There are no such things as “jobs americans won’t do”. It’s just you have to compensate people accordingly. With this failing stealth UBI experiment that we are currently engaged in, people aren’t willing to work when many of them are getting near 100% the same income not to work. The rest of us are being crushed by inflation.
A system where people get the same to work as not to work is not Universal Basic Income, UBI. Such a system is guaranteed basic income. There’s a huge difference.
It's unfortunately nowhere near a stealth UBI experiment and really just a classic welfare trap, in the vein of so many other government programs. There are many bad incentives in our unemployment system and it was clearly never designed to be a delivery method for long term stimulus.
This is not UBI at all. If someone starts working now, they lose those unemployment benefits they're getting. So the question becomes: should I work my ass off at this shitty job to make $X, or should I stay unemployed and make $X?
If it were real UBI, these people could work those shitty jobs while still receiving the extra income every month. It's still a shitty job, but you also get the added benefit of not having to live in poverty while you do it.
EDIT: Also, this situation is further proof of how useful UBI would be to the economy. It would be the government helping businesses by subsidizing wages, making even crappy unsustainable jobs livable and attractive to workers.
I think you vastly under estimate peoples will to advance. Would some take easy or no jobs sure, but not everyone wants to get by with a fixed income. They will always want to buy something UBI doesn't enable them to buy.
A nice vacation, nicer larger home, new car etc. UBI would just give people the cushion to take a risk and know if I fail I don't end up homeless. Or the piece of mind to relax and know they can eat a healthy meal and pay rent no need to work 2 or 3 jobs. Maybe the reinvest in their education.
This is not the experience of most Americans. In fact, if these numbers are accurate for you I might suggest you employ a financial planner to help find alternatives.
Houston, March 2019, my rent renewal was $1500/mo for a 12-month lease or $1500/mo for month-to-month or a new contract. Houston, October 2020, my rent renewal was $1500 for a 15-month lease or $2100/month for month-to-month or a new contract.
> Houston, March 2019, my rent renewal was $1500/mo for a 12-month lease or $1500/mo for month-to-month or a new contract. Houston, October 2020, my rent renewal was $1500 for a 15-month lease or $2100/month for month-to-month or a new contract.
Is there a typo here? You have to sign a longer lease but you are paying the same per month... that's a 0% increase.
And as for month-to-month, paying zero premium for a month-to-month lease is abnormal in pretty much every market...
But this isn't even the most confusing part of this thread. The most confusing is your next comment in the context of your concern about inflation.
> Signing a longer lease demonstrates that the new lease isn't like the old.
Okay. But if you earnestly believed what you're saying about inflation then locking in 2019 prices for 15 months instead of 12 months would be a GOOD thing for you! You'd be locking in a fixed price for a longer duration during a period of high inflation. I've signed a three year residential lease in markets with high housing inflation and felt like I was getting away with murder (and I was under-paying by about 500/mo toward the end of that lease). If you expect inflation, then you want longer leases at fixed-in prices!!!
The price per month of your housing has increased ZERO percent, AND your landlord is betting AGAINST rent inflation in their market.
So the rent didn't go up, the longer lease term was made longer and it was only the month to month that went up in price. The comparison is one you started making and only complain about when people call you on your made up numbers.
1. There's a giant difference between 80% and 30%.
2. That's not reflective of the rental market in Houston (I'm from there and going back for a graduation tomorrow), that's reflective of your landlord charging you for the convenience of not moving.
The top 1% are making more money than ever before. If you're holding assets impacted by inflation, you're doing quite well now.
If we take it as a given that in a modern, humane society no one should starve to death on the street and everyone should have access to the basics of survival, then the answer to the labor "shortage" is simply to shift some of the historically record breaking wealth inequality back down the org chart from the executives to the roles that need filling.
Agreed. Not long ago there was debate about a permanent structural stagnation with permanent unemployment. The argument was that workers lacked sufficient training or desire to fill current jobs. All while some economists were screaming that it was actually the result of an insufficient fiscal stimulus response to the Great Recession that could have easily been solved had the response been $1.5T instead of $700B. Given the massive fiscal response to COVID and this current situation resulting in a rebalancing as you highlighted, I think it’s clear that it was never structural and always a result of unnecessary slack due to a financial recession easily solved by government support spending.
How do you define the basics of survival? In parts of the world people live with 2 hamburgers a day, is that what you propose? Even $15/hour seems huge compared with basics of survival.
Also, there are not enough executives to take from them to give to the poor. You need 100 or 1000 times more for that, so the executives theme is a straw man.
I don't think these things are easy to achieve but they seem like obvious goals to societal progress. If not, what are we even progressing towards?
> Also, there are not enough executives to take from them to give to the poor. You need 100 or 1000 times more for that, so the executives theme is a straw man.
I said if a company wants to fill a role, that they should pull from executive pay. The average CEO gets 70-1 the pay of the average employee. There is absolutely a surplus of capital to pull from to increase worker pay (thus filling the role).
This is nowhere close to 'basics of survival'. You can survive on 2 hamburgers a day and 1 liter of drinking water, this is called survival. If you want 'basics of nice living' then call it that way, but don't redefine the dictionary. Think of 'basics of survival' what you need to continue to live if you land on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, naked and with no tools.
Really? Tell that to Hiroo Onoda and his 29 years in the jungle. You see, people play on the subjective nature of life and honesty is not a virtue anymore.
