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.
This is a terrific concept, however if I had to guess this would likely cost significantly more than raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. I'd have to imagine that a lot of people would stop working all together if they were given a living allowance as well. Anyone currently working below $15/hour would probably just sit back and live their life as it will have improved significantly over what it was before, homeless people as well. Then you could run into the scenario where businesses and taxpayers are paying more than they are even making to cover everyone's living.
Again I'm not saying it's a bad concept, but even just looking at the public outcry over a small percentage of the workforce getting a raise and it's hard to imagine those people ever getting on board with paying even more money to help more poor people. That and the fact that if you remove minimum wage all together you are really in my opinion embarking on a dangerously regressive course. Businesses can say well we can only pay you X now since you have so much paid for already and we need to pay more tax because of that so take this or leave it, otherwise we'll need to close down because it's getting too expensive to operate here. And since a lot of people seem to like to believe that whenever they hear it, they will take far less than what that company may be able to actually pay them.
This isn't even taking into account the fact that you would essentially need to force people to work otherwise as population grows there will be an ever increasing cost to subsidize people by taxing employers, add to that the fact that automation will continue to wipe out a lot of jobs and eventually you'll be left with companies paying for us to live without enough money coming back and no way of reversing this. At which point they'll likely just shut down.
A better solution in my mind would be for the government to make mandated severance pay for layoffs extremely penalizing for employers to deter them from replacing workers with machines. But the government isn't really taken this issue seriously yet, only those "evil" unions are.
A better solution in my mind would be for the government to make mandated severance pay for layoffs extremely penalizing for employers to deter them from replacing workers with machines. But the government isn't really taken this issue seriously yet, only those "evil" unions are.
A penalizing severance pay would prevent workers from being even hired in the first place
The Following User Says Thank You to calculoso For This Useful Post:
A better solution in my mind would be for the government to make mandated severance pay for layoffs extremely penalizing for employers to deter them from replacing workers with machines. But the government isn't really taken this issue seriously yet, only those "evil" unions are.
Think about this for a minute.
You are saying that we should incentivize farmers to use manual labour instead of tractors. We should use ledger books instead of spread sheets. A horse and buggy instead of a car. A series of ropes and pullers instead of cranes. Manual operator intervention instead of control systems. No more assembly lines. All hand tools. No CNC machines.
What you are asking to do directly is to eliminate economic expansion due to efficiency. There are only two ways to grow the economy. More people or more efficiency. You want to hamstring one of them.
In an ideal world all labour is replaced with machines and scarcity is eliminated. Actively preventing that from happening as a solution makes you a Luddite, a literal Luddite advocating the smashing of machines.
Unions "job security" concept is probably their worst feature. That Calgary only automated garbage pickup in the last 5 years is ridiculous when the tech was around for 30 and resulted in a safer and lower cost service.
Freeing humans from labour whether through agriculture or science has led to us to create society. 6000 years ago I don't think anyone was saying if this farming thing takes off what will the hunters and gatherers do.
I'm interested and will respond to the rest of your post but that last line jumped out at me as awful.
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to GGG For This Useful Post:
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.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
A better solution in my mind would be for the government to make mandated severance pay for layoffs extremely penalizing for employers to deter them from replacing workers with machines. But the government isn't really taken this issue seriously yet, only those "evil" unions are.
This would kill hiring all together as companies would find every way of increasing the efficiency of core staff. So they would automate and increase work production requirements. On top of that this would entirely kill seasonal businesses.
There would be a severe impact on companies that use low skill workers.
Even firms that are project based would get screwed by this.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
And the problem with minimum income is you couldn't get rid of health care as 30k doesn't go very far when it comes to real emergencies and adding an insurance industry like the US eliminates any beauraucratic savings.
Your class warfare comments definitely would occur and you'd end up in a Greece type situation fairly quickly if the rate of the GI is too high.
At 30k per person I'd quit my job in a second. I was thinking much closer to 20k for family with kids and 12kish for an individual. The goal of the GI is not die not live comfortably.
