What does a minimum wage hike have to do with COVID relief?

[bilby]

It's better for everyone (except business owners who want government subsidy of their labour force) to let unemployed people be unemployed without being poor. This leads to lower crime, greater happiness, greater opportunities for the poor (who can use their time to benefit themselves, rather than their bosses), it's an all round good thing.

But you're treating "unemployment is bad" as an axiom, so your conclusions are inevitably flawed.

If failure doesn't hurt you'll have a lot more failure.

I didn't mention failure. And your conflating unemployment with failure is very revealing of the reason you are unable to grasp my point.

How are unemployment and failure synonymous, in a society where unemployment isn't synonymous with poverty?

You are assuming that if things are changed, they will nevertheless remain the same. That's a common error, and the root cause of conservatism, which is another common error.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's better for everyone (except business owners who want government subsidy of their labour force) to let unemployed people be unemployed without being poor. This leads to lower crime, greater happiness, greater opportunities for the poor (who can use their time to benefit themselves, rather than their bosses), it's an all round good thing.

But you're treating "unemployment is bad" as an axiom, so your conclusions are inevitably flawed.

If failure doesn't hurt you'll have a lot more failure.

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

 

[laughing dog]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

Blaming all of structurally unemployed for their situation is inhumane.

 

[bilby]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

Then logically, an economy that doesn't have full employment is not decent. If there are fewer jobs than their are workers (and there are), then unemployment is not a failure of the unemployed.

Remind me, when was the last time the USA sustained full employment for the long term?

 

[ZiprHead]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

Then logically, an economy that doesn't have full employment is not decent. If there are fewer jobs than their are workers (and there are), then unemployment is not a failure of the unemployed.

Remind me, when was the last time the USA sustained full employment for the long term?

The fed actually works to keep a certain amount of unemployed to keep the economy from "overheating". A policy that benefits the business owner class. Can't have those little people have any actual leverage.

 

[KeepTalking]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

You are incorrect, as that is not necessarily true. There are many reasons a person may be unemployed for the long term, and not all of them are the fault of the unemployed. I know you like to treat this kind of issue as black and white, but there are shades of grey involved, and making the statements that indicate you believe the unemployed are failures and it should hurt them only serves to highlight your own failures.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

Then logically, an economy that doesn't have full employment is not decent. If there are fewer jobs than their are workers (and there are), then unemployment is not a failure of the unemployed.

Remind me, when was the last time the USA sustained full employment for the long term?

No--you have a certain amount of unemployment as businesses come and go and people change jobs. Trying to squeeze this out results in inflation rather than improving the situation. We have unemployment insurance for this (although I think the amount should be raised.)

And note that I said a decent economy--not the sort of thing we had after the housing crash.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Unemployment is not necessarily due to a failure of the unemployed. Treating it like it is does nothing to help the problem.

Long term unemployment in a decent economy is a failure of the unemployed.

You are incorrect, as that is not necessarily true. There are many reasons a person may be unemployed for the long term, and not all of them are the fault of the unemployed. I know you like to treat this kind of issue as black and white, but there are shades of grey involved, and making the statements that indicate you believe the unemployed are failures and it should hurt them only serves to highlight your own failures.

The disabled are not unemployed.

 

[bilby]

Then logically, an economy that doesn't have full employment is not decent. If there are fewer jobs than their are workers (and there are), then unemployment is not a failure of the unemployed.

Remind me, when was the last time the USA sustained full employment for the long term?

No--you have a certain amount of unemployment as businesses come and go and people change jobs. Trying to squeeze this out results in inflation rather than improving the situation. We have unemployment insurance for this (although I think the amount should be raised.)

And note that I said a decent economy--not the sort of thing we had after the housing crash.

So what's your solution for the sort of thing that regularly occurs to produce a non-decent economy?

It sounds to me like you would like us to think that you approve of fairly generous sums of money being provided to people unemployed in such circumstances, but thst you baulk at actually supporting such a thing for fear that someone undeserving might get some too.

Sorry mate, I would love to save you from drowning, but if I threw a life ring to someone who was able to survive without my assistance, they would get a benefit that they just don't need. And it might make the next person to fall into the river decide to be lazy and wait for me to come and help, and that would be a terrible thing.

 

[KeepTalking]

You are incorrect, as that is not necessarily true. There are many reasons a person may be unemployed for the long term, and not all of them are the fault of the unemployed. I know you like to treat this kind of issue as black and white, but there are shades of grey involved, and making the statements that indicate you believe the unemployed are failures and it should hurt them only serves to highlight your own failures.

