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So basically, you can't define what problem it will solve; what it will cost; who it will benefit; where the money will come from; or pretty much anything.
Your plan is to provide an undefined amount of free money to an undefined group of people somewhere between zero and 350,000,000. If you can't define anything about it, how do you think it will work?
I understand the desire of proponents to be sympathetic but cannot foresee an equitable way to do this without alienating those who are excluded; where to draw the line between who's in or out will be a thankless task. I see the issue of reparations as much the same, I cannot divine a scheme that solves the altruism in this well meaning attempt to right a wrong from long ago. I favor we look forward, not backwards.
In the case of a negative income tax I favor establishing a living wage for all over 21 with health care benefits no matter how many hours worked, and keeping the minimum wage for those under 21 in the world of entry level McJobs.
In the case of reparations I want public funded 2-year Junior college / trade schools for all citizens to provide non-college people the skills and entry point into the skilled trades, including but not limited to: carpentry, electrical, plumbing, painting, drywall, roofing, concrete work, landscaping, excavating/grading, nursing, barbering / hair dressing, cooking, baking, massage, truck driving, chauffeur, motorized vehicle maintenance/repairs. Follow-on courses would be available for those who move on to running their own small businesses to cover employment laws, hiring/firing, taxes, accounting requirements, safety rules, permitting, licenses, bonding and other business topics. This will enable just about every non-college person to have a shot for a life that's at least somewhere in the middle class.
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The living wage--what amount of hourly pay is this? For an income of $50,000 a year, that's $25 an hour, assuming full time hours (2000 hours per year).
Is it reasonable that an employer who's currently paying a low level, unskilled employee $10 an hour is now expected to increase the employee up to $25 an hour to do stocking or working in a fast food restaurant? What sudden increased "value" does this employee bring to the table? Most of these low level, unskilled employees can't even do basic jobs and many of them have poor performance in other ways (drug use, lateness, trouble getting along with others).
Currently, jobs that require certain certifications and skills such as a nurse's aide or a pharmacy technician aren't making $25 an hour. They might be making $15 an hour if they're lucky. $5 an hour more than the guy stocking shelves and working in fast food, but they have way more responsibilities and they bring a huge amount more value to the employer with their certifications and skill level. And what about the manager who manages the employee doing the stocking or the fast food manager? They might be making $20 an hour now ($10 more than the low level guy). Are you going to raise the nurse's aides to $30 an hour ($15 raise) or the manager to $35 an hour ($15 raise) since the low level person is getting a $15 an hour raise?
It's all relative. You can't raise the wages of the bottom people and not adjust the wages of the people with greater skills/value too.
People who dream up this pie-in-the-sky stuff never actually think through all of the ramifications.
A BS job or pseudowork is meaningless or unnecessary wage labour which the worker is obliged to pretend to have a purpose.
American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bull**** jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."[2] While these jobs can offer good compensation and ample free time, Graeber holds that the pointlessness of the work grates at their humanity and creates a "profound psychological violence".[2] The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;
duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;
box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers;
IF Prosperity is based on prodigious production of surplus usable goods and services, equitably traded and enjoyed,
AND
the increase in labor population, whose output is amplified / multiplied by tools, machines and automation, generates more surplus goods and services
THEN
Why aren't we all enjoying prosperity from that surplus?
Oh, right. . . MONEY MADNESS . . . the belief that money has intrinsic value independent of the marketplace, combined with the fact that money is always SCARCE, FINITE and in DEMAND... which THROTTLES trade. If you don't have the money, you can't buy the honey.
Don't feel too bad, the whole system is corrupted by money madness.
One of the "funniest" things I saw reported by "reputable" scientists and engineers, was the "cash value" of asteroids. NASA press releases are side busters.
Some have estimated the economic worth of the asteroids in the trillions and quadrillions of "dollar bills." http://www.asterank.com/
As of March 2023, the total amount of circulating medium is 2.3 trillion and since all dollar bills are debt, they can never exceed the current national debt* (31 trillions).
So how can one "value" an asteroid as worth 1,000 trillion dollars, when the dollars do not exist?
ANS: MONEY MADNESS.
Now, if a consortium of the ten richest billionaires walked into "BIG BANKS R US" and said, we'd like to borrow 4 trillion dollar bills to fund asteroid mining, and reap quadrillions, guess what?
You cannot borrow that which does not exist!
So how can you measure wealth in something that does not exist?
Barking mad?
UNTIL the laborers and businesses can create the medium of exchange used to trade their surplus, they're VICTIMS of the money powers who rule this planet.
Negative Income Tax would not be much just enough to push people incomes above poverty level. We are not talking about thousands of dollars or anything like that. People who own businesses should be for this because it means they do not have to raise their wages.
Negative Income Tax would not be much just enough to push people incomes above poverty level. We are not talking about thousands of dollars or anything like that. People who own businesses should be for this because it means they do not have to raise their wages.
Businesses will always try to circumvent regulations, tax laws, edicts, mandates, or whatever which goes to show that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I don't know how to formulate a set of rules to apply a negative income tax for who gets it and how much. I much prefer an ironclad minimum wage with few if any loopholes.
IMO it's better to have Medicare for all which would take a huge burden off of businesses, especially huge firms like GM, Ford, etc, who seem to be nearly as much in the health care business as they are into their line of industry. It would be paid for by payroll taxes and simplify backroom operations of many businesses who try to figure out how and which choice to provide this employee benefit. The concept of this being a "fringe benefit" goes back to WW-2 when industry used it to entice / poach scarce engineering talent from other firms to meet their obligations to fill defense contracts. Truman tried to make it a national scheme in 1948 but it was derailed by the usual suspects.
Right now the playing field is not level as some firms provide this "benefit" and some don't. Some people stay in crummy jobs for this benefit instead of finding more likable employment. Employers would like to shed this cost and have it taken out of the employees paycheck which would work if we had a living wage as our minimum wage. The cost doesn't scare me, Medicare has only a 5% overhead cost while private insurance skims 15-25% off the top to perform a middleman's job of taking money in from firms and doling it out to providers. This one fix, a major one for sure, would go a long way to make moot the concept or need for a negative income tax which in some respects is a work-around to help people pay for healthcare insurance. Let's fix THAT problem, not create another Rube Goldberg tap dance around the real problem that a negative income tax is partly designed to fix.
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In the US, roughly 40 percent of households paid no federal income tax in recent years. That is a huge number, which is akin to a negative income tax. I am wondering if the increase in minimum wages in many states plus the increases in overall wages in the past few years (due to high inflation) might push some of these "tax-free" households into the tax paying category.
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