The Long-Term Unemployed Are Doomed
slate.com
slate.com
Many of those people would indeed be employable in St. Cloud, Minnesota or Mankato, Minnesota in entry-level, manual-labor jobs, but unemployment benefits have, till now, provided enough income to allow living independently without having to go to work each day. I'll see what happens to the people I know best, locally, when the "emergency" extensions of unemployment benefits at long last cease. There are definitely employers in this frigidly cold state that are still on the lookout for willing workers, and I wish well to everyone seeking work. There are probably quite a few opportunities yet available to the people who will look for them.
But picking up and moving is not an easy thing, especially with family. Speaking from experience by moving my family to three different states spread across the lower half of the US because of work, moving can be a difficult and expensive thing to do. Most of our current debt is due to moving.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072755
P.S. The cities in Minnesota mentioned in the article that was submitted to open the thread are not particularly close to North Dakota and are not tied to the petroleum economy. They are college towns and rather pleasant to live in.
I wouldn't be surprised if Minnesota's economy was experiencing at least partial boom due to North Dakota in any case. You have tons of weekend warriors who drive 6+ hours a day routinely that aren't afraid to drive 6 hours to civilization, and even though the oil fields have infrastructure, they're still sourcing it from wherever they can get it.
- Lack of motivation/initiative. It seems far away, it seems risky, etc.
- Afraid of the cold
How would an unemployed person find out such a thing? His nearest social circle would likely not know such a thing, and this is not the sort of thing you randomly find out.
Just because you're unemployed doesn't mean you're stupid or illiterate. They can find things out by searching the web, just as we would. If they can't afford their own internet access, they can get it for free at the local library.
Source: I live near the oilfields in AB.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fargo+nd+cold&oq=fargo+nd+co...
That might be hard to scrape together if you're unemployed and living with parents.
1 - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/16women.html?_r=0
2 - http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2013/12/05/new-cold-snap-prom...
Housing availability is the big killer, plus lack of experience with a place that can -40F in the winter before windchill and 100F in the summer[1]. Going with the lack of housing is an overloaded infrastructure (water, sewer) that is being built up as fast as it can.
[edit] Also, a lack of people trained in the vocational skills needed for work in the area.
If I had the cash[2] I would try two things. I would probably build a combo capsule hotel, drug store, and laundry mat in the area (for single folks).
For a second thing, I have been fascinated with using pre-fab modules (think cargo container-ish) with standardized utility hookup that could be plugged into a shell building. Build a couple of building down the oil fields and see if the containers migrate.
1) this does play hell with the vehicles. I wrote a grant 20 year ago that included the stats on that and car maintenance given income. It was an interesting combo.
2) we are talking $$$$ millions
http://www.fargomonthly.com/blog/boom/
$44,564 – The average annual wage in Fargo, according to Job Services ND. The average for North Dakota is $49,088. The national average is $42,979.
121,017 – The civilian labor force in the Fargo metro area as of June 2013, according to Job Service ND. There are 4,344 unemployed people creating an unemployment rate of 3.6 percent.
6,713 – Number of Fargo jobs advertised online as of Aug. 11, 2013, according to Jobs Service ND.
87,347 - The total number of employees in Fargo, according to Jobs Services ND.
Add in the fact the cost of living is probably the lowest in the country and you have a great recipe for success, even for people who have been unemployed for a long time. If I had been unemployed for a while, Fargo would be the first place I would start looking.
So when these 16 million people move to Fargo ND (a solution costing billions of dollars - just for the move!), there's going to be jobs for them, right?
This is like responding to "hunger crisis in Africa" with "I saw a french fry on the park bench over there".
How so?
Say we have a town that has had a steady population levels of around 50,000 people for about ten years. Now suddenly they have a sudden influx of 10,000 to 20,000 people in a few months time.
Local government services would be immediately strained. For instance, suddenly there's a few hundred to thousands of new students that they somehow have to find room for. That means rooms, supplies, teachers, staff, and so on. Your kid was getting a good education when it was twenty a class, now it's forty a class. Unless they had the foresight to plan for that they don't have the money. For the next budget year they have to raise taxes to afford the new stuff they need. This really sucks for the people who have been there the whole time and haven't necessarily seen a raise in their pay because they aren't involved in the boom.
Wear and tear on infrastructure is suddenly much worse than normal requiring more frequent repairs ruining the established schedules and budgets. They have to raise taxes to cover the new costs.
