Amazon says part-time workers aren't paid as much, but full time does just fine. Ponder how much work is performed by part-time workers.
I would also question the significance of the $1 trillion value. The aggregate share value is $1 trillion, but what can Amazon do with that? Nothing. They got their money in the IPO.
Then, on the other hand, we've been told a minimum wage doesn't work... but also that people who make low wages don't work hard...
Is there a right-wing solution to poor wages? Or are poor wages the right-wing solution to lifting profits?
The "right wing" solution is something akin to a UBI or negative income tax (proposed by Milton Friedman, for example), along with creating a robust, dynamic economy with a low unemployment rate so that workers can easily find other job options if they want to quit, along with companies bidding up wages to attract enough qualified workers (which happens when we are at full employment. The fastest wage growth in the recent decades occurred at the end of the 90's when the economy was booming. We seem to be approaching that point.)
Universal basic income is what is needed. Not more government interference in employment contracts.
It's unconstitutional and undemocratic to pass laws designed to punish specific individuals.
It's unconstitutional and undemocratic to pass laws designed to punish specific individuals.
No, but you can pass laws to punish specific practices and you can then reference specific individuals who perform these practices in order to explain their negative effects and justify why these practices need to be punished.
I also agree that some sort of UBI is the better solution. If a given job is only worth $2/hour, then only pay people $2/hour to perform it. This shouldn't impact the ability of people working at it to feed and house their family, though.
A UBI subsidizes low wages. Anything that the government subsidizes the economy will produce more of. If you put in a UBI the economy will respond by lowering wages.
Anything that the government subsidizes someone will eventually demonize to get rid of.
If the government has to subsidize something we should take it for what it is, a sign that the economy doesn't want it.
But left on its own, the economy is short-sighted and relatively stupid. The "right wing" solution is to allow the economy to operate on its own, without adult supervision because it will self-regulate. But this is a pipe dream that has been explored repeatedly.
For example, left on its own, the economy doesn't do infrastructure well at all.
Last week I watched the Comcast crew bury fiber optic cable in my front yard. Last year I watched the AT&T crew bury fiber optic cable in my front yard. This was only six months after the Google crew buried their fiber optic cable in my front yard. I have now 3 fiber optic cables in my front yard. Why are they there? Because competition and competitive pressures drove them there. Is it efficient? No, it is inefficient, obviously.
Likewise, left on its own, the economy doesn't do health care, education, and jurisprudence very well.
Among the other things that the short-sighted, rather stupid economy doesn't do well is to protect society from the economy itself.
Capitalism is successful because it channels an otherwise destructive sin of man, greed, into a constructive behavior. But like society itself, the economy has to be policed. The economy has no use for the old, the disabled and the young. The economy and its greed are satisfied by selling dangerous products, by fouling the air and the water, by spoiling the land and by working workers to death, by hours and by ignoring their safety. Slavery and child labor make sense to the economy because they lower the costs of labor and the price of the goods produced.
The other thing that the economy doesn't do well is to distribute the gains from the economy when it's left alone. There is no natural mechanism in capitalism that determines the best distribution of the gains, of the income to the various participants in the economy. Rather it is determined by social mores and the very structure that forms the economy. A structure put in place and largely maintained by the government.
There has to an adult in the room. One who will channel the greed, who will police the economy to punish and prevent the bad behavior and who will provide the structure of the economy that will produce the best results in the long run and will distribute the gains from the economy in the best interests of society. And by that I mean to more evenly distribute the gains from the economy to all who participate in it, rather than just to over-reward the 1% of the wealthiest, as the "right wing" solution does.
Finally, I will get back to the OP. We need to change the structure of the economy to reverse the income inequality that we are seeing, not to shoot another magic bullet at the problem that will get the hopes up of the poor and the middle class, only to have it fail in the long term. You will have to tax the rich to do it and you will start the same kind of battle that we saw against the Affordable Care Act.
These types of programs should be paid for by the people who benefit from them to make them bulletproof against such demonization. This is what has preserved Social Security against eighty years of constant attacks by the wealthy trying to end the half of the payroll tax paid by the employers. We have to increase the wages of the poor and the middle class to allow them the ability to pay for more of their way in the world. The current "right wing" solution is to intentionally suppress the wages of the poor and the middle class and then to complain that they can't pay their own way and that they depend too much on the government.
The income inequality has been build up over the years by changing the structure of the economy and by changing the social mores to accept the increased inequality as the mysterious and unknowable working of the free market economy to reward those who are really important to the economy, the wealthy investors and the financial sector, the banks, the insurance companies and the real estate brokers, the rentiers, the 2%'rs who take a portion of every transaction.
It isn't the least bit mysterious what happened, of course. It was the result of carefully planned attacks on the poor and the middle class to suppress their wages to increase profits. To make them so afraid of losing their jobs that they won't demand higher wages. To eliminate the economic structure that gave workers the ability to negotiate collectively, the unions, against the giant corporations that the economic structure also allowed. To open up trade to expose our workers to competition from low wage countries, a competition that they can't win. A competition that ultimately will bite the American corporations in the ass because they picked the worse possible country to elevate by pouring all of the American money into it, the authoritarian controlled economy of the PRC, who have no history of capitalism save to oppose it. Who will now change capitalism from inside it to serve their state, something that they couldn't do when they were on the outside.
