[Archio]

>You have very little money, but can spend endless days reconnecting with your friends, hiking, playing games, learning music, et cetera.

The horror! Sounds like these employers need to raise wages to do better than the absolute minimum. If higher paying jobs are available, people will work. And some people still won't, but those people weren't going to work much anyway.

[nikanj]

I wasn't saying it's horrible, I was trying to explain why people choose to remain unemployed.

Setting the right level for benefits is hard: Either the basic income is high enough to provide for a good life (why would I get a job), or it's not high enough to pay for food, shelter, bills (why do we treat our unemployed people this badly).

Rising the wages across the board raises prices sooner or later. That probably moves the unemployment money from the former category to the latter via inflation, which does motivate people to get a job, but screws the people who can't get a job.

I have no solutions to offer. This is a gnarly problem, featured for example in the Grasshopper and the Ant, first recorded in Aesop's fables from ~600BC. Enjoying life is wonderful, but if everyone enjoys life, we'll all starve.

[antihero]

There's also another factor which I think is important. If working was simple enough to be a bit dull but not horrendously unpleasant due to companies that wish to work people to the bone, patronise them, and forcing them to submit to nasty management, it might be a more attractive concept.

If people are desperate for work, they are vulnerable to the absolutely disgusting way they are treated and exploited by employers.

I find that in tech that employers treat me fantastically because I have more of a value proposition and am thus bargaining from a stronger perspective.

If working is so bad that it's actively damaging to my mental and physical health, I would be doing everything I can to avoid it.

[52-6F-62]

The unfortunate side is that the people voting on and installing policies that don’t help workers but tend to punish them have never seen that side of life—one where they’ve had to operate at the mercy of a cruel employer out of desperation and just plain survival.

We can surely do better than that, but it takes empathy. For that reason, my hopes are tempered.

[aspaviento]

> Enjoying life is wonderful, but if everyone enjoys life, we'll all starve.

Maybe the solution is in the middle: make work time as little as possible so people who work can also enjoy life and pay them according to that time.

[harpiaharpyja]

I have to agree, I suspect the culture of mandatory 8 hours a day 5 days a week leads to a massive amount of wasted work hours put in just to fill the time (when considered across everyone in society who works under such conditions). It's a net loss for society as a whole.

[mistrial9]

oh how wrong you are -- according to Jack Ma in China:

Jack Ma endorses China’s controversial (996) 12 hours a day, 6 days a week work culture

[namelessoracle]

Is it any suprise that a chinese elite would advocate a "work makes free" policy?

[taurath]

Basic income would allow for people to focus on their own health and take work when they want to do something.

Part of technological and societal progress is that we don’t use the threat of starvation for people to better for themselves. We have enough money to bring up the bottom economic class and still let the top have their private cruise ships.

[sokoloff]

If you doubled federal individual income taxes for everyone in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen around $750/mo in UBI with that increase.

If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI.

The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.

[vetinari]

Taxes do not work linearly like you seem to think.

If you double the tax rate, you won't double the tax revenue. There's a big chance that the revenue would go down.

Another thing is, that money is not the wealth; productivity is. So if you want to pay UBI to everyone and want to keep the same purchase power of the dollar, you have to preserve productivity at the national level (GDP is a measure; but you need that specific physical output as products and services, not money). Which you won't, if a part of population would stop working.

[maxerickson]

A small UBI would end up being net zero for lots and lots of people. No burden, no benefit (except the knowledge it would still come in if their circumstances changed).

[jl2718]

No. Because nobody would work, and corporations would invest all revenues offshore. The country would be destroyed, and you’d get nothing. Income taxation is one of the most economically destructive and violent ways to generate revenues.

Do you seriously think it’s a good idea to point guns at people doing the work and tell them to give you 80-100% of their pay because you think you deserve it for doing nothing?

Only a violent sociopath would do that, right? Please tell me how your proposal is different.

[sokoloff]

Sorry if it wasn’t clear (and I can see how I left it slightly unclear).

I don’t see any viable path to paying UBI at those relatively low levels because the tax burden on people and companies is too high. (And frankly, $750/mo isn’t enough to accomplish what the UBI advocates want to promise which is to make work literally optional.)