Housing becomes premium. That house next door your son was thinking of buying with his new wife so you could help raise the grandkids? Can't afford it. Small apartments that used to be $500 are now $1000 or more. New cheap apartments and houses get put together as quickly as possible to meet demand. These will start to degrade around the time the boom starts to decline of which the community will have to deal with.
More crime that the small local police force that's accustomed to dealing with people they know will somehow have to find a way to deal with it all. Will need to hire more officers they don't have the budget for.
Restaurants are happy about the new business until they realize they need to hire new staff at much higher pay than before. Why work as a busboy at a buck over minimum wage when they can go out to the fields for three-to-four times (or more) than that? Suddenly a low paying job must pay a great deal more to get anybody to apply. That's good right? Until you realize the restaurant raised its prices so that the $5 sandwich you really liked is now $9.99 with no drink.
Since house prices have gone up that most likely means your property tax bill will be higher the next time its due. Granted, depending on local laws.
So, let's say a few years have gone by and somehow our little town has managed to deal with all these new and strange challenges they found themselves with. Then the boom goes away as they often do.
More infrastructure than they really needed has been slapped together as fast as possible and now needs to be maintained because it exists.
Now we need to start firing local government people because we no longer require them and the tax revenues are reducing because the boom has busted. Suddenly large number of people needing jobs that don't exist.
People who got the restaurant jobs at inflated pay will never leave because now they have the best jobs in town. The restaurant has to fire them anyway because they can't afford them since no one can afford the food now. These people won't be happy about going back to a buck over minimum in this type of job.
People are leaving town because no one can afford the over-priced housing and apartments which is currently all falling apart because they were cheaply made. By the time the pricing becomes affordable everybody's moved away. Now you have abandoned housing that's ripe for even more crime.
And I could easily think of more but I'm getting long here.
I admit that much of this is worse-case scenario type stuff but it's all possible without planning to deal with it. I personally seen some of these things happen in big cities that had the housing booms. The same thing happening in a small town would not go over well.
This just isn't a reality in most cases, however, I see that Minnesota caps the maximum weekly benefits at about $600 (before taxes) per week, which would definitely allow a single individual with no dependents to live independently without needing a job (if they receive that much). I am skeptical of the argument that unemployment payments discourage individuals from working, having once collected UI myself, I know first hand how frustrating and humiliating it is trying to make ends meet with the a paltry UI stipend, but when I consider ~$2000 a month, long term abuse seems a lot more viable.
For generations, people moved. To Oregon/California just because the east was too crowded and didn't have much opportunity. To the midwest to work in the tire, steel, and auto plants. To the south for the new auto and manufacturing plants.
And now it will be to the plains for jobs in the construction and energy industries.
How long can people use the excuse "I can't afford to move", when you can't afford not to? How long will they use the excuse "I'm upside down on my mortgage?" when they aren't going to be right-side up anytime soon and aren't working as it is?
Pack your shit up and move and send money back home to your family if you don't want to bring them. The long-lasting unemployment benefits just keep 'workers' stuck where they are, and as a result it keeps their families and future generations stuck in the same place.
For this post, I will be a hypothetical long-term unemployed person.
Moving to even a low-cost area is going to be at least $1000 for deposit on an apartment and utilities, plus the first month of rent. I'll also need groceries and transportation or gas.
Keep in mind that my credit, assuming I even have any, is maxed out because I have already been using it to supplement my living expenses and job hunt for the past few years.
I can't afford to move, and that is not a fucking excuse.
Depends where you are.
The UK has a problem with migrant workers getting stuck - they come here for work, don't get work, can't afford to go home, can't get help to get back home because of legal complications.
But the problem is getting the job before you move there.
Even if I have a good job waiting for me, if it doesn't pay -- in advance -- for relocation, I'm stuck.
Maybe there's some sort of loan business opportunity using the future tax write off as collateral or means to help pay it off?
So it doesn't help people who already pay no federal taxes, which is almost everyone we're talking about here. But anyone who lives in the US and pays no federal taxes is getting a pretty amazing deal to begin with.
