I think those cracks are plenty wide enough for people to fall through, and that you are just not seeing it, since you are not looking for it
I suppose I need to squint at it a little bit harder?
And people getting stuck on waiting lists and in administrative limbo while they are unable to pay their cost of living seems rather dire. You should change it to UBI covering all without that red tape.
Or we could just remove the red tape from the system we already have, whose problems we understand and generally already know how to improve, rather than try to implement a completely new system whose flaws we haven't even encountered yet.
So.. you don't want to change that?
What I WANT is irrelevant.
We're discussing what we can do vs what will actually work. Not everything that will work is doable; not everything that is doable can work.
As for a solution that both works and is doable, there are three things:
1) Raise the minimum wage and keep raising it so that it keeps pace (or almost keeps pace) with inflation
2) Reinforce the existing social safety net so that people who cannot or do not make a living wage income from work will still have guaranteed shelter, food and healthcare.
3) Free education and/or job training for all citizens
It's not that Basic Income wouldn't work, it's that it isn't doable under current conditions; even if you could get it passed into law, you couldn't sustain it for any period of time before the funding structure became both economically and politically unstable. Universal basic WITHOUT A MINIMUM WAGE is both not doable and wouldn't work at all.
Minimum wage increase is doable -- with extreme difficulty, I might add -- but would actually accomplish much to counter-balance the suppression of wages.
Minimum wage increase plus reinforcement of the social safety net is just on the threshhold of "doable", provided a few dozen Republican senators wake up with horse heads in their bedsheets.
You can if the reason it has no chance of happening is because you and your countrymen won't do it.
My countrymen aren't the problem. The majority of Americans actually favor some form of public option/universal healthcare system. The majority of CONGRESSMEN, on the other hand, refuse to say anything more about universal healthcare other than "no comment." And that's before we account for the fact that UBI wouldn't actually BE sustainable under present conditions and wouldn't accomplish what you want it to accomplish better than a restructuring of the programs we already have.
In other words, it's the solution that costs a lot more, does a lot less, and is far harder to implement because of the economic and political realities that preceded it. It's even more of a nonstarter when you keep insisting that the minimum wage should be abolished at the same time, in which case UBI accomplishes FAR LESS than a restructuring of the current system.
People can't be wage-slaves if they don't need the wage.
Proven false. We ALREADY HAVE a welfare system in place that ensures it so that people do not necessarily NEED to pull any ind of wage in order to still survive. Their basic needs -- at a very low level -- are met.
Ask people living entirely on welfare right now whether or not they "need" jobs. The answer might surprise you.
Once you remove the need for money from employment for survival form the equation a lot changes.
Exactly my point. If you remove the need for money from employment -- and remove the minimum wage to boot -- then paying your workers becomes OPTIONAL. There is a certain class of employers who will try to pressure their workers to keep on working for no pay AT ALL, and make the argument (in many cases, a pretty strong argument) that "You are being paid with experience and job skills that will help you make real money later in your career). You are now placing a huge segment of the workforce -- ESPECIALLY skilled labor for whom demonstrable work experience is extremely valuable in its own right -- into a position of mandatory poverty, and placing them at the mercy of their employers' generosity.
And when asked why you could POSSIBLY think this is a good idea, you continue to respond with vague homilies about the idle rich and robot companies needing to "pay their fair share." That doesn't explain why you think companies that make billions of dollars from their employees' hard work should be able to pay them ABSOLUTELY NOTHING just because the government is responsible for their survival.
If you merely said that they shouldn't be allowed to use the unfair leverage of the employees survival needs against them to pressure them into lower and lower wages beneath what they would otherwise pay without that leverage, I would agree with you. But that is not what you are saying when you set the price of labour at the cost of living or at some arbitrary number above it regardless of what would be paid if the employee already had enough to get by on.
But we're not setting "the price of labor" at anything at all. We're setting the MINIMUM price of living above a theoretical living wage. Companies are still free to negotiate the value of their workers' labor as high or as low as they want, just as long as they understand that there is a low point below which neither the applicant nor the employer can legally offer.
