I agree 100%, and I must say having immigrated from Australia, it's probably the worst thing about America.
It feels like Employers have all the power in America, and therefore all the Employees are basically slaves, and are treated as such.
I think it's important for a functioning society to value it's workforce over the profits of businesses.
>We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [applause]
My favorite welfare program they've created (called NEIS) is for those who want to start their own company. You get paid the above but get to build a company instead of having to search for a job (which is very useful when there are no jobs available in your area).
Taxpayers would basically be funding all the hackathon projects that are "Uber for X".
What's the alternative, work at McDonalds and develop no useful skills in the meantime?
Additionally, _some_ of these companies will actually work out, so there's that bonus too!
Overall, it sounds like a pretty solid investment in the workforce to me. A lot better than paying people to sit home and "look for a job" in an area where jobs are hard to find, at any rate.
Do something useful. (FYI, someone paying you is a strong indicator of "usefulness".)
I'd rather my taxes went to someone trying to build a business than someone that "tries" to get a job only to get fired after a month every time.
As an American, I often fear that responsibility, self-reliance, and self-determinism aren't respected by my countrymen.
So I'm rather heartened to hear that.
and you feel that an employee better exemplifies these traits than an entrepreneur?
taxes isnt a living person, so it cannot demonstrate self-reliance/self-determinism.
this doesnt even make any sense
While you're right that the doll bludger should "just get a job", you thinking that isn't going to change the fact that they won't.
Such programs aren't VC funds, they are a way to get tiny companies off the ground and to legalize under-the-table gigs (which are worse for both worker and state in the long run).
I'd way rather my tax dollars go towards people attempting to create something useful and improve their community than giving them food stamps and leaving them to themselves, which often leads to them sitting around home feeling useless and doing nothing with their lives.
honestly, if you are being treated like a slave, move to another company. if you cant, you don't have skills employers want. get them.
during the recession, many companies used their position of power to their advantage. the smarter companies (and now more successful) used the recession as an opportunity to get the best workers.
the ironic thing is, to try and force employers to treat everyone like stellar employees would probably result in treating everyone poorly.
the other commentor rightfully pointed out that this is a deflection rather than a counter argument.
enabling entrepreneurs is what makes america successful. people like them want all the success while crushing businesses. it dont work like that.
I moved from Australia to the USA because it's the world leader in technology, but if I was in ANY other profession (including starting my own company) I would have stayed in Australia.
The USA is great if you're in the top 1% or work in technology, but other than that there's little reason to migrate. That's why he's proclaiming that employees are basically slaves, general quality of life and job happiness for everyone else is far better in Australia.
And business success rates and the economy is doing just as well in Australia as it is in the USA. You can have the best of both worlds, you just have to look at the data instead of being stuck in ideology.
It's totally ok if you think the USA should favour the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else, but you're doing a disservice to yourself and your fellow Americans if you refuse to even look at the data or consider the possibility that there could be a better way.
person b: go back to your own country if you hate it so much here!
yeah, we are headed for a really productive and intelligent debate here.....
The comment was phrased in a way that could be construed as a personal attack and that's not ideal, but it can equally be read as a genuine point if we don't jump to the immediate conclusion that it was a personal attack - The point being: if conditions are more favourable in the home country wouldn't a rational actor move back to their home country and launch there, instead?
I don't agree with the OP by the way, but I interpreted the comment first in the way I described, rather than as 'grr if you don't like it go home'.
How is it a non-sequitur when it was in direct response to this quote?
No UBI proposal has ever said anything about "treating everyone like stellar employees" - it's an irrelevant point.
'treating everyone like stellar employees' is not irrelevant. we are not in the utopian world where technology has made resources so abundant that everyone can have what they want without working extra hard for it. maybe in 35+ years, but this PRECONDITION is necessary to even begin to think UBI would work.
SO when an employer is forced to pay all employees a basic income, they have to start paying uneducated / unskilled / low performing employees more. when revenue has not increased, this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees.
