LogFAQs > #953948311

No, I'd rather just give across the board UBI.
The point of working is to have more than the bare minimum to survive on, if you want like...a nice house, to go on trips, latest smart phone, etc...
it still encourages people to work.

If you just give UBI to people who work, then you have to leave the entire social safety net apparatus in place and it defeats the entire purpose.

Also, on your prior post...

wolfy42 posted...

Now if you work a 40 hour week at $15 an hour, you net a total of $600 a week as well! Woot your making as much as unemployment. Sadly that is the top end of the 15$ and under wages (almost half the population gets). in addition you pay taxes on all of it, meaning $2400 or so a year. You also have expenses you pay just to work (transportation costs, eating out more etc etc).

Basically for almost half the population not working right now is much better than working.

Exactly, this is why the UI boosts are insane, especially the $600 last year.
And it's not even a matter of equaling this new UI amount. It has to significantly exceed it to entice people to work vs. sit around at home.
The whole thing is terrible and grossly unfair to the people that were "essential" and had to work through the pandemic w/ no way out to get UI instead.
If Dems want to put an upward force on wages, then they should grow a fucking spine and just raise min. wage. Raising taxes on the high earners to make it more of a diminishing return to payout CEOs so much wouldn't hurt, either.

All jobs need to pay more honestly, across the board (until you are making 60k+ a year). Increasing min wage is BAD....very BAD.....you need to increase ALL hourly wages by the same amount (%)......and with that you also increase the base/min wage as well.

Just boosting min wage causes more skilled jobs that you need to be trained for, pay for licenses etc, to now just be making min wage as well. It's partially reponsible for it being so hard to find workers.

I completely disagree. Raising the minimum wage is vastly better and more fair than this UI boost. It provides an upward force for all wages, because now the low wage unskilled job is making as much as some of the jobs that require skills/experience, so then they demand more, and then those above them demand more, etc...
Just paying out shit loads of unemployment benefits those that get laid off, but fucks over those trapped in their jobs (you can't get UI if you quit your job, as the authors of the UI bills cheerfully put it)

First, pay more for basic jobs, so people doing them can afford to freaking live where the job is. This isn't freaking rocket science people. If it costs freaking $1200 to rent a 1 bedroom apartment, you need to pay enough for your employees to rent somewhere to live, buy food and have some money left over, and not require them to work 40+ hours to do it.

Sure. But this is a state issue. The cost of living varies so fucking wildly across the country, you can't just set the federal minimum based on California. There are plenty of areas where houses sell for $100K and you can live on less than $15/hr (if full time) just fine. Then there's NYC, Silicon Valley, D.C., etc... where you're effectively in poverty if you make the national median salary (somewhere in the $50K range, I think?).

By combining the two above suggestions, you would have far more people happy with their job. It would be WAY easier for you to get people to work for you, if you paid them freaking $20/hr and they only had to work 4 days a week (8 hours a day), then you have a part time position for the last 3 days (24 hours). That splits the week up perfectly, you have no days your business is closed, your employees are much happier and less tired, and your costs don't really go up at all compared to all the other expenses you have running a company.

See, this stuff is just ridiculous to me. I thought $15/hr was the Democrat rallying cry, but now b/c we're basing our standards on the ludicrous UI boosts, it needs to be even higher?

Freaking fast food etc give employees a 2$ an hour wage increase, but boost food prices by 33%. That is absolutely wrong as the additional cost for the employees is negligible (I'm looking at you Mc Donalds).

Total cost for 3 employees a day getting $2 more an hour (24 hour mc d's), is only freaking $144.....for the whole freaking day. If you charged 5 cents more per item you sold, you would make more then 5x that much extra money by the end of the day (easily).

The cost to pay employees is so little compared to everything else, that you could double the pay of ALL employees and barely affect the actual cost of product for your store (for most larger companies at least).

While it definitely shouldn't have lead to a 33% increase, wages are costly beyond just the amount the employee gets. Payroll taxes, social security taxes, medical plans and 401K contributions (probably doesn't apply to McD's), and so on... are all percentages based on the wage.
We're still in a very old system of taxation based on number of employees and wages. Which just doesn't work in the modern age of automation, outsourcing, global sales, corporate inversion, etc... The people that run their business like a traditional one (including McD's) get hammered in taxes. The super rich tech companies that claim their HQ is in a tax haven and ruthlessly slash their local work force in favor of bots/algorithms and offshore support in 3rd world countries make out like fucking bandits.

Because of this last year and a half, and the fact that many people have been getting over double the amount they need to survive every month, it's likely many have saved a significant amount, so even if you stopped the bonus unemployment right now, they might STILL not go back to work for quite awhile, until companies are FORCED to increase wages and do more to entice workers.

All this is doing long term is pushing those companies to try to automate as much as possible even faster, since now the cost savings from shedding employees is even higher.