[sdenton4]

More like a labor subsidy, backed by taxes... Which would need a minimum wage law as well.

This seems like a great idea to me! Making it cheaper for businesses to hire people for these jobs would lower prices for everyone, improving accessibility of the services.

[_heimdall]

I may just be missing how this would work.

How would this help lower prices? The taxes have to be paid for by someone, and that cost should largely end up landing on the consumer.

It seems like we'd be changing who's hands the money moves through, but it still has to be paid for one way or another. If that's the case we'd risk higher prices since taxes have to subsidize prices and cover all the costs of running the program in the first place.

[sdenton4]

Tax the rich, and use the funds to pay a portion of the wages in targeted jobs, reducing the amount that the business has to pay to hit minimum wage. Then businesses continue competing on prices, but have substantially lower labor costs, bringing down prices for everyone.

In the end, you use money from the rich to pay for socially beneficial jobs. Exactly the sort of thing government is for: ensuring that social goods are provided.

[_heimdall]

That's an extremely complex economic change, I wouldn't be so certain we know exactly what would happen.

Taxing the rich can have unintended consequences. First you have to change the tax code so they actually get taxed and can't dodge it, those rules alone would be difficult to write effectively and would likely mean changing other parts of our tax code that impact everyone. If the rich do get taxed enough to cover a good chunk of wages, demand for luxury items would go down so too then would the jobs that make those products and services.

Once subsidized by a UBI, at best workers will continue to work at the same levels they do now. There will be an incentive for them to work less though, potentially driving up the labor costs you are trying to reduce. How do we accurately predict how many workers will reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely? And how do we predict what that would do to prices?

The idea of taxing the rich to bail out everyone else is too often boiled down to a simple lever that, when pulled, magically fixes everything without any risk of unintended side effects.

[Capricorn2481]

But the idea of not changing the tax code because it might affect others, continuing to let the rich pay 0 taxes, is foolish.

There's an obvious wealth gap that's increasing and the people up top are getting even less oversight as we speak. As you say in your post, you don't know what the effects will be because it's not simple. But I see no compelling reason to continue with the oligarchy

[_heimdall]

Sure that would be foolish, my point wasn't that taxes should remain as-is forever though.

My point was that we can change taxes to a system that we think will work better today, but we can't claim to know what the actual results will be years from now.

The claim made earlier in the chains was that taxing the rich to subsidize wages would lower labor costs and lower prices. I don't think we can ever know well enough how a broad reaching change will land, and claiming to know prices will go down isn't reasonable.

[sdenton4]

I'm not actually talking about ubi here: it's subsidizing labor for some class of essential jobs.

[_heimdall]

Yep, sorry about that. I got my threads mixed up.