The disabled are not unemployed.

I don't recall mentioning the disabled, and I'm not sure why we are even talking about the long term unemployed. Your comments seem to indicate that anyone who is unemployed for any length of time should feel pain because they are failures.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Then logically, an economy that doesn't have full employment is not decent. If there are fewer jobs than their are workers (and there are), then unemployment is not a failure of the unemployed.

Remind me, when was the last time the USA sustained full employment for the long term?

No--you have a certain amount of unemployment as businesses come and go and people change jobs. Trying to squeeze this out results in inflation rather than improving the situation. We have unemployment insurance for this (although I think the amount should be raised.)

And note that I said a decent economy--not the sort of thing we had after the housing crash.

So what's your solution for the sort of thing that regularly occurs to produce a non-decent economy?

It sounds to me like you would like us to think that you approve of fairly generous sums of money being provided to people unemployed in such circumstances, but thst you baulk at actually supporting such a thing for fear that someone undeserving might get some too.

Sorry mate, I would love to save you from drowning, but if I threw a life ring to someone who was able to survive without my assistance, they would get a benefit that they just don't need. And it might make the next person to fall into the river decide to be lazy and wait for me to come and help, and that would be a terrible thing.

That's why we have unemployment insurance.

I would change how it works, key it to how many of your peers get jobs rather than a fixed time.

 

[laughing dog]

You are incorrect, as that is not necessarily true. There are many reasons a person may be unemployed for the long term, and not all of them are the fault of the unemployed. I know you like to treat this kind of issue as black and white, but there are shades of grey involved, and making the statements that indicate you believe the unemployed are failures and it should hurt them only serves to highlight your own failures.

The disabled are not unemployed.

You are wrong logically and statistically. Logically, anyone who is not working is unemployed. If you mean counted as unemployed in statistics, anyone over the age of 16 who actively seeks work but who does not have a job is unemployed. That includes the disabled if they meet those requirements.

 

[bilby]

So what's your solution for the sort of thing that regularly occurs to produce a non-decent economy?

It sounds to me like you would like us to think that you approve of fairly generous sums of money being provided to people unemployed in such circumstances, but thst you baulk at actually supporting such a thing for fear that someone undeserving might get some too.

Sorry mate, I would love to save you from drowning, but if I threw a life ring to someone who was able to survive without my assistance, they would get a benefit that they just don't need. And it might make the next person to fall into the river decide to be lazy and wait for me to come and help, and that would be a terrible thing.

That's why we have unemployment insurance.

I would change how it works, key it to how many of your peers get jobs rather than a fixed time.

Who's "we"? I am not discussing the USA specifically, I am talking about the world as a whole. Unemployment insurance is an American thing. I don't even know exactly what it entails, but I am sure it's not even similar to the provisions for unemployed people in either of the nations of which I am a citizen.

I don't know how it works, nor do I really care. What is your proposal for how it should be. Explain it to me like I only heard of "unemployment insurance" today (which isn't far from the truth).

This is the Internet, not America. You wouldn't understand what I was proposing if I started from the assumption that you were familiar with the details of the UK Income Support system, or Australia's JobKeeper or NewStart. So don't assume I have clue one what "unemployment insurance" entails, beyond what it's name appears to imply. (Particularly in light of the incredibly misleading names governments like to use. As a non-American, the first time I heard of "Right to work" states, I assumed that they would provide people with work as a human right. Which is about as accurate as assuming that the DDR was a democracy).

 

[KeepTalking]

So what's your solution for the sort of thing that regularly occurs to produce a non-decent economy?

It sounds to me like you would like us to think that you approve of fairly generous sums of money being provided to people unemployed in such circumstances, but thst you baulk at actually supporting such a thing for fear that someone undeserving might get some too.

Sorry mate, I would love to save you from drowning, but if I threw a life ring to someone who was able to survive without my assistance, they would get a benefit that they just don't need. And it might make the next person to fall into the river decide to be lazy and wait for me to come and help, and that would be a terrible thing.

That's why we have unemployment insurance.

I would change how it works, key it to how many of your peers get jobs rather than a fixed time.

Who's "we"? I am not discussing the USA specifically, I am talking about the world as a whole. Unemployment insurance is an American thing. I don't even know exactly what it entails, but I am sure it's not even similar to the provisions for unemployed people in either of the nations of which I am a citizen.

I don't know how it works, nor do I really care. What is your proposal for how it should be. Explain it to me like I only heard of "unemployment insurance" today (which isn't far from the truth).