I think the assumption is that most of people in this group are unskilled high-school drop outs but I wonder how many of them "have some college" or a degree and are just unwilling to "lower themselves" to working on an oil pipeline or any other kind of work associated with being blue collar. The assumption that people will take any job they can get, at least in my experience, is just plain wrong. For instance (I know this is just anecdotal) but I know quite a few people in NYC who attended elite schools that are perfectly happy to collect unemployment while they wait for a high prestige job opening (e.g. "I'm waiting for the New Yorker to have a job opening"). The thought that a government grant would get these people to go work in an oil field in South Dakota is absurd most of them are horrified at the thought of leaving Brooklyn. I was thinking of this article from Mike Rowe:
http://profoundlydisconnected.com/cnn-viewer-has-questions/
"Right now, in the manufacturing sector alone, 600,000 jobs are currently available."
If that is indeed the case there is something else going on.
Put another way, you seem to suggest that because people cannot find jobs they want, they should be considered unemployable; Why is this true?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists [2] http://www.amazon.com/State-Against-Blacks-Walter-Williams/d...
edit: if you follow the money on the bootleggers side, you will see that unions and companies with high capitalization support increasing minimum wages.
Some corporations support raising the minimum wage only in the sense that it would bankrupt their competitors business models. (cf Costco vs Wal-Mart). Although as someone in support of a higher minimum wage I don't see that necessarily as a bad thing.
Unions are less than 7% of the private sector workforce and shrinking, their influence has been quashed, for the most part ever since Reagan dismantled PATCO in 81.
Economically, a minimum wage sets a price floor for labor. At higher levels it also can induce demand by increasing the velocity of money through the bottom rungs of the labor force. Especially since the poor spend a much higher % of their income than the wealthy do.
And with respect to your [2], I counter with [0]. Minimum wage actually has very little if any empirical affect on unemployment.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Funnel_Graph_of_Estimated_...
I think a developer who was "consulting" or "freelancing" (read: unemployed) for the past six months would get more callbacks than one who'd been working at McDonald's, or needed to telecommute from North Dakota.
I suppose you can mitigate that effect by leaving it off your CV, but working a "crappy" job is still going to take away time and energy that could otherwise be spent improving your skills for your desired career.
That's basically true. I'm of the opinion that we need a real basic/guaranteed income program, because what we have right now is a terrible hodgepodge of TANF + unemployment + SSDI (http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/) which only serve to paper over the fact that we have more people than there are jobs.
This problem will only get worse in the future as automation hollows out the middle of the labor market.
Yeah, pretty much, though most of them can subsist for a long time on handouts before they actually die.
> that sounds like it would be massively expensive in terms of increasing crime levels and providing hospital care for all the dying people
Yeah, pretty much. This is one of the reasons the U.S. has the highest incarceration rates and health care costs of any industrialized country by a wide margin.
> Honestly it sounds like something out of a dystopian cyberpunk novel.
If only it were fiction.
Yeah? Like what?
> It's not an either/or situation where you run out of unemployment and then your next option is death by exposure and starvation. Come on.
It's not like you run out of unemployment and die from exposure the next day. It's a very slow, gradual process. Many people survive for years on the street before they succumb. But unless something changes, or they are taken in by friends or family, the vast majority of the long-term unemployed will end up on the streets (or in prison) and sooner or later they will die there, because the sad fact of the matter is that at the moment there is no place else for them to go.
In reality, very few people end up on the streets to starve and freeze to death.
Most of them manage to survive without starving or freezing because food and shelter are sporadically available. But it certainly doesn't extend their life span.
Yes, that's true (though "choice" is a little bit of a misleading term to apply to a mentally ill person -- their "choice" is often between the street and some mental institution which is not much different than a prison). But I don't see what that has to do with the topic at hand.
> There are shelters in most places
It is an extremely rare shelter that is not already heavily oversubscribed, especially when the weather turns nasty.
> the 'smart' homeless people hitchhike somewhere warm
That's true too. But the crop of folks who will be hitting the streets in the next few years as a result of unemployment benefits coming to an end are probably not very street-smart.
But your point is well taken: we will probably not be seeing dead bodies of homeless people being hauled away by the truckload. But (I predict) we will be seeing a lot more homeless people.
Those jobs don't exist. They just don't. The jobs are in China or they are being done better by mechanical sorters at Amazon.
Even if we figure out a relocation plan, that solves a minor part of the problem. Worse, those low skilled, high risk employees are now in another part of the country, first to be laid off and with no social network once they are.
There is NO solution that doesn’t involve either make work programs OR a guaranteed income OR people homeless and starving.
I think that's a pretty narrow view. There are other possible alternatives, like: new businesses opening; completely new industry forming that doesn't require high skill levels from its workers. Given an individual situation, I don't think it would be too difficult to imagine additional scenarios.
