Obviously correct, and Hastur's illustration of "whatever we subsidize we get more of" is spot-on for the First Rule of Macro as well.DBTrek wrote: ↑Fri Sep 07, 2018 7:15 amThe dilemma you guys aren’t addressing is this:
So ... how do you solve they problem? Do it Hastur’s way and simply say “No one with jobs gets welfare”? How does that play out? More people stay out of the job market and stay on welfare.
- Welfare is largely means tested and based on family size, meaning a family of X people receive $X until they earn above a certain amount.
Not all jobs are living wage jobs, many are dumb-monkey jobs that aren’t worth the cost and of automation. These jobs pay minimum wage or slightly higher, but they don’t pay the $X required to move a family of X entirely off welfare.
Attack the employer side? Say “You must pay anyone you hire enough to move them off government welfare rolls”? How does that play out? Elimination of all jobs that don’t pay $33k a year (or whatever the maximum welfare limit is for an unskilled worker with a family of 12)?
Trade offs have to be made with both approaches, and both trade offs seem to be worse than what we’re doing right now.
Either way, the larger point that dragged me down this rabbit hole in the first place was simply dispelling this idea Walmart/Amazon has a workforce *only* because taxpayers subsidize it. Taxpayers subsidizing the poor and businesses having dumb-monkey jobs with low pay are not correlated. Taxpayers are subsidizing the poor either way, and every job isn’t a living wage job. When a poor person takes a non-living wage job it’s not benefiting the business, who could’ve just as easily hired an unskilled worker who is not on welfare.
DB's point (i.e., a $X/hour job is worth $X/hour, no matter whether that job is filled by a bored millionaire looking for dates or a desperate single mother with no other prospects) is unassailable. Bernie Bros can try all day long to say that ain't so; I'm willing to be convinced, but what I've learned since the mid-80s on the topic makes me rather skeptical about the prospects.
Which brings us to the normally unseen disaster implied by the Bernie Bro "Eat the Rich" mentality. Another way of saying "whatever we subsidize, we get more of" is "whatever we tax, we get less of." Taxes are negative subsidies, and the rule is same, whichever of the two ways we say it. When we decide to get Bezos for his "fair share" or to "get him off welfare (?)" or whatever, by taxing the company based upon who it employs and for how much, we are guaranteed that the demand for the cheapest (that is, the most unskilled, most needy, most government dependent) labor will go down. That's as sure as the sun coming up in the morning.
Now for the unseen: what else are we disincentivizing? Competition for Amazon. By making the cost of hiring otherwise attractive labor more expensive (and likely prohibitively expensive), we are giving Amazon an edge on everyone else. Amazon is big enough to survive the tax through automation, &c. The smaller players in the market don't have that option. Most significantly, the players who might otherwise want to get into the market and compete with Amazon, et al, never open up shop at all. Rational actors recognize the barrier to entry and find something else to do. Who benefits? Amazon. Who loses? Every consumer and potential competitor and their potential employees.
The market will figure out the optimal distribution, Bernie Bros. All you are ever going to do by having the "taxpayers" get "input" into hiring is screw things up for everyone in sight, except for the richest players, who can pay their way around your SJW nonsense. Wow, well done.