This is the Internet, not America. You wouldn't understand what I was proposing if I started from the assumption that you were familiar with the details of the UK Income Support system, or Australia's JobKeeper or NewStart. So don't assume I have clue one what "unemployment insurance" entails, beyond what it's name appears to imply. (Particularly in light of the incredibly misleading names governments like to use. As a non-American, the first time I heard of "Right to work" states, I assumed that they would provide people with work as a human right. Which is about as accurate as assuming that the DDR was a democracy).

I will field this one. Unemployment Insurance is bullshit. It is a State run system of taking money from you when you are working, and the State deciding how much of that money to give you back, if any, when you become unemployed. For many States, this means either denying your unemployment up front because your employer claimed you were fired for cause, paying an unemployment "benefit" that keeps you below the poverty line, and then either kicking you off because they ran out of the money you paid in, or because you reached some arbitrary cutoff date before you exhausted the amount you paid in. And, since that does not hurt enough, the amount you receive while on unemployment is tied to the wage you made while working, so not increasing the MW means those on the bottom of the wage scale get to really feel that pain that LP just knows they need to feel because they are failures.

To recap, Unemployment Insurance is bullshit.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You are incorrect, as that is not necessarily true. There are many reasons a person may be unemployed for the long term, and not all of them are the fault of the unemployed. I know you like to treat this kind of issue as black and white, but there are shades of grey involved, and making the statements that indicate you believe the unemployed are failures and it should hurt them only serves to highlight your own failures.

The disabled are not unemployed.

You are wrong logically and statistically. Logically, anyone who is not working is unemployed. If you mean counted as unemployed in statistics, anyone over the age of 16 who actively seeks work but who does not have a job is unemployed. That includes the disabled if they meet those requirements.

Yeah, I was talking about how the official stats work--to be counted as unemployed you have to be able to work and seeking work. People who are not trying to get a job are not considered to be part of the labor force, they are neither employed nor unemployed.

 

[laughing dog]

You are wrong logically and statistically. Logically, anyone who is not working is unemployed. If you mean counted as unemployed in statistics, anyone over the age of 16 who actively seeks work but who does not have a job is unemployed. That includes the disabled if they meet those requirements.

Yeah, I was talking about how the official stats work--to be counted as unemployed you have to be able to work and seeking work. People who are not trying to get a job are not considered to be part of the labor force, they are neither employed nor unemployed.

One must have two qualifications to be considered officially unemployed in the USA: you must be in the labor force and you must not have a job. To be in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the gov't agency in charge of collecting the data),

The labor force includes all people age 16 and older who are classified as either employed and unemployed, as defined below. Conceptually, the labor force level is the number of people who are either working or actively looking for work.

(source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#laborforce). Unemployed disabled persons who are actively looking for work are included in the official unemployed category. So disabled people can be unemployed in the official definition in the USA.

Disabled people aged 16 or older who seek employment are in the labor force. If they do not have a job, they are measured as unemployed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

One must have two qualifications to be considered officially unemployed in the USA: you must be in the labor force and you must not have a job. To be in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the gov't agency in charge of collecting the data),

The labor force includes all people age 16 and older who are classified as either employed and unemployed, as defined below. Conceptually, the labor force level is the number of people who are either working or actively looking for work.

(source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#laborforce). Unemployed disabled persons who are actively looking for work are included in the official unemployed category. So disabled people can be unemployed in the official definition in the USA.

Disabled people aged 16 or older who seek employment are in the labor force. If they do not have a job, they are measured as unemployed.

If you're able to work you're not on disability.

 

[Keith&Co.]

If you're able to work you're not on disability.

Disabled =! Disability

 

[laughing dog]

One must have two qualifications to be considered officially unemployed in the USA: you must be in the labor force and you must not have a job. To be in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the gov't agency in charge of collecting the data),

The labor force includes all people age 16 and older who are classified as either employed and unemployed, as defined below. Conceptually, the labor force level is the number of people who are either working or actively looking for work.

(source: https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#laborforce). Unemployed disabled persons who are actively looking for work are included in the official unemployed category. So disabled people can be unemployed in the official definition in the USA.

Disabled people aged 16 or older who seek employment are in the labor force. If they do not have a job, they are measured as unemployed.

If you're able to work you're not on disability.

Disabled does not mean on disability.

 

[ZiprHead]

If you're able to work you're not on disability.

Disabled does not mean on disability.

Many disabled people on disability still work. Your yearly earnings are limited to a certain amount but you are still allowed to work.