I'm not trying to trivialize the difficulty the long-term unemployed are facing, but I don't think it's constructive to throw up your hands and despair, either.
When was the last time that happened? Every current industry is shedding employees. New industries are either small or require a high skill set.
Columbia, MO. NCAA Div I university.
Lincoln, NE. NCAA Div I university.
Iowa City, IA. NCAA Div I university.
Fargo, ND. NCAA Div I university.
Waterloo/Cedar Falls, IA. NCAA Div I university.
Mankato, MN. NCAA Div II university.
St. Cloud,MN. NCAA Div II university.
Rochester, MN. The town Mayo built/healthcare.
Notice a pattern here? At least a third of the "metro" locations mentioned are homes to NCAA Division I or II universities. Low unemployment? Yep. Low-paying jobs (even for technical positions)? Yep. (A friend of mine from one of the above Div. I "metros" says semi-tongue-in-cheek: so many grads love the area and want to stay, a convenience store job requires a Masters).
Rochester is essentially healthcare through Mayo. If you're not a healthcare professional, good luck. IBM used to have a major presence there, but I don't know how much now.
Let's look at our choices presented by the author. 1) Each of us gives money from his pocket to pay people to do things nobody else wants them to do, whether sitting on the couch, sweeping the streets, whatever, or 2) Be insane and cruel.
Certainly such a discussion must have a bit more nuance than that, right?
I'm not going to dive into the argument, because there will be plenty of it, mostly non-productive. I just wanted to point out the premise the article is written around. Such premises do not make for good discussions by people of varying opinions.
One option he does not even mention is that there could be an open an honest public debate about what to do, and at least make a new program (not UI), which would specifically and accountably address his issues.
Another thing which is not directly addressed is that when UI ends, people get jobs. There is a large amount of literature to support this. In many cases, it is simply not worth it for people to find a job, because UI and other benefits can pay up to 90% of someone's fully employed salary.
However, a high unemployment rate (suppose 15%) means that the average person is out of a job 15% of the time. In most cases, this is not really that devastating. The problem right now is the unemployment benefits last so long that you can stay out of a job to the point that you become irrelevant.
Learning new skills takes effort, and usually requires you to take a pay cut as you get an entry-level job in a new field. Everyone can do it, though. Instead, though, we are incentivising long-term laziness by granting money to people who aren't working. I know at least two people who are just living off their unemployment checks and not making any effort to find real work.
If the unemployed are getting a check, then people who are employed should get that same check while employed. I think that's the only way to keep the incentive to work. (This goes back to the idea of a minimum guaranteed income)
Then again, there actually are some legit lazy people that will only ever work enough to buy hydro and a roof over their head.
Or, if you want to be more generous, ceased facing a massive effective marginal "taxation" rate on their first couple thousand dollars of monthly income.
I don't mean this as a moral judgment. I can imagine a host of situations where being paid $20,000 a year or so to evaluate your employment options and otherwise spend a lot of time doing non-wage-earning activities like spending time with your kids would make perfect sense.
I know that one condition of receiving unemployment benefits is to be looking for work, but I'd be surprised if that is hard to fulfill.
I was on unemployment for a little over a year. I had to apply to 2 jobs a week and every so often (only twice) I had to spend 3 hours (I felt a waste of time but I am sure there were people who did need the help) at employment services to some sort of meeting (called something like 'workforce re-entry evaluation') where they gave advice on how to fill out applications etc. They also had classes there that counted towards the job search requirements (learn to use web, word, excel, etc).
You had to bring your job search records for them to look over also. I know there are people who just sit on their ass but I really would have preferred to be earning some money. I felt bad enough but then to have people say 'just get a job' like I wasn't even trying. Half of them didn't believe that the gas station send a rejection letter (at least they had the courtesy).
One of the problems was that this area isn't a tech hub. The bigger cities are but just not paying the bills so you can move away and see if a job works isn't a good solution (driving 6 hours for an interview at your own expense is always fun though).
I got way less than $20K that year. At least it helped show how little I could live^H^H^H^H survive on.
Our little corner of the world is still so employee-friendly that it's really hard to damage your career in any meaningful way if you're truly, provably good at what you do. Certainly not by taking the odd five years off to start a startup, travel the world, or play pickup basketball.
You'll still have your network when you decide to come back. Those guys will be nicely distributed across dozens of tech companies, all of which need developers like they need air.
