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Nintendo Kid posted:Unemployment rates only matter when employment is necessary to stay alive. By modern standards you could say that unemployment during the 50s say was easily 40% or something due to how many women kept house rather than work. What you're really talking about here is labor participation, and in that sense we've already got around 40% of the working age population who are unemployed. The actual unemployment rate only looks at people who are actually looking for work. Labor force participation rose pretty steadily as women started working, and it's falling again since there aren't actually enough jobs to support full labor participation.
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Nov 2, 2014 18:25
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archangelwar posted:The idea that it would have any economic effects distinct from other existing forms of wealth transfer is pure ideological fear of the poor getting money. This shouldn't be too surprising, since one of the beneficial side effects of any form of guaranteed income (along with other social programs like universal healthcare) is to equalize worker bargaining power. There are fewer reasons to put up with bad pay or a poor working environment if you know that you won't starve to death or end up homeless if you're forced into a period of extended unemployment while looking for something better.
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Nov 3, 2014 19:09
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My Imaginary GF posted:I keep saying make it about domestic entitlement elimination, and you've got an economic issue that is sellable to the base. I don't get why people keep ignoring this fact to focus on The problem is that you can't fully eliminate 'entitlements.' At the very least you'd still want something like a single payer healthcare system since it's ultimately cheaper and more efficient than what we have now. In fact, one legitimate problem with basic income systems is how to deal with people who make bad decisions. We don't want anyone starving and it's costly to have people avoiding things like preventative care for financial reasons, so on some level we still need basic social safety nets.
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Nov 4, 2014 01:32
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our expats
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My Imaginary GF posted:"We're giving folks freedom from entitlements. If they choose to squander that freedom on new rims and tires, they'll have to find a way to keep feeding themself. Either they work and keep buying food and eating, or they don't." Since you're apparently being serious about this social darwinism stuff, you probably need to realize that this can't work the way you want it to because there are individually rational choices at low income levels (and $15k/year certainly qualifies) that are socially expensive. We don't want people foregoing healthcare, even temporarily, because there's a large social cost in uninsured people showing up at hospitals. It's cheaper for everyone to be covered as a basic right so that financial considerations don't prevent people from getting basic preventative care. Food is less of a concern since I doubt most people are stupid enough to let themselves starve, but healthcare is very much something that's still going to be a major problem. If you want to do away with other social safety nets, then you have to enshrine in policy some form of minimum income that guarantees the payout will automatically scale over time to guarantee some basic standard of living. Effectively, someone living on minimum income needs to be able to afford basic necessities like food, shelter, transportation, and healthcare for the system to be meaningful. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 16:52
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wateroverfire posted:Let me chew on that for a bit. What do you make of the rationing the U.S. had to undertake as the war progressed? A lot of capital was repurposed to supply the war effort and it seems like the QOL of american citizens at home took a dive due to scarcity of things like metals, gasoline, and even food. This is sort of irrelevant for the topic at hand, isn't it? The US government rationed during the war because there was an actual need to do so, but the rationing effort also insured that there were enough resources for use at home by those who needed them. Gasoline wasn't rationed out evenly, for example, but it was rationed out to households on an as-needed basis. In other words, supplies were legitimately limited, so some people having to do without wasn't indicative of the government's inability to manage the economy and quality of life was probably about as good as could be expected given the circumstances.
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Nov 6, 2014 23:23
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