Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I was thinking about minimum wage the other day and my argument that businesses should pay a wage that allows a person to live without government subsidies. It might be entirely flawed. For example the US Walmart example is that they require health subsidies from the government. Well this is very true in Canada as the entire health system is subsidized by high marginal rate tax payers.
What if that were flipped the government should give its citizens enough money so they can meet the absolute minimum of needs (home and food). Then get rid of minimum wage. Essentially have a minimum guaranteed income but very limited employee rights
In this environment you would have higher taxes to subsidize people who aren't working or working for very little money and business would have to pay enough money so that the benefit of working outweighed just collecting the subsidy.
The concept of minimum wage might be completely flawed. Its set up to ensure that people can earn a living and support themselves but what if instead we ensured businesses were successful, taxed them effectively, and used that money to support people.
|
Here's the three fold argument to a guaranteed minimum income. To make it affordable all social programs go away. Unemployment, subsidized health care, welfare everything. That way you can balance the cost. When you do that you can on the plus side get rid of the mass government bureaucracy. On the negative side people on the minimum income or choose to not work and just live on that are one hospital visit, or one bad situation away from destitution.
The second argument is that its tough to define a minimum income in that kind of user fee environment. Is it $15.00 an hour, $30.00 an hour, and what's affordable from a government budget standpoint without taxes becoming punitive for people making above the minimum income level.
You can't make it too high, you don't want to de-incentivize the workforce. You want to drive people to want to work and make a good income.
Oh and the fourth one is that you will actively create class warfare and resentment between the people who want to live on the minimum income and those that are footing the bill, the resentment comes from the argument of why the heck and I'm paying for a person to sit at home. On the other side, the argument is look at all of those 1% they should pay a lot more.
From a pure financial calculation, I think that the number of Canadians over the age of 18 to death is probably around 28 million. So your maximum budget requirement of lets say $30,000 per year would be $840,000,000,000, last year, I think Canada's total income was $290,000,000,000 and total spending was $318,000,000,000. So we are talking an unaffordable program as that figure includes all military all infrastructure and every government service out of there.
We know that Canadians over the age of 65 number about 4 million (I'm going by older figures though so that should be on the low side with an aging population). leaving about 24 million between the ages of 18 and 64. So it would only be affordable if like only 10% or less were reliant on a minimum government paid income, which I think is less then now where we have a close to average 10% unemployment figure in this country not including people that cannot work and are on different programs.