Times may have changed but when I worked jobs at the companies that currently are complaining about labor shortages, the first thing they did during our on boarding was tell us how to sign up for food stamps.
I don’t really care if welfare queen businesses can’t stay open after they’ve been sucking at the government teat for decades in the form of welfare for their workers. When your level of “impossible to hire” is set below the minimum needed to sustain an employee, then you are useless to society at large and you deserve to go out of business
the 2800 total from stimulus payments at most helps defer 1-2 months of living expenses. The unemployment payments you cannot get if you are "are unemployed by choice" since by definition you had to lose your job for other reasons.
Why do you act like giving even the barest of bones to people is an assault on businesses?
That condition was waived during COVID. Plenty of people are on unemployment who were not fired.
The fact is, something like 50% of unemployed workers were receiving more than their previous wage. You can argue that we should be restructuring the economy or whatever anyway, but it's incredibly dishonest to suggest the US gave out the "barest of bones". The US COVID benefits were per-capita the highest in the world, by far.
> The fact is, something like 50% of unemployed workers were receiving more than their previous wage. You can argue that we should be restructuring the economy or whatever anyway, but it's incredibly dishonest to suggest the US gave out the "barest of bones". The US COVID benefits were per-capita the highest in the world, by far.
The unemployment benefit for corona was calculated to be a minimum wage job plus 40 dollars a month. A single minimum wage job is not enough to live in most of America. America is one of the costliest places to live. If this is more than they received from working a job previously then that job did not pay enough and their workers were likely getting benefits ala McDonald’s and Walmart employees on food stamps.
I do not think it’s dishonest to call it the barest of bones to give just enough to live from the richest country on the planet, _and_ I don’t think it’s dishonest to call that the barest of bones even if it’s more than they made earlier.
Do you think there should just be no welfare? If that’s the case then we disagree on fundamentals here and won’t ever come to an agreement on the Covid payments
No... they are still on unemployment from the loss of their job last year. The rules changed, but the people already on unemployment (voluntarily) did not lose eligibility.
> The unemployment benefit for corona was calculated to be a minimum wage job plus 40 dollars a month.
This is _on top of the existing state benefits_. You are pretending that the federal benefits are the only UI, which is just not true.
> This is _on top of the existing state benefits_. You are pretending that the federal benefits are the only UI, which is just not true.
No shit. If you look at my comments you might find me taking about this as additional and how 1 single wage job isn’t enough to live.
The real problem businesses are having is that being forced to figure out an alternative to working at a shit job for a year meant people figured out alternatives. People learned other skills and changed careers.
That’s on top of al the deaths. Most of these shit jobs were frontlines workers who got hit hard by Covid. You don’t need to kill everyone to make the labor market really tight. If you made it so there was even 1% less supply than demand and there’s still margin available to use then you’d see salaries skyrocket as firms need to start cutting their margin to acquire labor.
Nobody is entitled to cheap labor.
But I say on the margin, because it's not 100% of the story.
It's not easy to design a system that provides for the needy, doesn't cost too much, and doesn't give undue incentives to become/stay needy.
The "needy" have no claim on the output of the productive. There is no free lunch, there is no claim to the unearned. The solution is to get rid of welfare entirely, on principle. Anything less leads to this mess eventually.
As to the latter half of your comment, society has a claim on the output of the members of that society, given that the entire operation is built that way.
Society presents you with opportunities that you may not otherwise have. Stated conversely, the expectation is that the opportunities that one might not otherwise have are given to them -- the very definition of welfare.
To do otherwise is merely to try to pull the ladder up behind you, not some great moral ideal.
"Society" has no claim on the output of the members of society. Actually, there is no such thing as society above and beyond "the members of society." What you're claiming is that "the members of society" have a claim on "the members of society," but obviously it doesn't manifest itself in a just way otherwise you could only claim what you deserve, or in other words you wouldn't claim anything from anyone else without mutual agreement.
What your statement really means is that one group of people in society "the needy" have a claim on another group "the productive." As a productive "member of society" you are forced at the point of a gun (don't pay your taxes, then defend yourself from being arrested) to support the most worthless scum on earth as long as he has the social grace of being "needy."
Need does not produce food, need does not build houses -- those are productive efforts -- but need is the ultimate claim on the life and labor of all the productive members of society.
If you want to help the needy so much, I will not stop you, please feel free to spend every last penny you have supporting them -- but leave me out of it. I have a right to live my life as much as they have a right to squander theirs.
Yo, we took an informal vote and it looks like everyone agrees that businesses don’t “deserve” cheap labor.
Anyhow, even if I agreed with your concept of "justice", your definition of society is also wonky, if you imagine that it can only be defined by the sum of its current constituents.
Society does not consist of only your contemporaries, and is not made up only of the efforts of those who are currently contributing.
You, as a member of whatever society you are member of, benefit from the contributions of the members of society who have come before you. To some degree, you also suffer from the mistakes of those before you as well. The society you are a member of gives you a great many affordances, some of which you are able to benefit from more than others due to your circumstance, and some of which you do not benefit from at all.