In addition to that, increased competition from a global remote work force as well as increased immigration sponsored by the tech lobby is going to crush western developer affluence.
In another 15 years, things may be looking pretty grim for the average developer.
Couldn't you have said the same thing 15 years ago? I don't think anything significant has changed since then.
Another problem with this thinking is software is never done, it just evolves and changes. It also needs some serious maintenance. Even if the job of software developers will be done by software, someone still needs to maintain and improve that software (unless we get self-writing software, which I don't see any time soon).
Another thing that keeps changing is hardware. Switching from computers to phones and tablets and the web created completely new markets for phone and web apps (written in Java/JavaScript) which weren't there a few years ago. Who's to say there aren't going to be new markets a few years from now? (For example, we'll need developers to write Google Glass apps).
In addition, even after all this evolution, current frameworks and languages are still horrendous. The most popular languages right now are C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP, all of them horrible to program in (more or less). I think there's still plenty of work to do in this direction.
Of course; my point is that you need a lot less programmers overall. Where a team was once required, now a staff of one or two will suffice, and this trend will continue as it becomes easier to do more with less. I'm not saying that the professional programmer will cease to exist, rather, I'm suggesting that the employment prospects for developers will inevitably fall in line with other industries.
Who's to say there aren't going to be new markets a few years from now? (For example, we'll need developers to write Google Glass apps).
I don't think there is much longevity in a "apps for yet-another-platform" future. To-Do lists and tower defense games have lost their novelty and useful/interesting apps are pretty rare. I do see platforms like Google Glass and Occulus Rift as potentially huge markets, but the cost of producing software for these platforms continues to fall right along with the discretionary income of all your potential customers who aren't employed as software engineers. It's a rapid race to the bottom.
In addition, even after all this evolution, current frameworks and languages are still horrendous.
Except for the burgeoning movement of hip languages and tools you wouldn't describe as "horrible to program in" that has driven the hype and growth behind the contemporary software golden age.
Wait, the sole reason these people were looking for a job was to get a steady unemployment insurance check?
But, to get UI you MUST be looking for a job.
So, they are fruitlessly searching for jobs they know they won't get solely to get the cheque. They will stop wasting their time once there is no cheque.
Will they really? Would you take your family out into the streets?
I suspect they'll double down on their efforts and possibly take a job that they suspect was "below them".
For the rest, it's off to the welfare line.
I would like to think that I'd personally be one of the people who keeps trying. But if I was getting constant rejection, I'm not sure how many YEARS I'd keep trying.
Many of the long term unemployed have never recovered from the 2008 down turn, some have been unemployed longer than that. That's 5 years or more.
This is absolutely not why people are not getting of UI to take a minimum wage job. Right now, if they were to accept a minimum wage job, they would lose UI and get paid less for the job then they are getting from UI. It is financially advantageous to stay on UI in those cases. Without that incentive, they would take the low wage job, but they would have to get on welfare/food stamps which the rest of us have to pay for.
So, tax payers are either paying for UI or subsidizing the difference between what those employees are paid and a living wage.
The solution to this mess is simple: Make companies who are profiting billions share those profits and pay their employees a living wage. You do this by raising the minimum wage. With a higher minimum wage, it would become a financially sound decision to get off UI and work a minimum wage job, and taxpayers wouldn't have to pay the difference.
I don't mind this, but I don't see it to be the solution. These multi-billion dollar corporations will find a way to cut out the labor using more automation in workflow or they will out-source this work.
What I'd like to seee is tarrifs go up considerably. If you want to offshore your labor then we'll make up the difference at the dock when you offload your goods.
On another note, if we're going to be a progressive society, we need to start being more progressive with the way regulate businesses with things like the minimum wage. Making McDonald's (1.8mm employees, $27.5 billion revenue) pay the same minimum wage as Fred's Burger cart (3 employees, $73k revenue) is ridiculous. Small businesses should be able to pay a lower minimum wage than bigger businesses, if we're going to be a progressive society.
If we're not going to be a progressive society, then there's no reason to talk minimum wage in the first place.
If you find there's some legal manipulation that could go on so larger companies could avoid paying the higher minimum wage, well, then that's no different than every other progressive law on the books.
Given the relationship between previous wages and UI, a jump in the minimum wage is a short-term solution that doesn't really address the problem -- anytime you have an extended disruption in the employment market you'll have long-term unemployed who (for as long as they have UI benefits) are getting UI benefits much higher than the minimum wage with the current UI formulas, unless you raise the minimum wage so high that it becomes the only wage (or at least, high enough that there are very few jobs significantly above it.)
