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Comment by NhanH | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand in all the "jobs are moving oversea" discussion is that the opponent seems to be advocating for economic inefficiencies (creating/keeping jobs in the States at all costs, comparative advantage be damned) as a mean for keeping a healthy society. Shouldn't the correct and proper solution be some appropriate measurements like basic income or better social welfare in general?

Jobs are a mean to create wealth (and by extensions, welfare) for a society. I don't understand the reason for trying to reduce the wealth being created in some notion of keep "jobs", and if the inland American economy can not generate enough wealth for some reasons, then we have bigger problems to deal with.

Essentially, this is a wealth redistribution issue, and should be treated as such, focusing on creating "jobs" seems to be the wrong idea to go at it.

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Let me highlight something I found in the data as an example of how this is nothing more than a gamed system that has nothing to do with Americans not being available to fill jobs:

Nested in the available data are several records for "Associate Data Scientist" and "Senior Data Scientist", meaning that the employer advertised the job as a role with this name.

(By the way, these visas were APPROVED!)

They then have listed as the category for the visa job role "Operations Research Analysts" for the Associate, and then "Computer Occupations, All Other" for the Senior Data Scientist role. Interesting how two jobs which sound very similar have completely different classifications for the same company, huh?

The best part: The prevailing wage listed for the "Associate Data Scientist" is $48,901 and the "Senior Data Scientist" is $61,110, because those wages are dictated by the bucket they are placed in.

The actual wages which were payed for these roles was $80k and $70K, respectively.

These rates are so far below market value it's ridiculous.

The point is that the law is supposed to be in place so that companies can get workers when Americans aren't available, but the reality is that they simply allow companies to refuse to pay the market rate.

The employer in question is Walmart, in case you are wondering.

I'm not disputing what you are saying at all. But having to hire American over foreigners knowing that company have to pay higher wages is still economic inefficiencies (the same as outsource, and actually I was specifically talking about outsourcing, not H1B visa).

Would you use the same argument for hiring discrimination?

I.e. if a sector of the labor economy is discriminated against, do you say, well, let's fix that issue with government subsidies/negative taxes? If women get paid 80 on the dollar, we make the government make up the rest rather than legislate that companies to pay justly?

I don't follow the similarity between my argument and your question on hiring discrimination, so I'm not actually sure what is being related here.

Anyway, the government already subsidized certain demographics, for one way or another (various types of welfare, and the population also support a bunch of subsidize that doesn't exists right now: parental leave comes to mind). In essence, it's not a question of "do" or "do not", it's just matter of deciding where to draw the line.

Another distinction is that not all discrimination and welfare discussion is about economic, a lot of policies have to do with moral, ethics and general humanity. With those constraints in mind, the consideration change a lot. The original argument I was replying to was purely economic. If you want to make a moral argument of "people need job to have self actualization and feel good about themselves", then it's not a common argument around here, and certainly worth considering, but completely different.

The parallel is in saying that inefficiencies should be avoided and that companies should be allowed to pursue savings wherever they can. If so, if they can skirt the system by hiring cheaper labor and creating unemployment for those lower skilled workers, then if we don't care about employing lower skilled workers but compensate them with alternative means (basic income, etc) then why not address other ills the same way? Don't address the root of the issue, just subsidize it away.

For the original discussion, subsidizing is addressing the root issue (distribution of wealth problem), there is also the solution proposed a hundred years ago by some guys name Marx and Engels ...

The example you brought up with women being paid 80 cent on the dollar is a whole can of worm that I'm not willing to open right now. Let's just put it simply that I think that specific issue is more complicated and one of the biggest difference is that it has more than just straight up economic consideration.

Who's going to pay the cost of a basic income system? Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).

The globalization that allows the wealthy to eliminate their first-world workforce also allows them to avoid just about any tax they don't feel like paying.

Assuming that if the system work out when everyone/every company pays their required share of tax (otherwise, it's back to the wealth creation issue, and advocating for more economic inefficiencies won't help), and it's just a problem of tax avoidance, then the solution is to fix the taxation system.

I'm not saying that everything is fine and dandy, I'm saying that pointing finger to random chicken in the sky and shoot them won't solve the real issue. There are a lot of problems, but American politics right now is a bit engrossed in the wrong kind of trivialities.

> Right now the tax base rests on the middle class (which is rapidly collapsing).

Where did you get that from? The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.

Edit: at a 50% marginal tax rate if the 1% get 60% richer through this kind of automation and offshoring, we could lower the tax rate on the bottom 80% to zero!

Edit #2: If the 1% get 120% richer, we could start handing out checks to everyone in the bottom 80% equal to what they're paying in taxes today! See where I'm going with this?

> The wealthiest 1% of Americans alone pay 50% of the federal income tax. The bottom 80% pay only 15%.

You're confusing wealth with income.

I'm aware of the distinction but it doesn't make a difference to my argument.

If MegaRoboCo Inc. and their contemporaries are making $1 trillion a year each in 2050, the tax revenues (corporate, capital gains, income on dividends, income on executive compensation, whatever) can be enough to support the resulting mass unemployment.

Well you certainly have a point. I would argue that a working society is a society with purpose and is ultimately healthier than a society without jobs but adequate social welfare. But more pragmatically, I don't think a truly livable basic income program is in this country's DNA.

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