This is a terrific concept, however if I had to guess this would likely cost significantly more than raising the minimum wage to $15/hour. I'd have to imagine that a lot of people would stop working all together if they were given a living allowance as well. Anyone currently working below $15/hour would probably just sit back and live their life as it will have improved significantly over what it was before, homeless people as well. Then you could run into the scenario where businesses and taxpayers are paying more than they are even making to cover everyone's living.
Again I'm not saying it's a bad concept, but even just looking at the public outcry over a small percentage of the workforce getting a raise and it's hard to imagine those people ever getting on board with paying even more money to help more poor people. That and the fact that if you remove minimum wage all together you are really in my opinion embarking on a dangerously regressive course. Businesses can say well we can only pay you X now since you have so much paid for already and we need to pay more tax because of that so take this or leave it, otherwise we'll need to close down because it's getting too expensive to operate here. And since a lot of people seem to like to believe that whenever they hear it, they will take far less than what that company may be able to actually pay them.
This isn't even taking into account the fact that you would essentially need to force people to work otherwise as population grows there will be an ever increasing cost to subsidize people by taxing employers, add to that the fact that automation will continue to wipe out a lot of jobs and eventually you'll be left with companies paying for us to live without enough money coming back and no way of reversing this. At which point they'll likely just shut down.
A better solution in my mind would be for the government to make mandated severance pay for layoffs extremely penalizing for employers to deter them from replacing workers with machines. But the government isn't really taken this issue seriously yet, only those "evil" unions are.
The 19th century called, they want their economic policies back.
You are saying that we should incentivize farmers to use manual labour instead of tractors. We should use ledger books instead of spread sheets. A horse and buggy instead of a car. A series of ropes and pullers instead of cranes. Manual operator intervention instead of control systems. No more assembly lines. All hand tools. No CNC machines.
Did you even read what I wrote? Are farmers not already using tractors? This is about preventing further automation. If a farmer is employing someone to drive that tractor, it would make them the decision to replace that worker with a self driving tractor a lot more difficult for them to make. Protecting jobs is important in a consumer driven economy.
Quote:
What you are asking to do directly is to eliminate economic expansion due to efficiency. There are only two ways to grow the economy. More people or more efficiency. You want to hamstring one of them.
If 100 thousand jobs are replaced by machines to make businesses more efficient, how does this expand the economy? If McDonalds eventually becomes fully automated, their cost savings on labour do not get put back into our economy, because even if their business expands they are not creating more jobs, they are just taking in more money. This doesn't only apply to automation, look at the oil and gas industry. All of these people out of work because these companies decided while they could still operate here at a reduced profit with the price of oil where it is, they could make more money drilling elsewhere, so they completely crippled our economy in the process by laying everyone off. I'm not suggesting that they would not have made the same decision even with higher severance pays, but it would have been a bit more of a deterrent. It creates an environment where companies can still make money here, but not so easily leave the people who helped them make all that money in the dust when they decide it's a slightly better return on investment elsewhere.
Quote:
In an ideal world all labour is replaced with machines and scarcity is eliminated. Actively preventing that from happening as a solution makes you a Luddite, a literal Luddite advocating the smashing of machines.
Unions "job security" concept is probably their worst feature. That Calgary only automated garbage pickup in the last 5 years is ridiculous when the tech was around for 30 and resulted in a safer and lower cost service.
Freeing humans from labour whether through agriculture or science has led to us to create society. 6000 years ago I don't think anyone was saying if this farming thing takes off what will the hunters and gatherers do.
I'm interested and will respond to the rest of your post but that last line jumped out at me as awful.
No one is advocating the smashing of machines, but people need to realistically view the threat of expedited automation. Technology is moving too fast these days, if we eliminate jobs at a faster rate than we create new ones what do you think wI'll happen?
