[daraul]

This is a powerful point to ignore. The Great Recession has shown this trend might be establishing itself already; the percentage of people not participating in the workforce in any fashion spiked, hasn't recovered, and isn't showing promising signs of ever recovering.

What a basic income will tend to do however is reduce the need for a minimum wage. Currently the minimum wage exists to solve a problem: People need to survive, and to do that they need to work enough to enable that. The problem is with workforce participation being compulsory, absent a minimum wage the price for labor in unskilled work rapidly drops. Where you can find someone desperate for 7.00 an hour, you'll find someone else equally desperate willing to take 6.90 an hour. There will be yet another person willing to take 6.80, and this trend continues until you reach a point where you're better off scraping whatever you can do to survive.

So it's actually preferential for the labor force to shrink some; instead of everyone competing for the tiniest slice of a paycheck just for survival, you'd have a labor force with much more power, ensuring that you don't have to settle for work at 7.50 an hour just to eat. On the contrary: You'll stand on a corner and flip a signboard around in the air for 20 bucks a day only if it's worth your time, and to buy the extra 6-pack or whatever you desire, but don't need to survive.

[mason55]

> You'll stand on a corner and flip a signboard around in the air for 20 bucks a day only if it's worth your time, and to buy the extra 6-pack or whatever you desire, but don't need to survive.

This is key here. Plenty of people are willing to work beyond survival for luxury goods.

[dragontamer]

On the contrary, I see a falling dollar in the world market which is reinvigorating the US Manufacturing industry. As China's middle class grows, they become impatient with China's loose policy of eradicating their own currency to promote local jobs. The Chinese middle class has begun to rise, and with it, the cost of production in China.

In the US, the weaker economy has hurt the US Dollar, making manufacturing cheaper again in the US. So for the first time in over a decade, Apple Computers is building a US Factory.

[daraul]

It's not just a weaker dollar causing manufacturing to return to the US, though (especially relative to China) that is definitely part of the cause.

Rising fuel costs threaten global supply chains. Especially in areas that have a less-than-cordial relationship with the US such as China, there is some uncertainty that things will stay as they are.

Another powerful trend that is reinvigorating the US manufacturing industry is the re-evaluation of the spoils of offshoring. Companies such as GE are discovering that there are many side benefits to bringing production back to the US: Shorter supply chains from manufacturing to retail, better quality from production, and greater feedback from shop floor to engineering.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-inso...

One of the biggest unaccounted costs of offshoring was the effects it had on the lifecycle of a product. That article points out how GE was able to take a $1600 water-heater from China and sell it for a profit $1300, just by manufacturing it from the US. It turns out that in off-shoring the production, they lost most of the feedback in the product's lifecycle that enabled them to refine the design far beyond what they thought was 'final'.