Which is why I'm saying it's a market regulation. It's kind of like how there's an upper limit to how high a credit card company or a bank can legally set an interest rate. Under your logic, we would argue that there shouldn't BE a cap at all, that interest rates being set very very high would simply turn customers away. You would again be under-estimating the ingenuity of wage slavers; a guy I know from Georgia worked half of his adult life as a sharecropper and never made a dime from that work, because the company that leased his family the farming equipment charged them an interest rate that, without warning, jumped as high as 800% during harvest months.
Predatory lending is akin to predatory hiring practices. To use another example: a new employee with a lot of training and a college degree but little actual work experience starts a new job at $20.00/hour. A month later, his boss tells him that due to slow performance his pay is being cut to $18.00, and two months later down to $16.50. At the end of the year, this employee goes to his boss and says "I've just been told you're cutting me to $15.00. I can't take another pay cut. I'm quitting and looking for another job." To which the employer replies "And anyone who calls me for a reference will hear me say that I had to cut your pay by thirty percent because your performance was so lousy. I'm sure
that'll be fun for you to explain. Tell you what, go back to your desk and take a cut to $12.50 and I'll forget this conversation happened."
Now imagine this exact same scenario, but take ten dollars off every amount.
There's nothing "unfairly large" about a minimum wage increase.
That depends entirely on the increase, or decrease. For it to be fair, you have to set it at the value that the parties
would agree on without duress.
And in the labor market, the employee is almost ALWAYS under duress. Wage negotiation doesn't happen for the working or middle class, they literally take the best offer they can get.
So the minimum wage simply applies a counteracting form of duress on the employer, providing a lower limit to the salary offers he can make. This protects the workers with the least amount of negotiating power from predatory business practices.
The companies that depend on suppression of wages to keep their profit margins up are trying to maintain an unsustainable business model
Ok, but "suppression of wages" isn't paying people below whatever arbitrary wage rate you decide minimum wage will be.
Of course not. Suppression of wages is the RESULT of the aggregate of many choices made by employers who are trying to maximize their profits, NOT by increasing productivity, but by paying less for the same amount of productivity. No one business can suppress wages in the entire labor market, it takes a shitload of them all doing the same thing to have that effect.
So as with any market regulation, it comes to this:
If enough people do X, the result is Y
We want to prevent Y
Therefore X is illegal.
Where "X" is "offer an excessively small pay rate" and "Y" is "suppression of wages across the entire labor market."
It is based on exploiting the worker's need for money for survival and getting them to work below the rate they'd agree to if they didn't have to take the work in order to get by, which is something UBI undoes.
You're still proceeding from the false assumption that any sort of back and forth between employee and employer takes place.
Employers don't actually CARE what their employees need to get by; for all they know, their workers could all have trust funds and annuities and are only working the job for beer money.
The underlying force of wage suppression IS, in fact, the pursuit of greater profit. It is caused by companies who cannot or do not increase productivity choosing to maximize profit by gradually reducing labor costs. The proof of this is the fact that MANY companies do this, even those that do not depend on minimum wage labor. In many cases, the result is a deterioration in the quality of their services, which in turn makes them less productive, which means they now have to reduce their labor costs even further, and on goes the downward spiral.
When, on the other hand, you establish a lower limit to how far you can reduce labor costs, the companies that might depend on reducing those costs have no choice but to try and make their workers more productive. They can either do this by hiring more productive workers for the same jobs, or by firing the least productive workers and giving the go-getters more work. But the most likely scenario by far is those companies will try to re-train those workers and reinvest in them so they can actually raise revenues for the company. This is a far more responsible business practice, but it is much harder to do.
tl;dr: your entire spiel about UBI is based on a series of bad assumptions. The biggest of these is that wage rates involve any sort of interplay between the needs of employees and the intentions of employers. That is not how the labor market even SLIGHTLY works. Wages are based on the employers' needs in relation to HIS estimate of the lowest and highest rates someone would be willing to work a particular job. This is why (if you've noticed) that in every job you have ever interviewed for, no boss or HR person has ever asked you for your financial situation at home or for your net worth. They don't know, and they don't care.