If unions were the reason that Calgary didn't have automated garbage pickup trucks earlier, what changed? Garbage collectors still have a union, so if they had this power to prevent it, why would they all of the sudden change their minds? Sorry, most of your posts here show you have a fairly well informed point of view on things, but this comment is just nonsense, especially if you know and take into consideration how the city and it's labour unions work.
As for the freeing humans from labour created society comment, when did this happen exactly? Last I checked there was still a large percentage of the workforce working in manual labour jobs. The ones most recently "freed" who are sitting at home or on the street wondering what they are going to do now probably wouldn't like this society that is being created.
It creates an environment where companies can still make money here, but not so easily leave the people who helped them make all that money in the dust when they decide it's a slightly better return on investment elsewhere
It also creates an environment where no one in their right mind would open a new business here.
The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to OMG!WTF! For This Useful Post:
Did you even read what I wrote? Are farmers not already using tractors? This is about preventing further automation. If a farmer is employing someone to drive that tractor, it would make them the decision to replace that worker with a self driving tractor a lot more difficult for them to make. Protecting jobs is important in a consumer driven economy.
If 100 thousand jobs are replaced by machines to make businesses more efficient, how does this expand the economy? If McDonalds eventually becomes fully automated, their cost savings on labour do not get put back into our economy, because even if their business expands they are not creating more jobs, they are just taking in more money. This doesn't only apply to automation, look at the oil and gas industry. All of these people out of work because these companies decided while they could still operate here at a reduced profit with the price of oil where it is, they could make more money drilling elsewhere, so they completely crippled our economy in the process by laying everyone off. I'm not suggesting that they would not have made the same decision even with higher severance pays, but it would have been a bit more of a deterrent. It creates an environment where companies can still make money here, but not so easily leave the people who helped them make all that money in the dust when they decide it's a slightly better return on investment elsewhere.
No one is advocating the smashing of machines, but people need to realistically view the threat of expedited automation. Technology is moving too fast these days, if we eliminate jobs at a faster rate than we create new ones what do you think wI'll happen?
If unions were the reason that Calgary didn't have automated garbage pickup trucks earlier, what changed? Garbage collectors still have a union, so if they had this power to prevent it, why would they all of the sudden change their minds? Sorry, most of your posts here show you have a fairly well informed point of view on things, but this comment is just nonsense, especially if you know and take into consideration how the city and it's labour unions work.
As for the freeing humans from labour created society comment, when did this happen exactly? Last I checked there was still a large percentage of the workforce working in manual labour jobs. The ones most recently "freed" who are sitting at home or on the street wondering what they are going to do now probably wouldn't like this society that is being created.
You really need to stop. I could go through the whole post and point out the lunacy, but this first, highlighted point is more than enough.
Efficiency increases productivity.
If people had employed your 'no new machinery to save jobs' in the 70s (JUST in farming), the world would already have experienced massive death and starvation by being unable to feed the population growth.
Your policies are ridiculous, backwards, short-sighted, and already proven wrong a thousand times over.
Yet you just keep stating them and restating them in here as if they will somehow become useful if you say it enough.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to Enoch Root For This Useful Post:
This would kill hiring all together as companies would find every way of increasing the efficiency of core staff. So they would automate and increase work production requirements. On top of that this would entirely kill seasonal businesses.
There would be a severe impact on companies that use low skill workers.
Even firms that are project based would get screwed by this.
Just so you know, there are a lot of contracts that have clauses like this in them, yet those companies still hire people, and I don't mean just collective agreements either, ever hear the numbers that CEO's take when they get turfed? Yet somehow they also continue to be hired.
Your point about seasonal business and project based work makes sense, however I think there is a very simple solution to that, make temporary contract employees exempt. The construction industry already has a number of labour laws that companies are exempt from so it's not too far fetched to imagine similar measures could be taken for this scenario.
What do you feel would be the severe impact on companies that use low skilled workers?
You really need to stop. I could go through the whole post and point out the lunacy, but this first, highlighted point is more than enough.
Efficiency increases productivity.