[jhauris]

I'm not at all convinced of UBI, but does your math include removing all the tax that pays for benefits that would no longer be needed such as unemployment, social security, etc.? It seems removing those benefits would reduce the tax burden significantly.

[UncleMeat]

Even ignoring the ridiculous 80-100% here, people who don't work aren't "doing nothing". There is more to the human endeavor than buying and selling.

Why do you take weekends? Or go home in the evening? Why aren't you using your evenings to be a "productive member of society"?

[josephcsible]

There's a difference between "I don't spend literally all of my time productively contributing to society" and "I never productively contribute to society".

[jl2718]

I don’t care about that. All I care about is that people realize that taking from others is only achievable through violence and/or deception.

[wing-_-nuts]

80-100%? Holy hyperbole batman.

Stop beating that strawman! He's already dead.

[bzbarsky]

If the suggestion were in fact to double "all federal income taxes", what do you think tax rates would end up looking like? Right now the top "all taxes" federal marginal rate is 39.35%. (2.35% Medicare, and 37% individual income tax). Doubling that gets you to 78.7%. And state taxes also exist; in California the top rate would be > 90% overall.

And of course doubling rates will not double revenue, because incentives really are a thing and a change this large would have large incentive-mediated effects, including people ending up with more compensation in non-taxable form (leisure, respect, non-taxable perqs, etc). The only way to double _revenue_ is for rates to rise even more, or more likely to start affecting more people (i.e. the top rate starting to apply at lower income levels).

Now those are marginal, not average, rates. But just to be clear, right now US government (federal, state, local) spending is ~46% of GDP. Federal spending on its own is ~30% of GDP. If we are talking about doubling that second number, overall government spending would be 76% of GDP. Which generally means the _average_ tax burden across all people would be 76% of income (though some of that can get hidden via corporate income taxes and whatnot). There will absolutely have to be people with average tax burdens > 80% to suport that. That's assuming that we don't finance things by borrowing, of course; 1/3 of US government spending right now is not even coming from tax revenue.

It might also be instructive to compare 76% government spending to the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... to see how that measures up against other countries.

[dragonwriter]

> Basic income would allow for people to focus on their own health and take work when they want to do something.

A very mature, robust UBI might, but we’re far from being able to support that. Realistically, a near term UBI increases opportunity and aggregate economic performance by reducing perverse incentives and friction in means-tested welfare programs.

It takes about $7350/year/person (average household size weighted by population is around 3.4, interpolating between poverty line by household size numbers that’s about $24,500 annual household poverty line) to have an on-average poverty-line-level UBI, which costs $2.4 trillion/year.

That’s 11% of GDP (and not all ofnit additional, because many existing poverty support programs would be subsumed), which is enormous but probably not unsustainable with political will—but you aren’t realistically, no matter how much political will there is, be able to maintain enough of a multiple to make work really unnecessary for most people—poverty level income after government transfers isn’t a “living income” level (which is why ”living wage” efforts typically target an income level that starts, as a baseline, about 4× higher for full-time work.)

[staticassertion]

> Rising the wages across the board raises prices sooner or later.

Does it actually have to though? If a company is still profitable it doesn't actually have to raise its prices just because its profits go down.

[nikanj]

Typical margins in various unskilled labour jobs are under 10%, and labour is usually one of the big ticket items on the budget. If payroll goes up 30%, prices have to go up - or the business goes bankrupt.

Next up, someone who saw Founder is going to point out that McDonalds makes money from rent, not selling food. Sure, that might be true for McDonalds-the-corporation, but the McDonalds-down-the-street franchise will have to come up with the payroll money somehow.

Your average business is way less profitable than you think.

[staticassertion]

For sure, I'd heard that 10% before and it makes sense - also aware of the McDonald's use case. I wasn't trying to imply that this was a simple or universal fix. Still, pulling unemployment to force people back to work feels really gross and I think we need to start to look at where there's room in that 10% (or more for other companies) to help people.

That said, do we need so many McDonald's? If, say, half of them closed, but the people who worked there had better lives and more free time, I'm inclined to believe the world would benefit. So maybe we end up with fewer low-skill jobs, but ultimately was society really benefiting greatly from that labor anyways?

