henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:02 am
"Minimum wage (typically 60% of regional median income is the number that kills fewest jobs while doing something useful)"
(you! citizen business owner! you must pay no less than the gov-assigned minimum! we, the knowing, deprive you of control over what is yours! we do not trust individuals to transact or contract freely!)
Well yes. It's a strength and a weakness of NL that it's not strongly tethered to any specific ideological position other than a general sense that liberalism is good and public policy should be effective as designed to provide according to the wants of a democratic polity.
Society in general wants poverty reduced, so the job of the good neoliberal is to find the ways that reduce it effectively without having harmful knock on effects. The best evidence is that minimum wages work for some of that, but at very high levels they promote automation which kills off low paid jobs (arguments can be made that this is a good thing overall, however it is deemed undesirable by many).
An alternative is to move price floors by providing higher levels of assistance for the poor or unemployed. This is difficult and expensive, but you can subsidise the low paid (not in itself automatically a bad idea), which at some level (a higher level than people assume) becomes the state subsidising the low paying companies instead of the low paid employees, which is inefficient and unjust. Or you can just give out really generous unemployment benefits until employers who want staff have to pay above poverty rates to get any staff at all. Both of these are much worse than a minimum wage because they distort everybody's incentives too much.
In the longer term, we should consider the very high minimum wage option, and look at whether we are actually good with the job loss and automation side of it, it may turn out we are. However, very high minimum wages in Scandinavia are a problem for refugees who find themselves at a heavy disadvantage in the job market under those circumstances, causing much anxiety. So usually minimum wages are considered safe only if they leave an entry level at which youngsters and recently released criminals can still gain employment.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:02 am
"Redistributive taxation (exact opinions vary but neolibs don't approve of regressive taxation, and probably all approve of negative income taxes for low income families)"
(wealthy citizen! you have too much! we will take some of what you have and give it to others we deem needy! no, no, we don't want your opinion on this! pony up the moola!)
Well it doesn't take an awful lot of moola but it does deliver outsize benefits, and it removes children from inherited poverty. So yes, suck it up like a big boy, stop being greedy and let us fix a problem with a little your money and mine. You can deal with somehow persuading society that they are wrong to want to actively reduce poverty, in the meantime you may as well let us deal with the effective methods to do it that don't waste the cash.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:02 am
"Universal insurance for loss of health and loss of income etc."
(rest easy, ailing citizen! let us bind your wounds, ease your fever, straighten your spine! all better? back to work, citizen!)
Yes, universal insurance is cheaper than partial insurance for everyone.
You drive a car, or one of those really tall trucks with the giant wheels or something I assume, and I doubt you can legally drive it without insurance. If that insurance weren't mandatory, it would be much, much more expensive for those who did get it, causing even more people not to get it. This is the result of Adverse Selection, at first those who consider themselves at little risk don't buy the insurance, then the price goes up and those who want it can't afford it, and in the end it is expensive for everyone. After which you only end with the government providing tax breaks to subsidise it anyway, without which many more Americans wouldn't have it at all.
henry quirk wrote: ↑Mon Jul 08, 2019 2:02 am
"Education and skills training for the out of work and often the same for those who are just in low paid careers and would like to earn more."
(no, citizen! we have no need for farmers! we need sanitation engineers! your training begins now!)
Tell that to those poor stranded coal miners in Virginia who really thought that they were going to get a federal lifeline to return them to the 70s. They are fucked, and that won't be changing. They would have done much better to learn new trades, it would be a good idea to help them out.
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