#2 if all of your needs are GUARANTEED you might be surprised to find nobody would be willing to do many jobs.
Wait, I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Employers don't pay a basic income, the government does (so by extension we all do, through taxes).
I'm not sure how it will shake out, but there are pressures to both reduce and increase pay in a BI system. Everyone is getting a base level of income, so wages across the board will drop (but companies will be paying more in taxes, so it's offset somewhat). On the other hand, there will be less applicants for crap jobs, so the wages for those will likely go up. Then again, maybe a crap job isn't so bad if you don't have to do it 40 hours a week, and since people won't need the work as much as want it for increased spending power, maybe you can fill what was a single position with 2-3 part-time positions, and people will accept less pay because they aren't doing it all week long.
The biggest problem with moving to BI is that there are so many variables that are affected it's impossible to say with any confidence how it would settle. Experiments like this help with that, but even they can only go so far when the people are interspersed with others that are not on a BI system.
BI is not paid by employers to employees. You seem to be confusing Basic Income with some kind of minimum wage.
> this means taking pay raises / income / benefits from the other employees.
Or it means reducing returns to capital; this is fairly expressly the case in UBI funded by increases in taxation of capital income.
Although, raising the minimum wage would be a good thing. Here is an article that shows how the lowest paying companies are effectively ripping off the rest of the economy:
http://prospect.org/article/confronting-parasite-economy (Confronting the Parasite Economy)
The articles is written by Nick Hanauer who is co-chair board of Pacific Coast Feather Company, his families business.
Here is a excerpt from the article which explained what happened when minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour in Seattle.
In 2014, Seattle took its high-wage model one step further, passing the first $15 minimum wage in the nation. Restaurateurs and right-wing think tanks warned of ruin. Businesses would close. Workers would lose their jobs. The invisible hand would punch us in the mouth. But it never happened.
As the Puget Sound Business Journal recently reported in a front page story titled “Apocalypse Not: $15 and the cuts that never came,” six months after the first wage increase went into effect, Seattle’s restaurant industry is growing faster than ever. Even celebrity chef Tom Douglas, who had warned that Seattle could lose a quarter of its downtown restaurants, has continued to add restaurants to his local empire. “Douglas has now changed his mind about the law,” the PSBJ reports, “saying he was ‘naïve’ to think that restaurants would raise pay on their own.” That he was. And then on February 15, 2016, The Seattle Times reported that ADP’s national survey of economic vitality ranked Washington state number one in the country for both wage and job growth. And you thought higher wages killed jobs. Not hardly.
seatle is successful because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom, not because of minimum wage, that started just over a year ago.
I would be interested in where you have got the data from for that assertion that it was because of a tech boom and subsequent real estate boom. At the moment I believe the person who actually employs people as a large manufacturer than what is mentioned here in a comment.
If you would like to give your sources, I would be interested.
Yeah, I know some people think that we live in a meritocracy where if you have wealth, you deserve it, and there's no luck or dishonesty or cheating or inherent unfair inequalities — but it's obvious you don't come to that view by looking at the evidence, you come to that by something along the lines of reading Ayn Rand and just believing that nonsense or something similar.
In reality, lots of wealth is captured by those whose action provide no positive value to the world. Lots of success involves luck. And lots of people working shitty not-so-productive jobs have the potential to be far more effective and UBI would assist that in ways other approaches do not.
Anyway, even if we disagree about tons of things, you could have productive discussions with people if you didn't insist on bullshit implications like the idea that all the people in high-paid jobs are hard-working, deserving, productive folks while all low-paid people are the opposite.
From everything I understand about the world (from personal experience and from reading and learning from others), there's a strong correlation between success and unearned privileged that is at least arguably a stronger correlation than the one about hard work. So, the most success comes from all three factors: luck, privilege, and hard work — put together.
It seems like you think even acknowledging luck and privilege is tantamount to denying the significance of hard work.