And if the answer is "yes", ok, that's probably a case for the government to start providing or assisting in that service.

[sp332]

The McDonald's where minimum wage is $15 don't really charge that much more than the places where it's $7.25 though.

[NovemberWhiskey]

A Sausage, Egg and Cheese McGriddle meal is $5.99 in Montgomery AL, but $9.19 in New York NY.

[staticassertion]

I don't think this proves anything at all, but certainly not about wages. Food in big cities is often 2-3x the cost, which you can attribute to:

a) Customers having higher salaries

b) Property being massively more expensive

c) In the case of NYC, much higher property taxes

d) Yes, perhaps the cost of labor as well

Seems really hard to draw any conclusion given all of that.

[sp332]

What's your source for those? I checked UberEats and it's $5.06 in Seattle.

[maxerickson]

How much of the difference is wage and how much is rent?

[skynet-9000]

It's a lot more risky for the business though, which means that more marginal areas will not have a McDonald's if they can't do the volume.

[duckfang]

If a company relies on wage slavery and the implicit American threat of 'no work: no housing, no food, no medical', then those companies should die.

Edit: it's funny how I'm modded down, but this is straight up 'Socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor'. And it's doubly insulting that the unemployment "insurance" is being pulled en masse, with only regard to the monied elite.

Then again, I'd expect no less coming from a den of VC's and their ilk. They certainly don't care about the human.

[gruez]

>If a company is still profitable it doesn't actually have to raise its prices just because its profits go down.

Because companies/executives are known to be altruistic?

[staticassertion]

If it sounded like I was implying that companies would do that, that's my mistake - I was only saying that they could do that.

[gumby]

> Enjoying life is wonderful, but if everyone enjoys life, we'll all starve.

What a grim, zero-sum view. How about working and enjoying life?

[mbg721]

I think it's more accurate to say "If everyone optimizes for immediate enjoyment all the time, we all starve."

[UncleMeat]

And if everybody optimizes for capital markets all the time, people die without living.

[mbg721]

For sure! I would never advocate "maximize other people's money" as a philosophy around which anyone should center their life. The idea is to convince everyone to buy into an economy that works, and then live life around that.

[ABeeSea]

Prices are a function of supply and demand, not the cost of labor.

[missedthecue]

But if the equilibrium is below the cost of production, no one will bother producing.

[Barrin92]

if you mandate higher wages by making firms compete with welfare all you do is create wage-push inflation, because to fund the higher wages companies will have to raise prices. Your average business where low-paid people work, like services or retail or hairdressers don't have some crazy margins where you can magically conjure up money out of the ether.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Big companies can also lower profits.

I know it's a shocking idea, but it is possible.

Sometimes when that happens more money ends up in the local economy and hairdressers etc can charge more and pay more without pricing themselves out of the market.

It's the difference between an optimistic and inclusive economy and a depressive and retentive one which tries to minimise shared opportunity.

[Barrin92]

There's not a lot of big, profitable business in Montana (in fact apparently the largest company in the state has about 10k employees). What you're talking about is monopsony power which yes, can depress wages, but as the article points out Montana has an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent and every sector has labour shortages. It's a tight, competitive labour market, not a loose one.

There is no magic here. If everyone charges more and pays more you have, on aggregate, gained nothing. That's the point, if merely raising nominal wages would make everyone better off we'd have a magic button to solve poverty.

[yarcob]

> If everyone charges more and pays more you have, on aggregate, gained nothing

You would reduce income inequality. People who earn money from labour would now earn more vs. people who earn money from capital gains. It would also incentivise investing into production companies rather than passive investments like real estate.

[koolba]

> It would also incentivise investing into production companies rather than passive investments like real estate.

It would do the opposite. Investments with low to no labor costs would see increased investment as the returns are protected against rising labor costs.

High labor costs also incentivize automation of low level tasks traditional performed by low wage labor. Anybody who’s used a self checkout kiosk knows how that works.

[intended]

Automation is coming anyway. A kiosk costs many many magnitudes lower than even an unpaid human. The unpaid human still has to go to the loo.

This is not an argument to keeping people underpaid.

