Hacker News Reader

If the government wants people to have something, the government should provide it, and provide it to everyone.

Does the government want people to have healthcare? Then the government should pay for it, not require employers to pay for it. If the government wants people to have paid leave or a pension, then they should pay for that too.

Imagine if we tied other benefits to employment. Maybe the government could require your company buy you a car and dinner every night. People need transportation and food, right? So lets make employers provide it! It's free for the government and legislators get to feel virtuous for providing it, when actually they have just offloaded their costs to someone else.

It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.

> It's madness. The government should provide these things, and employers should focus on whatever it is they do best -- not being a healthcare provider.

The startup I worked for in Italy had about 40 people by the time I left.

They dedicated ZERO person hours to anything health care related. No insurance, no administration, nothing.

Italy has plenty of other obstacles for startups of course, so that in and of itself didn't make it easier to do one there - but what a nice thing for a business to be able to ignore.

Agreed, and employers should pay taxes to fund the government services they rely on. Unfortunately the corporate world has decided that having to fund an extra HR person to deal with healthcare is preferable to any sort of taxation and oversight. Society suffers. The last 50-75 years of corporate thought has been to attack any sort of taxation entirely.

It is good for companies, it makes it that much harder to quit or retire if you can't ensure your health care remains.

It doesn't really matter what tax pays for this. Ultimately, the customer pays for it (the average person). Corporate taxes are just a roundabout way of taxing the investors. This means that it will affect where investors are willing to invest - they will still want investments to pay back what they expected. This means that investors will simply put their money elsewhere to get their expected returns.

Also because healthcare and other benefits provided by your employer are unreliable. If your employer can easily fire you when you're sick (it's illegal where I live, but there are probably ways around it, and I understand that in many US states it is easy to fire people for any reason), then getting sick directly threatens your health insurance, at exactly the time you need it most.

Also, if something is essential, then it's also essential for unemployed people. Providing it through employment makes no sense.

Don't forget that you are still paying for healthcare even if it's not called a tax. Part of the revenue a company makes needs to go towards paying for healthcare, which comes out of the pockets of investors, owners and employees, and customers need to pay higher prices to cover it. Maybe it doesn't go to the government, but at the end of the day it is effectively a tax, as you have no choice over whether you pay it or not.

In 2017 the US spent roughly twice per person on healthcare than France ($10,224 vs $4,902) [0], the next few months will show how effective that spending has been...

[0] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

The government requires a minimum wage, and companies pay for it...

The government doesn't pay for anything. Taxpayers do.

Now I'm not against taxpayers paying for something so long as all taxpayers pay for that thing that everyone enjoys. What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.

Everyone who gets the benefit should also have skin in the game to pay for that benefit.

> What isn't right is when someone votes for a tax they won't feel the burden of.

The real freeloaders are the well off republican voters that keep voting for more and more tax cuts, deficits be damned, putting trillions of dollars of burden onto the next generation.

So children should pay for playgrounds and schools?

Schools are a net benefit to a community. According to some studies, it’s an annual 18% return on investment and a lifetime 11x return per dollar spent. There are not many places that one can get that kind of return over many decades. We’re pretty foolish for not investing more.

Or you can bring in highly educated and highly motivated immigrants at almost $0 cost to your taxpayers. It's just the cost of vetting and processing applications. You also have the benefit of only getting the good eggs with few to none of the bad eggs. It's almost certain that H1Bs and other skill-based visas have a much much higher rate of return.

I'm not opposed to the idea of immigration, but proposing it as a replacement for education is bizarre. If you have a population of uneducated idiots, pretty soon you won't be able to afford those highly educated immigrants anymore.

If they have income yes. If they are supported by adults then those are the people paying.

By the time my kid pays for his sandbox he'll be too old to care about it.

> "The government doesn't pay for anything. Taxpayers do."

By that logic, taxpayers also don't pay, but their employers do. And they don't either, but their customers do. It's the cycle of money in every economy.

But perhaps more important than that: in a democracy, the government represents the citizens (including the taxpayers). The government pays for stuff on behalf of the citizens for the benefit of the citizens. At least if the system functions correctly.

Smart employers don't offer sick leave out of the goodness of their heart: if the sick employee stays home, they don't infect others, so overall productivity is higher. And of course this applies even more with the pandemic.

Yeah, but that's a long term kind of decision-making and market pressure that, as I said, really only works in a steady state environment.

Right now Amazon needs to worry that if they offer this, everyone will take off sick out of fear. They have to worry that if that happens that it won't happen to Walmart, who didn't offer the benefit. There isn't time for a feedback cycle to work, they're worried about losing a years worth of revenue right now.

You just can't trust an employer's self interest to align with ours at moments like this, for the same reason you can't trust our own self interests to align (c.f. people working when they're sick because they need the money, or sick new yorkers fleeing to other states -- both decisions made in immediate self interest).

And Amazon, being Amazon, generously offers their employees unlimited unpaid time off for the time being.

> Employers are never going to get this right. Amazon specifically (and obviously they're not alone) is looking at a huge financial impact to "doing the right thing" here. ....Realistically, governments are the only entities capable of providing this kind of security in extremis.

Oh come on. Amazon make huge profits (and McDonald's and Apple and Starbucks, etc.)

Yes, providing this kind of sick leave would reduce their profits, but they are absolutely 100% capable of doing so.

In almost every developed country in the world they do.

The government just needs to make it law, then Amazon won't be at a disadvantage to their competitors, they'll all be on a level playing field.

It's just a question of what's more important - corporate profits, or employee health, safety and ability to pay rent and buy food.

> The government just needs to make it law

That's exactly what I said.

> Amazon make huge profits

Not taxable profits ;)

> Bezos isn't any different than anyone else here, really. Maybe someone will get to him to be kind

I just can't help but think that this is an incredibly naive model of how corporations function.

I'm not saying I disagree with the premise but I do think it would be incredibly helpful to the people pushing for this to give off a greater sense of how multi billion dollar corporations function. It just really can't be that simple.

Sick leave backed up by social security works well in most social democracies I'm aware of.

> Obviously you're being downvoted by the libertarians here,

Much like how when libertarians haven't touched the levers of power in decades you get indignant tweets about how they've caused the government to fail at something, we get comments here about how the top-voted comment in a given thread is "downvoted by the libertarians."