That's not to say that minimum wage shouldn't be higher than it is (given the current basic system and assuming some better solution to the problems minimum wage addresses isn't adopted), but minimum wage increases don't really address the UI issue you are raising.
You seem confused about the reality that there are no jobs.
The equation for millions of people in the United States today is: apply for 1,000 jobs, get zero offers.
So out of the zero jobs offered, which of the jobs that are below them should they take?
"The unemployment rate declined from 7.3 percent to 7.0 percent in November, and total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 203,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in transportation and warehousing, health care, and manufacturing."
Must have been the last 203,000 jobs. Apparently according to you there are now 0 left.
What is your point again?
I don't agree with that, but I find it hard to refute when it comes up. Are there any good, fact-based arguments that prove this idea to be false?
There are around 11 million unemployed in the US. There are not 11 million employers looking for people that can't find anybody willing to work. If there was, everybody would have the UI benefits cut off for not taking those jobs.
One year I was laid off and "employed" 3 days later because I became a freelance contractor. For the right price many many skills are marketable.
I as a businessman would never turn away someone who had the nerve, need and drive to come to me and say "I'll bust my ass for half my usual price, just dont let me starve".
Write a book, song, game, movie? For income? Are you serious? Even if you are of the type to pull that off, how will you support yourself as you create these things? It's not the same as a job with a weekly income.
Grow some food? Actually, more people should do this. Hopefully the local government won't stop you from doing it because your neighbors whine about you growing tomatoes by the side of your house.
Sell a service? Plausible, if you have a skill that fits a niche because otherwise you're probably already entering a highly competitive and low margin industry. Also, depending on the service you sell, the local government may want to have a word or two with you which will likely require capital.
Invent something? See the part about writing a book, song, game or movie above. Same thing, if not worse because lawyers.
Sell some clothes? True, you could sell just about everything. In some cases that might be ideal because you might be able to downgrade your lifestyle just a tad to lower your expenses.
But good for you that you had a skill that translated into a freelance contractor market. That doesn't work for everyone. I've never heard of freelance contractor cashiers for instance. I guess they could learn a skill first but, again, how do you support yourself during this time?
It's good for you that you're willing to exploit someone's skills at half their value but not every business looks at it that way. I would imagine most managers would not want to hire someone at lower value or being over-qualified for because often that means the job is often a stepping stone to a better job. They see it as a risk of losing the investment they made in an employee that left at the first opportunity.
Not that I'm saying your suggestions are necessarily bad ideas. It's just not always so easy a solution, such as people who suggest just picking up and moving to where the jobs are. With a little thought one can see that things are not always as simple as what they sometimes should be.
This seems suspect. People lose jobs for specific reasons. Maybe a specific sector is shrinking. Maybe automation is replacing workers of a certain skill set. Maybe cheap labor elsewhere caused your employer to move.
Blaming "the country" for failing these people "by letting the labor market stay so slack" is meaningless in its vagueness.
I'm not sure how Yglesias would, but to me the answer is obvious. The 2001 recession (official dates are still, IIRC, March-November 2001, though there was, around 2004, talk that the start date maybe should have been pinned somewhat earlier, I don't think it was ever actually revised), was, as you note, much shorter and, in part because there was a lot more access to credit, which supported a quick rebound of aggregate demand and a return to expansion and better top-line employment numbers (a number of factors, include tax policy changes which shifted the distribution of gains upwards, made it a fairly hollow expansion in which the bottom three quintiles all saw income declines and the next quintile was flat, however, which, help set the stage for a deeper recession with a much slower recovery when the bottom fell out of the housing market, since it was a lot harder for demand to rebound.)
Tax incentives only go so far because the cost of having jobs local go beyond just those taxes. Payroll and its associated taxes can be expensive. Those tax incentives would have to somehow offset those costs as well.
The problem with long term unemployment is the same issue I ran into the other day on an elevator.. One girl asks another girl, "did you get a job yet?" the girl responds, "Giiiirrrrrl, da gubament gonna give me 2 hundred dollas a week, why i gonna get a jerb?"
Get em off the tit and get em working or they starve and die.. either way win win for us all.
A person can use a quote out of context all day long but it doesn't truly reinforce the stereotype until a person hearing the quote agrees with the out-of-context usage.
