 2y ago
  When you put it that way it sounds a little like communism.
  • p3rls 2y ago
    This sentence sounds like semantic anarchism.
• AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? It would be fairer and more just, but words about justice are cheap and power is expensive. But how is this related to the subject? There is an article lamenting that a third of Amazon warehouse workers are on food stamps. Now suppose that Amazon paid more taxes and correspondingly provided more funding for the food stamp program. The next week a third of Amazon warehouse workers would still be on food stamps and media outlets would still be publishing the same clickbait headline.
  • pc86 2y ago
    This implies that government expenditures are based on actual revenues, and that $x in additional revenue is divided proportionally to all government services. Neither of these is true.
    • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      It does not. The amount Amazon pays in taxes is independent of the proportion of their warehouse workers eligible for food stamps. This is entirely consistent with amount they pay in taxes also being independent of the amount of their taxes that go to fund the food stamp program in particular.
• r00fus 2y ago
  > Should the companies shoulder more of the burden? Note: this only works for large corporations. Small corporations don't get this benefit. To make it more fair and increase competition and reduce corporate corruption, the system should increase support for everyone on a fair basis, not just these particular wage slaves.
• brnaftr361 2y ago
  No, people should shoulder the burden and when a business model is untenable, there should be a correction which is instantiated by a lack of labor. It's neither the company nor the governments responsibility to dictate what the market will bear, only follow the optimization curve that the charter is architected to. A lot of the problems we see in the modern market are a product of well-intentioned interventions, namely things like welfare that allow for low-wage workers to sustain a long term position at a job that underpays them which is ultimately zero-sum to those individuals which it is supposed to support. Where interventions need applied to companies, namely conglomerates, they are not and virtually nobody seems to want to discuss this, but it's the bull in the China shop because these monoliths have a unidirectional charter toward profit and infinite coffers by which to affect policy change and ensure that margins can remain relatively extreme without regard to consequences which either the individual or the society in which they operate suffer.
• johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I'll avoid the low hanging fruit but: if the government needs to supply aid to working citizens, they aren't getting much or any tax on a non-trivial portion of the population. I don't see how the government benefits from this transaction, and why they wouldn't at least (on the state level) increase minimum wage to offset this.
  • _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Three different 'governments' in this scenario. The local government still benefits from having people employed even if state government/Federal government doesn't.
• galdosdi 2y ago
  This has been going on since the 1700s, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system And was criticized as indirect corporate welfare then too