Poll: 1.8M Americans have turned down jobs due to unemployment benefits

But that's assuming someone would be working full time, right? When I was working on a restaurant (as dishwasher), I wouldn't get more than 20 hours in a week, usually around 15 hours iirc

A business has a number of levers to pull if they want to suppress wages; outsourcing (nationally and internationally) is usually the primary means. How do you suggest we increase the value of people's time without the Government setting the floor? (not to say the Government is the only way - just 'A' way).

My brother is fully disabled and unable to work, and he gets $1,200.

Most the jobs they can't fill are 24 hours per week 8-12 bucks an hour slog fests for the not so princely sum of 800-1200 whereas people are getting paid 2500 in unemployment benefits NOT full time jobs paying substantially more than unemployment.

Your concerns are fanciful.

Imo after all taxes, a lot of 40 hr/wk salaries are a meaningless gain over $2500

Take a fake employee named Susan. Presently you pay her $12 an hour for an average of 24 hours per week. In a normal month Susan receives 4 weekly paychecks for a grand total of 1152 before taxes or deductions with which to pay per bills.

Susan is serving you a plate of food for $15

Now imagine you raised her wages to $14.40 and offered her full time. Her wages are now 2304. She is making twice as much money and now the food sadly must cost... $15.90.

But you say Susan doesn't want to work full time she has other responsibilities, other jobs for example!

This is because you and your industry have specialized in each paying Susan to run around between her 2-3 jobs so she can afford to live so she can get enough hours to live without any of you having to pay benefits. It could also be because your industry pays too little for anyone to afford to live so you have collected workers who have lesser need because for example they are spouses of well paid workers earning supplemental income. As the cost of living rises faster than incomes this isn't a stable equilibrium. Even Sam spare time may find he needs to earn more to live and if Sam moves on to a real job, graduates college, moves out of his parents home etc you can't be sure you can replace him at your less than survival wage.

The service industry isn't a benefit to America its a diseased kidney and if the entire industry as it is died not much of value would be lost.

Well, the workers who are now unemployed paid these taxes when they were employed. So no, it was not free. It works like insurance. Having insurance is a good thing. I agree it should not encourage people to not work forever, but it is not like unemployment benefits are generous. They are bare bones payments.

When it becomes clear that there aren't enough hands on deck (or at desks, or in factories) to "keep the lights on" then we can say there's a problem.

Until then, it's good for people to have more financial independence and be able to find a job that doesn't treat them like cattle.

As you mention, this breaks down when you take it to an extreme (eg. 200 mil). But that's not where we are and nor is it where we're headed so I don't see the equivalence.

> The U.S. Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance program is funded through unemployment insurance taxes paid by employers and collected by the state and federal government. The taxes are part of the often-discussed payroll taxes all employers pay

And in order to claim from it, you must have had enough contribution to it yourself, indirectly through your prior employers.

The amount you receive from it is then proportional to how much you've indirectly contributed to it.

Edit: Okay, to be fair there is a small amount that is indirectly paid from taxpayer, that's because employers who pay on time get a small tax break themselves, so indirectly it means the government budget will need to ask more of other taxpayers since those employers get a small break:

> Employers pay federal taxes of 6 percent on the first $7,000 in annual income earned by every employee. Employers who pay on time get a tax break at 5.4 percent

But this is pretty minimal, and it's in the form of a tax deduction.

Edit2: Also, at a higher level, it isn't unreasonable to argue that technological advancement and the overall increase in production efficiency and productivity gains could go towards allowing a certain amount of people not to work at all, and others to work less. You just need to change your perspective from thinking that people are motivated to work only from loss, and that actually a lot of people would be motivated to work from gains. For example, instead of thinking people only work in order not to starve, you can start to think people would work in order to afford better quality food. Or that instead of working for not getting rained on, people would be motivated to work for affording a much bigger home with a bigger tv, and a pool.

You can tell that many people are actually motivated to work for these added gains, look at how many rich millionaires and billionaires still work full work weeks.

So for this, the question would be, did we make enough progress in efficiency and productivity that we could have all work be motivated from gains, and no longer need any of it be motivated from loss?

This system can then be constantly adjusted to the current levels of efficiency and productivity and what it can afford.

So the idea is you'd see how much of the negative incentives you can eliminate for work.

Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they would die? Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they'd be homeless? Etc.

Obviously, I'm Canadian, and so you'll see that I'm biased in this model, since it's somewhat the Canadian model. But I'll give an example of the tuning, because you can tune this to quite the granular levels if needed. Universal healthcare for example is a way to say: Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they would die from disease or injury or old age? And the granular tuning allows us to even do things like make it dependent on the specific disease, injury, etc. You can do that by tweaking what gets covered and to what extent. Maybe we can't afford to treat fully people to really expensive treatment, and so these people would still be forced to find ways to pay for it and thus work. Etc.

If unemployment covers cost of living better than a low wage, no benefit, long or odd hours job where in summer you need childcare and your own transportation then that job can be expensive or even more costly than having no income/unemployment at all.

A lot of commenters on here seem to miss that a good chunk of the nation makes under $10 an hour (<$20k/year) without benefits vs median CS/IT work at $60k+ depending on the state plus benefits. You can't label a segment of the economy "essential" then attack low wage workers for not wanting to contribute to the same economy that screws then six ways from Sunday.

You know, there is a free lunch in the sense that there is no point in increasing productivity when you have already saturated demand and therefore increasing demand (even through artificial means) allows increases in productivity to become viable again. We've seen it with slavery and societies with a huge lower class. The middle class and above don't value labor because it is so plentiful and therefore don't use it efficiently and end up wasting it on useless things. Zombie companies are the extreme case of this. You have so many "useless" people working on bullshit jobs that you can have entire "useless" companies!

"It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." - some dude

A lot of Asian countries already do this.

If I made $9 or even $15 an hour at a day care center, you can be sure I wouldn't give a fuck about the kids.

The capacity for a government to run essential services at a loss is a long standing component from even the US founding fathers. Hamilton wanted to adopt all debt from the colonies as a way to consolidate credit, unite the colonies financially, and put stock into the federal government with power to manage the nations debt vs individual states. Jefferson was against the policy but it (and other Hamilton drafted plans like a central bank) were approved through compromise.

You obviously have an opinion on it which of course you're entitled to, but unless I'm misreading, the tone of your message is that the CPI is obviously calculated correctly and there's no controversy surrounding it.

From what I have seen there definitely is, here is just one example from Forbes, but if you're interested in digging there are a lot of qualified opinions on this out there.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/06/24/the-m...

No.

Money is power and too much power gathered in too few hands is a recipe for a disaster. You may consider me as something of a radical since if I had any real power to implement policy, there would be an upper bound to what you can own ( say 3 Hawaian islands ).

I do not consider some poor sap trying to decide whether it is a better thing for him to get $cheap_food as a result of unemployment or minimum wage job an issue of the same magnitude. In fact, their only nexus is that they happen to involve money.

I am pleased that this money supports others who are less lucky than I was.

The cost to raise a child is estimated to be about $250,000, and the average amount a person will pay in taxes is $340,000.

By my calculation that is a $90,000 "free lunch" to society with the investment to make that largely born by the parent. The people actually getting the "free lunch" are those who don't have children, but benefit from the investment made by parents.

The government isn't willing to do this. It's only willing to offer an extra $300/week for 26 weeks.

Why do you believe the government is willing to push the price to infinity? How would that benefit them?