For example, if a person from Mars says something stupid and someone provides me with a quote. Do I say to myself; "That person is stupid" or "Martians are stupid"? If I go with the second then the problem is within me, not the quote nor the person who provided it.
So, did the Nazi's quote Jews out of context to further their aims of denigrating them? I'm sure they did. But it only worked for people who agreed with the idea in the first place.
/s
This shifts the system away from incentivizing you to be unemployed, and towards countering the centralization of wealth.
My natural inclination is that such a system will create a huge incentive for a percentage of people to willingly choose to be unemployed for most of their lives. If the amount isn't enough as a "living wage" amount then people will either adjust to make it work for them or they will clamor for the powers that be to increase the amount given to make it "livable". I'm sure it would soon become a "right" of some sort.
I'm not saying that such a system would inherently be a bad thing, but it has to be designed with that outcome being considered and the consequences it implies.
If by countering the centralization of wealth you mean take from Paul to give to Peter, then you're just trading one problem for another.
The problem is, basic income will likely lead to inflation. The government would need to control prices in the necessities market (food, rent, utilities, etc) to make basic survival possible on $15,000. The price of luxuries can go up as long as necessities are affordable.
There's your incentive. You can survive on the basic income, but if you want any luxuries, you have to have a job. That way the people who don't want to contribute to society are taken care of, and there's an incentive to actually get a job paying more than $15,000. I'm sure we've all heard stories about families on welfare buying expensive toys, TVs, Xbox, dirtbikes, cable TV, etc. If we want to get rid of that, welfare needs to pay exactly what it costs to survive, and nothing more.
"My opponent must not be elected because he'll take your warm coat away and prevent me from providing for your 'right' to two bowls of soup a day."
"Vote for me and I'll put real chicken in your broth!"
"My opponent calls this 'surviving'?"
For the record, the US government does not tend to view a warm coat and two bowls of soup to be surviving in the US.
On the other side, if the government installed such controls as you describe then that part would potentially get worse simply because of abuses by the government on its people. Plus, government controls often do not have the intended outcome anyway resulting in worse problems than what they were trying to solve in the first place. Also, keep in mind that politicians often offer to increase the money to these programs to increase their power in their own little corner of the political landscape. Or to buy votes. Or to attack political opponents. I can easily recall the accusations that one party must not be elected because "THEY WERE GOING TO TAKE AWAY YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY!!" even though that party did not claim wanting to do such a thing. The more control you hand over to the government over its people, the more control that it desires to get in the future.
Some would say that welfare is already supposed to provide just enough to survive on to help that person. But with some groups that use the money clearly for things outside of surviving, some groups that are constantly redefining what "surviving" means, and some groups blatantly using welfare measures to buy votes to obtain power means that welfare will almost always not be the solution to the problem at hand.
Taking care of humans fairly is a rather difficult thing to succeed at.
That's not true at all: http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items
You might be confused, because some states provide other forms of benefits (SS or TANF) on the same debit cards as SNAP ("food stamps"), but the food stamps program only pays for food--and not even all kinds of food.
You wrote a lengthy post, and you seem to have strong opinions about this subject, but you are badly misinformed about the underlying facts.
If anything, it's an argument in favor of replacing current welfare programs with unconditional cash transfers.
Thank you.
If one can take your government provided food stamps and convert them to cash is an abuse, how will straight-out giving them cash supposed to help in that situation? They will be provided cash with stipulations so nothing would change according to the rules.
Although, I admit there is evidence out there that if you just give cash with no stipulations to people that need help instead of "stuff" distributed through a service of some sort, they tend to do better overall: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/08/23/214210692/the-char....
Not sure what century this was in, but the article is basically saying this strategy is a fail. The resume's get screened to "auto" inbox->Trash, without being read, considered, interviewed, etc. Now, if you got those leads because of your network...you're clearly using a strategy that is not widely available to many people (that's why its a network: it's exclusive, not open). So, in essence you are blaming them for not being priviledged. Again, this is a moot point. These people need to pick a strategy that is <open to them>. Saying you have options that they lack is not a viable piece of advice to them (duh!). You might as well tell them to go to Harvard or MIT and become a programmer. While it's true tha "would" help, its also true that it has zero probability of <actually> helping. In otherwords, it's a humble-brag. It's not advice or critique (or a good comp).
Speak for yourself. Other people starving & dying isn't a win in my book.