If people had employed your 'no new machinery to save jobs' in the 70s (JUST in farming), the world would already have experienced massive death and starvation by being unable to feed the population growth.
Your policies are ridiculous, backwards, short-sighted, and already proven wrong a thousand times over.
Yet you just keep stating them and restating them in here as if they will somehow become useful if you say it enough.
The bolded portion is the only part of your post that is a fact based statement, the rest is your opinion. Also should point out that, being disagreed with does not mean being proven wrong. Even if it's "a thousand times over"
Efficiency improves productivity, but when that efficiency is leading to local job losses with zero job creation, it's not improving your economy.
It also creates an environment where no one in their right mind would open a new business here.
There is currently risk associated with starting up businesses, yet businesses still start up. The goal of this would be more aimed towards slowing down the job losses from automation or from companies that just go where the bigger dollars are, not because they are taking losses. Let's say automation continues to grow at the rate it is, and we continue to lose jobs while businesses are able to more easily able to start up. If these businesses are automated and not creating new jobs, are we really going to be headed in a better direction?
The bolded portion is the only part of your post that is a fact based statement, the rest is your opinion. Also should point out that, being disagreed with does not mean being proven wrong. Even if it's "a thousand times over"
Efficiency improves productivity, but when that efficiency is leading to local job losses with zero job creation, it's not improving your economy.
Speaking of opinions...yours, automation will kill jobs and job creation, is probably wrong. Most articles and common opinions suggest jobs won't disappear never to be seen again but will just change as they have always done in response to technological advancements.
ATM machines didn't kill any jobs. It just freed employees from mundane day to day tasks and allowed the same people to focus on sales, business development and expansion....stuff that has created more jobs and more business.
Automating transportation for example is more likely to increase demand for goods which would create more jobs at the source of production.
I wouldn't have believed the article without watching the clip.
Calgary MP makes a plea for Energy Jobs and Pipeline in a Member's statement. Talks about the effect on energy workers. The Bloc MP behind him laughs at the plight of the workers and shakes his head the entire time. Then he has the audacity later to pitch that Quebec doesn't get enough.
Well that is one of looking at things. The other is that a "bailout" for oil companies isn't asked for at all, and might do nothing here. For example you give Suncor $10bn today and how many jobs does that bring back? Aside from my personal dislike of giving private business money, which I think is a bad idea, what is the point? They haven't asked for this, and just giving them money doesn't mean they hire people tomorrow.
Second, there have been a lot of concessions made by the federal government. They've extended EI so it basically goes for a full year, have pushed for infrastructure spending here and as far as I know they've approved every pipeline or project that has come through for them to have their say. I don't consider that SFA, but everyone has their axe to grind.
Ok so let's dissect this.
EI extensions: that's fine. How did that help the thousands of contractors out of work?
Pushed for infrastructure: the Feds are running one of the highest deficits that our generation (hopefully) are ever going to see. And all they have done is "Push" for infrastructure? Thanks.
How are those pipelines going? It sure seems to me they red taped it to a high enough degree that even though they are "approved" they will never be a "reality".
So I guess it might not be "sweet" FA but it sure is a whole lot of FA. Unless of course they are doing something I'm not aware of.
I also never said I wanted a bailout. It was an example of the Eastern bias that seeps into the minds of a whole lot of Albertans these days.
I wouldn't have believed the article without watching the clip.
Calgary MP makes a plea for Energy Jobs and Pipeline in a Member's statement. Talks about the effect on energy workers. The Bloc MP behind him laughs at the plight of the workers and shakes his head the entire time. Then he has the audacity later to pitch that Quebec doesn't get enough.
A little more on the Bloc MP. He is apparently an academic who does economics research according to his Wikipedia page.
I'm guessing he hasn't run many econometric tests on the impact of the energy industry to Canada's economy or on the impact of the energy industry to the transfer payment thresholds.
__________________
"OOOOOOHHHHHHH those Russians" - Boney M