If you believe that you have not benefited from the society you live in, at the expense of others, you need to think on it a little longer.
Then the needy have no need to participate in, support, and follow the rules of society and might as well support principles of anarchy. Why should they bother with this system they have no chance of succeeding in?
When we decided to form societies and governments, we already decided we were going to work together to help each other out--all this social contract stuff.
The increasingly extreme stages of capitalism we see now has instead recreated an abstract form of survival of the fittest in economics. This has slowly broken the social contract that gave rise to people agreeing to join and participate in societies to begin with. Many are struggling for basic needs, not just wants. Everything is about how much money and capital you can roll up.
If this gets too extreme, for the bulk of the population who aren't doing well (those who have no claim on the "productive") in this abstracted form of survivalism, why not just push for anarchy and revert back to lawlessness and the non-abstracted survival of the fittest?
What do the needy have to gain to follow this arbitrary abstract system they've lost in? They might have a chance of becoming a king in a different structure so they will support other options. If you get enough people who think like this, you will see major changes in government or perhaps complete collapses of societial structures.
Welfare needs to exist, we need to provide for those who can't provide for themselves. If we don't, we risk massive social instability because only the winners will have any sort of incentive to participate. Plus there's, I don't know, being human mixed in there too (maybe it's just me but I feel everyone should have some basic support).
Capitalism can only exist if you can provide the stable societal structure for it to exist within, for property to accumulate, for property rights to be granted, honored, and enforced. For that to happen you need to make sure the poorest participants have some interest in participating in your society and not rejecting it outright. I suppose force is another option if you like authoritarian systems.
Unemployment insurance serves a valuable role in giving people (barely enough) means to look for new employment - which can consume a lot of time - without needing to immediately seek new employment outside of their area of expertise and thus damage their chances of getting a new job in a field that suits them, and if a job suits someone then it suits everyone because it means someone is capitalising on their potential.
Wage-slavery is not how any employment system should work.
> Unemployment insurance serves a valuable role in giving people (barely enough) means to look for new employment [...]
Unemployment insurance is very weird: I agree that insuring against unemployment can be a good idea for many people. But why can't they purchase that insurance like eg their car insurance?
Then everyone can buy the type of insurance they want. They can decide how long they want their payouts to last and how high they should be. (And, of course, also how high their insurance premiums are going to be.) No need to involve one-size-fits-none central decisions.
(Though from what I can tell, when people prepare privately against bouts of unemployment, they typically 'self-insure', ie they accumulate savings, instead of buying an insurance policy.)
Just to be sure: providing publicly for the needy can be a worthwhile goal. But that should likely be means tested, and not called an insurance, and should probably also not be linked to _not_ having a job.
They can. And in many cases they should, on top of the mandated minimum insurance.
That won't stop the state taxing them and providing minimum insurance with the taxes. Why? Because unexpected negative income volatility that isn't covered has social as well as personal costs, and the simolest way to mitigate the social costs is to assure that people are insulated against some of the personal costs.
It's not only mandated minimum insurance, you also have to buy it from a monopoly provider. And you can't opt out by pointing to your pile of cash for self-insurance, either.
(At least not without jumping through a few legal loopholes.)
> That won't stop the state taxing them and providing minimum insurance with the taxes. Why? Because unexpected negative income volatility that isn't covered has social as well as personal costs, and the simolest way to mitigate the social costs is to assure that people are insulated against some of the personal costs.
That's just welfare, not really insurance. Welfare for poor people is a different thing.
By having employers pay into an insurance scheme that’s betting against them going out of business the idea is if the plant does go bust then the workers have at least a few months to figure stuff out (better than nothing!) and whatever social support systems the town has won’t be overwhelmed. And as the insurance is (ostensibly) a hedge against mass-unemployment it means that businesses with riskier business models or with greater-societal-collapse-potential will pay more to make up for it (though in reality I understand that employers’ unemployment insurance contributions are now at a fixed %, I might be wrong, please correct me)
You mention some social support system, but seem to be assuming that it has to be organised at town level? You also mention unemployment insurance, which you seem to be implying is organised at some wider geographic level?
If you change your comparison to systems with the same geographic support area, the difference you point out would vanish, or not?
To be clear: geographic diversification is good! That's why eg the long standing US bans on branch banking were so bad for their financial system. (And why Canada whose banks had branches in all corners of the nation had a much more stable system.)
But that's besides the point. The point was that paying people to be unemployed is, on the margin, giving them on incentive to stay unemployed.
As one alternative, if you pay people a universal basic income, you have less of these bad incentives. But you also have a much higher cost to the overall system.
Designing a good system is hard and full of trade-offs.
The question about how much employers contribute to some unemployment insurance vs how much employees contribute, and how much each of them _should_ contribute is also an interesting one. But independent of our main discussion.