[sokoloff]

How would reducing the profitability of productive companies incentivize investing in them? If I knew this was coming I’d try to move my own investments (time and money) into activities which didn’t require high-priced inputs (like labor) to things which didn’t (like IP and real estate and maybe even crypto).

[prepend]

Actually it increases income inequality. Raising wages affects the lowest wage workers most, the same who are impacted by raising prices. The wealthy and ultra rich don’t benefit from increased wages, aren’t harmed by raised prices, but they earn an income on increased prices so result in higher income.

Think of it as the owner has a percentage of revenue. So prices go up, they make more even if most of it is given as wages. Obviously, firms want to raise prices but are limited by the market because of competition. If everyone must raise prices then the competition element is removed.

[badpun]

How? Higher minimum wages make owning a business less atractive.

[intended]

Minimum wages in America are so low, that an increase in minimum wages goes to spending on consumption goods. This drives economic activity.

Eventually inflation catches up and we are back here again.

To be fair the real issue is the wealth gap.

More money in the hands of poorer people means more money circulation and demand.

Money in rich people’s hands means more investment.

Currently far more is in the hands of rich people so we have incredible amounts of investment dry powder waiting to be deployed, and riskier and less healthy ideas being funded.

Optimum consumption and investment is the ideal way forward, and everyone gets a bigger pie (except the environment)

[mindslight]

> If everyone charges more and pays more you have, on aggregate, gained nothing.

Except for the rampant price inflation in housing, healthcare, education, which has happened over the past few decades. The higher unemployment benefits reflect the actual cost of living. Wages (and service industry prices) rising are unfortunately more of a trailing correction than a leading cause.

[ABeeSea]

>It is a tight competitive labor market

So raise wages enough to convince people to move to Montana.

[yarcob]

The logic is a bit misleading, because you implicitly assume that goods and services should be as cheap as possible, while rents and real estate prices are rising to all time highs.

If rents were lower, and goods and services were more expensive, then many people would earn more (since many low paying jobs are in retail and personal services). And it would be a lot easier to lower living expenses by just consuming less.

[sokoloff]

How does giving people more money lower rents though? If UBI became likely, I’d expect investments in the low-end of the housing market to do better based on the prospect of a rising rental market and more steady payments of rents owed.

[jonnycomputer]

I'd guess that if low-end housing were a more profitable segment of the market, then supply would increase, driving down the price.

[jonnycomputer]

This seems to be just a recipe for defeatism. It essentially argues that there will always be poor, that anything you do to fix it will just make them poorer. I just don't buy it.

And if its true, then tear the damn system down, because its failing us.

[jollybean]

"all you do is" ... there are are lot of possible side-effects.

[imtringued]

I honestly don't see the problem. Abnormally low inflation is a problem, unless a government cunningly takes advantage of the labor force to get ahead of other nations there is no benefit, it merely indicates that the private sector is not competitive enough and rising asset prices are just an indicator of an increasingly unstable economy.

Just think about it, China gives you free shit, you take advantage of the free shit to make your nation grow faster. Trump says, we don't want your free shit (trade war). Biden says, thanks to your free shit we can grow our economy (infrastructure).

Of course if you do neither, the free shit piles up in your country, prices for everything go down and people are unemployed as a result.

[rednerrus]

You’d have to pay a ton of money to get people to give up free time with their friends having fun.

[axiosgunnar]

So you appeal to the market forces (just pay more!), but ignore the massive distortion of market forces due to welfare that has increased a lot since the pandemic started?

[smnrchrds]

> The horror!

The scary part is the deficit we are incurring to pay for it. It's not sustainable. The benefits cannot be extended indefinitely.

EDIT: In Canada

[freeone3000]

The last time the federal government had a surplus was 2001. If we can manage to sustain a twenty-year deficit for expeditionary wars, but can't to sustain the health and well-being or our own people, our priorities are incredibly inverted.

[smnrchrds]

I live in Canada and was talking about Canada, as was the GP. I don't know the fiscal capacity of the US. But here, CERB/CRB are not sustainable with our current fiscal capacity.

[BurningFrog]

"If you can't afford what you need, you just have to pay more" is a true statement, but not much of a solution in most cases.

[jl2718]

I think the bigger problem is that the work environment has turned into political hell.