The negative income tax is the answer...

[immoderate]

This is a reaction to a few threads expressing a longing for some kinder time, when there were jobs that were productive if not meaningful. Maybe after the total breakdown, and we're back in the bronze age, but not until our whole system is leveraged for one individual to control all the wealth.

The fact is that there is not enough real work to go around. And the best work left has the effect of inflating the price of commodity items.

Roosevelt had armies of men digging ditches, with shovels. Something a guy with a Bobcat could do on his lunch hour. Digging ditches sucks anyway. What about good, solid factory work? Went to China? If it came back, robots would do most of the heavy lifting.

The work that needs to be done, to supply necessities to a growing world population, can be done by a decreasingly small fraction of the population. There is some incentive to make instantly obsolete crap -- not good for the earth we have left. Beside there is a smaller population who "owns" the work. There are fewer people to do the dealing for the goods and services we don't produce. And it seems the best incomes go to those who sell the deals themselves. The point is the ditch diggers are gone. The factory workers are gone. Bridge and highway builders, gone too. We're left with brokers and security.

The negative income tax, first proposed by Juliet Rhys-Williams, in the British parliament, and sometimes pushed by Milton Friedman(!) and the Nixon administration -- the idea is to give a subsistence allowance for people with no income. That's right, from the government. The immediate benefits, no more need of welfare and unemployment insurance. It gets enough money to the people to keep the economy circulating. If people can work, they can augment their income.

I allow that the idea needs some adjustment, and is likely to entail some bureaucratic madness -- but no worse than we have now, and with better results.:) Surprisingly there is some research out there that mostly shows that some supplemental income does not reduce incentives to work.

--imm

[valerief]

1. Corporations get them now. In the billions. nt

[immoderate]

3. I've never heard them complain.

--imm

[PoliticAverse]

2. The "Earned Income Tax Credit" is what the negative income tax morphed into.

http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96466,00.html

[AngryAmish]

12. exactly

[exboyfil]

4. Alot to be said about a guaranteed income for every income

with no strings attached. Lots of current administration expense and employees can be eliminated with that approach. The only folks left should be fraud investigators to ensure only U.S. citizens are receiving the money, and that they are only receiving the one check with which they are entitled.

Would such an approach involve no needs testing for assets and income? What kind of amount were you thinking? Would it be the same amount for children or a lesser amount?

300,000,000 * $10,000 = $3,000,000,000,000 I just threw the $10K in as a starting point for discussion.

The average Social Security check is $1,177/mo =$14,124/yr.
Minimum income for aged without blindness etc is $8,088/yr. (a couple is only $12,132/yr sure an argument for living in sin).

A complete roll up of all social spending would be useful. Also consideration should be given to moving these individuals out of high cost urban areas so that their rent dollars can go further. Housing with a secure sleeping space and common area for food preparation etc should also be considered.

Throw everything except health care in the pot - subsidized housing, food stamps, WIC, TANF, SSI, and possibly Social Security. Except for fraud to ensure no one gets more than one check the administration costs can be cut dramatically. No determination of income if individuals want to work, don't let it impact their basic allowance.

My kids will be done with High School in 2016. At that point I would be 53. $10K/yr. looks pretty attractive to me.

[immoderate]

6. You have given this some thought.

Some sort of public housing is surely indicated.

Means testing should be considered at the point the negative tax means nothing. This so it won't be a disincentive to work.

--imm

[exboyfil]

10. When you means test

then you get into the whole fraud/administration nightmare we now have. If everyone gets a check, then everyone decides whether the additional marginal dollars gained make it worthwhile to work additional hours at whatever tax rate has been defined to support the entire social safety net.

Any income based means testing immediately translates into the disincentives we have to work that are currently in place. You work you lose your health care. You work you lose your food stamps etc. Every hour of work should improve your standard of living. The $10K or whatever just gets collected on the other end from taxes on folks who have decided to work in high paying jobs.

The original proposal was that not enough good jobs exist so we should establish an idle class that receives a check - how much is still to be decided. If you make that check large enough, folks like me whose children are gone value time far more than the extra dollars that can be made from unsatisfying employment - even employment as a professional. I would not mind living in a communal setting with a small secure sleeping room if it means that I don't have to spend 40+ hours/week in an office without windows. I only work for my children and everyday I am coming closer to the realization that I am not going to be like my dad - work his entire life and retire at 60 to only get cancer and fight it and die. I would much prefer to have my 50s to relax and enjoy my remaining time on this earth.

Also there is something inherently unfair about a defined idle class that needs to be supported by the labor of others.

[immoderate]

14. That's a good point.

I'm not sure I get your last sentence. Did you men that the means testing itself would define the "idle class?"

--imm

[lunatica]

5. LOL! That's Socialism 101

[immoderate]

7. Whatever works.

--imm

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Factory work sucked, too

"Digging ditches sucks anyway. What about good, solid factory work?"

I don't think I'll ever understand the current leftist longing for the capitalist factory. It was a deskilling and utterly deadening horror.

[Maru Kitteh]

9. 20+ years of factory work have ensured that my sister is capable of nothing else.

[alcibiades_mystery]

11. Factory work was itself hated throughout the 19th and 20th century

Indeed, well into the structural readjustment of the 1970's, workers in "developed" or so-called "first world" countries protested against their working conditions in the factories. Have people forgotten the Lordstown strikes of the 1970's?

Now we've romanticized factory work. We hear nothing else, all day, from the left:"if only we still made things! Why don't we have factory jobs?" It's the most absurd bit of nostalgia in a what has become an embarrassingly nostalgic movement. The reason we don't have factory jobs is because workers developed their strongest resistance strategies precisely against those jobs: the strike, the slowdown, sabotage, auto-reduction, the wildcat strike, or just walking away (the turnover rate in Fordist factories throughout the 20th century would astonish most observers today - it was astronomical). Everything workers developed in capitalism's industrial/monopoly phase was a weapon aimed at the factory; should it be any wonder that capital moved its factories to places where the workers had not yet developed those weapons, or where the state apparatus could directly control workers?

We don't have "manufacturing" (in fact, we still do) because the workers deciphered the form of power in the capitalist factory and waged effective war against it. Period. And we fucking hated the factories, because we knew they were the places where our labor was being stolen, and our lives deadened.

So the nostalgia for factory production is a rather sick joke.

[immoderate]

16. Modern factory work will be supervising machines.

I have been in industrial settings that are not the sweat shop stereotype. I would not compare factory work to recreation any more than farm work. It should be well compensated.

--imm

[alcibiades_mystery]

17. Being supervised by machines, more like it

As it always was. Automation is of the essence of the modern factory.

[immoderate]

18. There are some things that must be manufactured...

What's the best way? :shrug:

--imm

[alcibiades_mystery]

19. Um

for the producers to collectively own the means of production?

:shrug:

[immoderate]

20. Sure. That'll do it for the producers.

What should we do with the non-producers, when production is optimized?

--imm

[immoderate]

15. I think a 20 hour work week would help.

One of the problems that arises is that it will be difficult to get people to do menial tasks. Short hours and good pay should help.

--imm

[piratefish08]

13. seems to work for GE - let's give it a shot!