From an economic point of view, who contributes doesn't make too much of a difference in the long run: employers care about total cost of employment, employees care about total benefits of employment.
There's however one benefit to having an employer contribution to things like social security (or equivalents). And the government of Singapore often employs this tool:
In a recession, one reason unemployment goes up is because the market clearing wage drops faster than actual wages paid. That's called 'stick wages'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity
In Singapore, when unemployment threatens to go up, our government cuts the employer contributions to our version of social security. Effectively giving everyone a wage cut.
When times get better, they raise the employer contributions back up.
(That's similar in effect to how a temporary burst of inflation can help employment numbers: because wages are relatively slow to adjust, an unexpected bout of inflation drop real wages in the short run.)
No. I wasn't assuming that. I'm just using a small town with a few large employers as a good rhetorical example.
> You also mention unemployment insurance, which you seem to be implying is organised at some wider geographic level?
It doesn't have to be, but the bigger the pool that's spread-out to diversify risk, the better. That's a given.
> If you change your comparison to systems with the same geographic support area, the difference you point out would vanish, or not?
I don't see any difference between a (hypothetical) city-wide unemployment insurance scheme vs. nationwide unemployment insurance scheme, except that in the city-wide case the risk pool is much smaller so the overall risk of the insurance fund being depleted sooner by a simple large mass-unemployment event is much higher.
According to Wikipedia Zakat is basically a tax on wealth (not income!); the funds are supposed to go to various needy / worthy people, but it doesn't mention anything about unemployment.
Anything I'm missing that you want to point out?
Zakat on produce (fruits and veggies), and cattle each have a different way of calculation.
As far as unemployment goes, if the unemployed individual falls into one of the categories of people that deserve Zakat, then he will get it, it's quite straightforward and very fair. Actually, an individual may be employed and still deserve Zakat.
This way, we ensure that the lower class of people are lifted up, while not overburdening society with insanely high tax rates.
Economists have also looked into the effects of wealth taxes.
Taxes specifically on the value of land held enjoy broad academic support: land is hard to hide or smuggle out of the country, and its supply is fixed.
> As far as unemployment goes, if the unemployed individual falls into one of the categories of people that deserve Zakat, then he will get it, it's quite straightforward and very fair. Actually, an individual may be employed and still deserve Zakat.
Yes, that's what I alluded to: making unemployment the condition to get assistance, gives a certain (perhaps small) disincentive to employment.
Of course, making being needy the condition instead of being unemployed, gives a certain incentive to staying needy. Traditionally communities regulated this via social mores and standards.
Interesting point. As far as I'm aware though, Zakat laws do not apply to land. Only if that land is making produce, then Zakat is owed on that produce. Zakat does not apply to properties either.
> Yes, that's what I alluded to: making unemployment the condition to get assistance, gives a certain (perhaps small) disincentive to employment.
Yes I think I agree. It also goes both ways. Not every unemployed person needs assistance. A rich retired person does not need any for example.
> making being needy the condition instead of being unemployed, gives a certain incentive to staying needy
This only seems to be a problem in modern Western societies that have certain social programs which people keep debating. To be more specific, just because someone is unemployed, they are not automatically immediately eligible to receive Zakat. They only take Zakat if they fall under one of the categories of people eligible to receive it.
Islam encourages people not to be needy and depend on others; they should work to sustain themselves and not be a burden (e.g. https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:296). Living one's life purposefully relying on Zakat is not something that is common (of course barring certain situations that are beyond one's control, e.g. some severe injury or an old person who has no family members left). If you look at historic accounts, there was a time during the Ummayad Caliphate where in Iraq there were no people left to take Zakat, because everyone paid their share and everyone was working. The poor class was all but eliminated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
Interesting! Land Value Taxes are seen as especially efficient, because they also apply to fallow land. Thus giving a strong incentive to do something with the land, instead of just 'banking' it.
> Islam encourages people not to be needy and depend on others; they should work to sustain themselves and not be a burden (e.g. https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:296). Living one's life purposefully relying on Zakat is not something that is common (of course barring certain situations that are beyond one's control, e.g. some severe injury or an old person who has no family members left). If you look at historic accounts, there was a time during the Ummayad Caliphate where in Iraq there were no people left to take Zakat, because everyone paid their share and everyone was working. The poor class was all but eliminated.
These kinds of social norms are common outside of Islam as well, and very doable in smaller scale communities.
It's a bit harder to keep them up when the welfare system gets administered at the level of large countries.
(Though not necessarily impossible.)
Of course, geographic diversification also has its advantages: even if a whole region is devastated, the rest of the country can easily pitch in.
Trade-offs everywhere.
From my understanding, Zakat will apply to any asset you use to bank things. Let's say you run a grocery store. Long lived items that are not sold after 1 lunar year will have Zakat apply to them. They're treated as money basically. Similar with land or property, if you're not doing anything with them, just banking them, then they get treated as money. Hope that makes sense.
I found that statement incredibly out of touch and lacking empathy.
wat?