Comment by toomuchtodo

My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state).

Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).

> someone who only produces $7 of value is no longer employable

This is the wrong model. You're using a worker's wage to describe their productivity, and a big reason for the mess we're in is that wages stopped increasing with productivity fifty years ago. (search "wages productivity graph")

I have a family member that is severely disabled. She used to be on a program where the government would supplement her wages - she worked at Jack in the Box, where her employer would pay like $3/hr and the government would top that up to $10/hr.

Now that program is gone and minimum wage for fast food is $20/hr. She simply cannot perform $20/hr worth of work, so she's unemployed (and living on government assistance).

The previous arrangement was fantastic because the work gave her a purpose and something to do all day, and she contributed to society while saving the government money. Now she stays home and watches TV endlessly.

This has informed my ideas - I think supplementing minimum wages could be a better alternative to UBI (with some exceptions).

A rather low hanging fruit is smoothing out welfare cliffs so poor people don't feel stuck in an position of a local maximum of utility near the bottom. The problem is that these initiatives are very complicated, and you get more public support just blindly throwing money at the problem.

The real issue is that a few people have accumulated a lot of wealth and property, and they use it as a tool to extract even more money. It's basically the late stage capitalism money vacuum hoovering up everything. In the past the only levers we had against this were breaking up firms and enforcing anti-monopoly and preventing capital from even entering certain parts of our economy. We could, for example, ban private equity companies from buying houses and healthcare companies, break up national monopolies into regional companies, and eliminate a lot of the consolidation that has traditionally enhanced the bargaining power of the company owner against the employees.

In the short term it would make a lot of stuff less efficient, but when people talk about "efficiency" they really mean driving costs down and driving income up. So we really don't want an efficient capitalist economy, we want a capitalist economy that is just efficient enough to meet our needs while not being so efficient that a few people can exploit that efficiency and run away with our things.

Abolish the minimum wage along with density restrictions in zoning. Make it affordable for someone making $300 per month to have shelter.

I don't think it works if we're narrowly focused just on wages, but I don't know why that has to be the only focus. If we as a society want to support people having a baseline quality of life, then let's pay for it together rather than pushing it all on employers.

I don't think we put enough money behind it today, but the Earned Income Tax Credit is designed to do this while minimizing the disincentives for people to work. https://www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-the-earned-incom...

I think many people have a misunderstanding of what lower fertility means. Imagine a country has a fertility rate of 1. It doesn't seem that bad because it's pretty close to replacement. But fertility is an exponential system. So a fertility rate of means that each following generation (~20 years) will be half as large as the one that came before it (the formula is simply a ratio of fertility_rate/2). So you won't see any problem at all until the first generation to have low fertility starts to die. At that point you suddenly start seeing a rapid exponential effect. Every ~20 years (the size of a generation) your population size will be decreasing by 50% !!! And this never stops until you go extinct (which won't take particularly long), or start having children again.

It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.

Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!

This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.

Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.