” but so long as we can ensure that the upper class don’t hoard wealth in off-shore tax havens,” — that’s a big big problem in the USA.
If they did NOT hoard wealth in off-shore tax havens and avoid paying taxes in every which way, I might start to agree with you.
But because our big corporations pay no taxes and the politicians and wealthiest store their money in tax-free bank accounts off shore, their greed is making this marvelous system you talk about, fail and fail miserably and it will continue to fail.
The problem is at the top, at least in the USA. I don’t know about other nations. Our system is built that way to favor them. and it does.
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The USA has been working hard to destablize Venezuela for decades now because of their rich oil reserves.
So, I don’t think it’s valid to hold up Venezuela as an example. It’s not just the USA either: When Venezuela asked the British bank who was holding their PHYSICAL gold bars for their gold bars back, the British bank said, “No”.
They said no. It was Venezuela’s gold bars. Outright theft. But that’s because several nations gain far more by Venezuela’s failure than by its success. It embarrasses me that my country does this stuff but it did and does.
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Indeed. The concept of “job” being tied into everything is going away because of automation. And I’m ok with that. The powerful and wealthy will have to find a way to work around that because they won’t give up automation but they also need consumers to consume their products and for that the consumers need currency, which they can’t get if they automated their factories to save and make more money.
It’s their problem, so long as things DON’T move towards population removal measures, in which case the problem shifts in a big way.
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As Marvin points out, post-industrial nations like the USA are moving away from jobs and towards automation. Businesses can grow wealth without employing people but instead purchasing computers and robotics for products and for stores, touch-screens instead of workers.
Now, it’s possible to have a jobs program: that’s been doing before. But in a jobs program, whether it is run by a government or by encouraging corporations to “create more jobs”, the jobs are minimal. They’re things to keep busy with. That’s not innovation.
The low unemployment in the USA over the last couple of years were all those kinds of jobs which don’t support a place to live, food, etc. very well.
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The free market is a redistributive economic scheme but it is centralized by whoever is the biggest corporations in place of governments.
Usually, at least in the USA, that results in one or two companies controlling entire industries. They take the effective place of governments, but without any of the rights one might hope to get with a government. Instead there are private contracts which are hidden from view.
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It’s not a fear. Basic jobs are being replaced by machine as they should be. Why hire people when a machine can do it better and less expensively?
Also, the # of people in jobs says nothing about the quality or job nor how much money it makes.
I can be employed for $1 a day or $1000 a day but that graphs looks identical either way.
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I don’t expect UBI to happen in the USA. It may happen in other nations but not the USA. The TINY BIT we’re getting is already running out and most people won’t get any relief money.
Maybe UBI will happen in other places but the USA is too addictive to overpriced real estate, oil, and turned “ruggedness” (other people’s ruggedness or poverty) into a virtue for that to happen.
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Typical worker pay is almost flat at the bottom. The top is CEO pay, which has grown approx at the market index, which is expected.
Workers do not benefit from market increases.
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Oh, the USA had a false boom after WW2. It wasn’t real.
What happened is: Mortgages. People were encouraged to get married and move out of homes with big families and live on their own. “Nuclear family”. This sold millions of mortgages to banks, which last for approximately 20-30 years.
Houses get sold and resold in the meantime.
What also happened after WW2 is corporations paid up to 90% of their profit in taxes. The USA was funded by the tax revenue of big corporations.
But once that stopped and once the mortgages were paid, the slight increase in wealth by the middle class – owning a house – now became a burden with upkeep and sales and such.
The growth window through lots of houses being built and big families splitting up was closed by the mid 1970s and definitely by the 1980s when mortgages ran out and homes aged.
But, companies continued building on new plots of land, encouraging more people to be nuclear families and buy their own homes, to establish 30 year mortgages, hoping to continue the magic of the 1950s in the USA.
But we had a big market and real estate crash in the late 1980s. Years of slow real estate followed.
It’s been getting worse since.
And while glow from the real estate boom from the 1950s was fading, the big corporations petititioned Congress to pay less taxes and by late 1960s, succeeded in the first of many many “tax breaks” to come.
Now, in 2020, corporations pay less taxes than any US citizen does. This is a complete flip from the 1950s when they were paying the most.
There’s no growth left in the USA. Other countries need to do it. India, middle east, parts of Africa.
And no, it’s NOT illegal immigration that causes low worker wages. They do jobs regular US citizens never do like farmhand work and their pay is not included in those charts (approx 3/4 of US worker wages). They do pay taxes though – because they believe it’ll help citizenship (it doesn’t).
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Here are the tiers of earners in the USA over time.
This is my proof to you that “illegal immigrants” had absolutely nothing to do with any wage issues in the USA. Why? Because this affected tiers FAR removed from the illegal immigrant level.
Only one class benefitted significantly from the market.
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I don’t know if UBI is an answer but I know that the USA can’t return to how it was doing things. It’s already been failing for some time now, living on loans it can’t repay. Yet it’s also wealthy but the wealth is trapped in corporations and in offshore banks accounts. Greed on huge scales.
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I’ll agree that for:
high school dropout level
skilled illegal immigrants are competition.
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Thankfully there are fewer and fewer high school drop outs. More and more graduate and are able to get jobs that are not competing with any skilled illegal immigrant labor might be.
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So I can see that this _could have_ been a problem decades ago, it does not appear to be so now.
Then again, the quality of jobs has been diminishing over the past few years with most “jobs” are part time and minimum wage which to me don’t really count as jobs but technically, they do, even if their earnings are ridiculously small.
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I live near illegal immigrants. They work the nearby farms, at least before the virus hit. Significant source of tax revenue. I don’t have a problem with them as I consider it part of the “American Dream”. Work hard for your kids and grand kids. That sort of thing.
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Oh, I disagree. Citizens won’t want to do this kind of work. Not for decades and decades.
In the 1960s, they tried to get rid of all illegal immigrants. They tried to replace them with high school students, veterans, unemployed people.
It failed quickly and miserably. It was a mistake.
This past week, our local farms got hit hard by the restaurants being closed. Tomatoes rotting on the ground,. That’s a failure of capitalism: no alternative distribution channels.
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The market does NOT lower prices when there is higher output. They simply destroy the higher output.
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I don’t know much about Paul Ryan except he was a sneaky politician, like most politicians. I didn’t believe what he said and he only wanted to make money for himself and his family.
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The difference is small. If a US citizen makes $8/hr, the illegal immigrant makes $6.
It’s 75% of standard US pay. It’s a savings but it’s not extreme.
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Our dairy farmers in FLorida are dumping milk to the ground. Why? They don’t want prices to go down.
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It’s insignificant in the USA because illegal immigrants have some rights as citizens WANT the farmers to keep farming. Citizens don’t want to pick tomatoes and work 60 hour weeks in the hot sun under poor living conditions.
We complain about working at fast food. A McDonald’s job is considered the “lowest acceptable job” for a US citizen for some reason. Been that my whole life.
Now you know that a restaurant service job is not a bad job at all. But to Americans, it’s considered low.
For a citizen to have to do what the undocumented workers have to do is almost unthinkable to a standard US citizen.
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Illegal immigrants may be a problem in other nations but not in the USA. Our Republican politicians have been saying they are a problem but their rhetoric doesn’t fit the facts.
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