Long Article on Modern Monetary Theory and Universal Basic Income (bankrupt, insurance)
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That is not human nature - for most they will be fine just doing nothing - look at how many welfare queens there are and even more before welfare reform. We have already seen what happens - the majority are ok with never working and the few that do choose petty criminal or drug dealer as their profession so they don't have to give up their benefits.
I take the opposite view -- the number of people who want to work and want to be productive outnumber those who want to sit on the couch and be idle. Look at the labor participation rate: nearly 2/3rds of adults who are not retired or in jail are either working or actively seeking employment. Human nature for most is to be creative, to do something, to be productive doing something.
I take the opposite view -- the number of people who want to work and want to be productive outnumber those who want to sit on the couch and be idle. Look at the labor participation rate: nearly 2/3rds of adults who are not retired or in jail are either working or actively seeking employment. Human nature for most is to be creative, to do something, to be productive doing something.
Look at the data when we were paying people not to work with enhanced unemployment benefits - most employers were begging people to return. Also why would so many want to retire early except to NOT WORK. Those 2/3 working or looking for work are doing it because they need the money, not because they want to. I can give many more examples - you are deluding yourself if you think the majority would not rather get paid to not work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NJ Brazen_3133
MMT is what we are living in right now.
Not at all correct - that claim is made by those that want to say it works. Real MMT has no basis in reality.
A long read but it makes some thought-provoking points. One of them is: we are all accustomed to the idea of tax first, then spend. Under MMT, it's spend first then tax. The author makes the case that the only way for the nation to achieve maximum capacity utilization is through government spending; this will cause incomes to go up and the excess can be sopped up with taxes later. His rough estimate of deficit spending needed is 27% of GDP, or about $6T per year.
Also: "The only spending that is truly inflationary is the spending that outstrips the ability of the economy to meet that particular demand with supply." I believe the data certainly bears that out, prior to the pandemic there were years of near zero interest rates with lots of money creation, record levels of cash (or their equivalents) in private and institutional hands and inflation was very muted. Post-pandemic we are seeing inflation, and while the jury is still out, it appears to be a disrupted supply chain issue. The supply chain issue is still a problem, as of Sep't 10, there were 50 container ships at Long Beach backed up out to sea.
Again, I'm sharing this because it's an interesting take, not that I endorse or agree with all of it.
You might be able to get away with this for a time if you are the world's reserve currency, which we are today, we will not be for long. Once that goes the ability to borrow and spend gets reduced dramatically as the fed can't eprint money so much. Why groups are turning in dollars for tangible assets now, they know what is coming.
How much is the labor shortage a function of demographics and the housing crisis?
What I've seen locally are two things -
1) A body problem.
Boomers have been retiring at an ever-increasing clip since ~2015, and the pandemic cause a HUGE wave of Boomer retirements. Pretty much everybody over 60 I know who was close to retirement, or could at all swing retirement financially, said "I'm done" when all the pandemic crap went down. They HAPPILY took the buyouts that were offered to them rather than go through all the changes. Even if those weren't available, many of them decided to make do with what they have rather than put up with all the crap.
There are not enough people to replace them. There simply are not equivalent younger people out there to do 1:1 replacements. Pre-pandemic I did not realize how big of a problem this was. We'll put out job advertisements and NO ONE qualified applies. At least no one who has precisely what we're looking for.
At the service level lower end economy, there are not enough replacements for people who have retired a quit because there are literally fewer bodies. Gen Z is a smaller demographic, proportionally speaking, than the 3 generations ahead of them. Millennials and Xers are moving in to middle management now and taking over for the exiting Boomers. They don't need nor have any reason to take the low end and entry level jobs. What we've done at my work is internally promote as much as possible, to the extent some people I wouldn't have expected to get promoted succeed, because our external recruitment is so abysmal.
2) Housing.
The cost of housing has risen out of control. Where I live, the full-time wage needed to qualify to rent a 2-br apartment SKYROCKETED from like $16-17 an hour in 2018-19 to around $27 an hour in 2021. For anything under $27, which are most of the low end jobs, it makes it where it is not worth it to work unless you already have housing taken care of. No one can move in for jobs anymore. So the service job labor pool is limited to people like high school students and trailing spouses. The typical service wage pre-pandemic was about $13-15. Now it is $16-19, but that's still not enough. In fairness to the businesses, they can't pay $27 for jobs that simply aren't worth $27, because if they did have to start paying current people are are making $25 something like $35 and explode their labor costs. It's a stretch to push $20 for most of these jobs.
This is also a problem for external recruitment.
Last edited by redguard57; 09-16-2021 at 05:27 PM..
LVT is just another term for property tax - the US already has some of the highest property taxes in the world. No matter how you fund it, UBI makes little sense.
Only lazy, unambitious and retarded (I don't mean disable or handicapped) people want UBI. All they want is to just sit there and have little income (enough for their monthly food, clothes and rent) to come in every month. But then, eventually, they want more money (want the UBI to be increased, like they are entitled for it) for booze and drugs and gambling for fun because they say people who work have more money than they have, and those people who have more can have more fun than they (the lazy ones) - that's not fair. All they want to do is not to work and just whine.
If there's UBI, the people who work hard will have to pay more and more tax; otherwise, where can the government have money to give the ones who don't work? The hard working people will be mad; and millions of them may become lazy because who would want to work hard and pay lots of tax for the lazy ones? Then they will have not much left either.
I haven’t read the article and not even sure yet where I stand on this issue but I did hear an interview once with Andrew Yang, a Democratic candidate in this last election. He explained that the money would come from the businesses and that they would tax the AI/robots that replace the humans. I’m not so sure about that because how do you count the number of machines in a system? No sooner will the govt get it figured out than business will figure out how to cheat. All this led me to think my darkest thought ever, which is that once enough people are laid off and collecting UBI, industry will see no need to keep these people around. If you know what I mean.
And I’m going to get on my soapbox again...the best way to lower costs to the job makers for human labor is for everyone’s healthcare to be paid for by the govt....at least a basic level of care and then if you want higher quality and shorter lines you can pay for it. If we did that then I believe that more and higher quality jobs would be created without the higher costs of hiring humans over AI.
And I’m going to get on my soapbox again...the best way to lower costs to the job makers for human labor is for everyone’s healthcare to be paid for by the govt....at least a basic level of care and then if you want higher quality and shorter lines you can pay for it. If we did that then I believe that more and higher quality jobs would be created without the higher costs of hiring humans over AI.
Labor and overhead costs have little to do with a company's decision to hire; if it does, only on the margin, e.g., if wages are sharply up maybe they'll hire 5 instead of 6. The number one driver of job creation is demand. When demand goes up, sales go up, revenues and profits go up -- this is what forces businesses to scramble to hire up. They don't want to miss out on higher revenue because they don't have enough staff.
In theory UBI will help ensure the working class always has money in their pockets, which will increase aggregate demand, and in turn ignite increased employment to meet that higher demand.
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