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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

There seem to be a million different issues with a proposal like this, not the least of which is that the allocation of the labor amounts to a corporate or municipal handout.

If you pay a living wage to a zillion people, they have to be assigned some sort of valuable work to do if it's not just a UBI system. The government already pays everyone to do the work the government wants done, so the target of this inflation-funded labor value would be, what, precisely? There's only so much garbage that needs picking up.

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And yet if we look around, in any city or town in the US, it’s easy to see there’s still garbage needing to be picked up; old buildings falling apart; sidewalks and roads in need of repair; the need for more libraries and parks, more librarians, more teachers, more doctors, more first responders, more social workers, more… everything?

At best, the public realm meets, but almost never exceeds our, needs. Oftentimes it doesn’t even do that! Sure— if you’re fortunate enough, you can avoid the system altogether (private school, private healthcare, personal assistant to organize your DMV appointment, etc), but that just proves the point: what is there to be proud of?

There’s so much that needs to be done and yet we’re not doing any of it. Instead we’re mostly coasting on the infrastructure (imagine if building highways then took as long as high speed rail today), (what’s left of the) social safety net, and institutions we created in the 50s and 60s.

Why?

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1979/teresa/acceptan... - we didn't dare to love.

it’s easy to see there’s still garbage needing to be picked up

I remember in my town the city council suggested that - pay unemployed people to pick up trash.

You know who the biggest opponent was? The union for city workers. It threatened their jobs.

You need to think through all the implications.

Have them join the union then, or make it a program sponsored by the city workers (who else to better manage it anyways than those normally responsible for trash pickup?).

That was also apparently one of the reasons that NYC could “never” have containerized trash pickup like literally any other city in the US. Surprise! Despite that, and a million other “intractable issues”, the city has essentially switched to trash containerization pickup overnight, and everyone is better for it.

The amount of work that needs to be done is nearly infinite. It's just that we don't currently value the work as highly as the cash it would take to pay the worker.

In a world where we decided to do this, there is plenty these people could be doing to contribute greatly to society.

It wasn't rhetoric - what work would they be doing? For whom? Who would assign it? Based on what priorities?

We are talking about a firehose of somewhere around five hundred billion dollars a year. Where do you intend to aim it?

Our infrastructure is woefully out of date and remains so because it's very expensive to fix. Let's fix it.

Fill pot holes, add and improve drainage canals, build damns and levees, etc.

Ok, who gets priority? Whose bridges get fixed first? Population centers? Rural places without a lot of traffic? Which states? What about the environmental considerations for the dams? Who gets the power generated?

This is what I mean by a "municipal handout" - this is a firehose of value, and the people you point it at will be enriched. The allocation of that value is not trivial, as everyone who holds USD is paying for the labor via inflation of the money supply.

It sounds like you just described a whole other set of jobs this will find, ie the managerial and beurocrat class that will oversee it.

There are already plenty of lists of dangerously unmaintained bridges and roads that lack the funding required to keep them safely operational. Start there. Trust me, finding infrastructure to work on in the US is not a problem.

> There seem to be a million different issues with a proposal like this, not the least of which is that the allocation of the labor amounts to a corporate or municipal handout.

What do you mean by "corporate or municipal handout"?

> If you pay a living wage to a zillion people

Are there currently a zillion unemployed people?

> they have to be assigned some sort of valuable work to do if it's not just a UBI system

There's not a dearth of valuable work to be done (especially once you divorce "value" from "profitable for the private sector") however in an economic sense the only real requirement to prevent this from being a UBI is the requirement to somehow show up. That is, the JG must be purchasing foregone output, so people shouldn't be able to work full time and then also collect a full time JG wage without doing any extra work. Of course someone can work both a full time job AND also work full time for a JG if they have the desire to work 80 hours. This may not be implemented in the program due to health concerns but economically speaking it's viable. The specific mechanisms by which this is achieved are implementation details.

> The government already pays everyone to do the work the government wants done

Yes this is done through permanent government programs, and the tax base is set up to accomodate this spending.

However there are errors and people end up involuntarily unemployed. A JG eliminates that problem.

> so the target of this inflation-funded labor

What do you mean by "inflation-funded labor"? I think this might be answered on the page under the heading:

Won't "printing money" to create jobs for all unemployed people cause hyper inflation?

> value would be, what, precisely? There's only so much garbage that needs picking up

There are two headings on the page that address this:

If the government creates jobs for all unemployed people won't they just be "bullshit jobs"?

So what types of work would be included?

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