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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

If you can break even on 50 to 80% salary in government benefits, and you work a low-skilled job that you can easily drop and find a new one, why would you go back to work? Let’s end extended unemployment and see if the desires of workers have changed.

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It's at least worth considering the possibility that, if potential workers are really choosing to stay home for as long as they can rather than go back to these specific high-stress, low-pay and low-benefit jobs, perhaps the temporary expansion in unemployment benefits is not the "problem" we should be taking a closer look at.

I mean, if we're already subsidizing low wage jobs with social programs like food stamps, why not just make the extra UE benefits permanent? It'll rob those companies of productive labor they were paying substantially less for and force them to either do without or pay more.

But how would the government afford to pay all these benefits indefinitely? Unless the new normal will be to just keep taking out more debt in perpetuity.

> if we're already subsidizing low wage jobs with social programs like food stamps

I imagine by not having to pay as much for social programs, like food stamps. We're already paying for social programs indefinitely.

That is basically the plan, yes. "Modern Monetary Theory" is that USD-denominated debt is free because you can print the dollars to pay it back at any time.

> USD-denominated debt is free because you can print the dollars to pay it back at any time

Are you aware of this thing called "inflation"? Do you understand that printing more dollars dilutes the real value of a dollar?

Govt. debt has been used to pay for high military spending etc. It has happened before many times and can happen again. A better way to solve these problems could be to not just throw money at them but build preventative systems.

Spend what's needed, then take in what's needed to balance it out, through a combination of taxes and debt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

Yeah, that worked great for my home country.

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2019/modern-monetary-...

The new normal should be a combination of moderate deficit spending (nothing like the COVID stimulus packages - those are special crisis spending level events) and significant tax increases for the wealthy (think 1950 level), plus wealth taxes for the ultra-wealthy.

I would love something like this. Honestly I think it's the right answer to minimum wage, the whole gig economy independent contractor thing, and if we can just get healthcare removed from the employer/employee relationship we can get a real situation where the only people working these jobs "want" to work them. As in these jobs give enough X where they consider it worth it rather than they need to work to live.

This is the obvious answer, and downvoted for some reason.

If you give people close (or more) money than they would receive from actually working, most won't work.

This is just a consequence of the semi-free job market the US has. Indeed people would return to work if their benefits were taken but would this be a good thing? Should people be forced to work like this? These jobs will soon be automated anyway. The key question is how we can share the benefits of automation widely such that we don't have giant swathes of penniless workless population.

People have been saying automation will make a bunch a people unemployed "soon" for how long now? 10 years? Yet we still reached record low unemployment pre-COVID.

Once automation reaches the level that you describe and there's a labor surplus, then we'll easily have enough resources to support UBI. But don't kid yourself, we're far from that point.

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