The Employment to Population Ratio

I agree but I'm just saying that people's potential limitations, relative to the rest of the workforce, may not provide them the success to avoid poverty and/or government assistance. Assuming that all workers fall somewhere on the bell curve, we know those in the lowest quintile, will always struggle relative to others higher on the curve...there is no way to contract the curve to force everyone into the same group...or even 2 or 3 groups. It is these differences that determine income and wealth, good and bad decisions, etc. Too much discussion IMO is solely based on income, yet we know for a fact that general incomes range from $15K/year to $250K/year which guarantees those earning in the 4th and 5th quintiles will never be able to financially compete with others in 1st through 3rd quintiles. Consumer spending of the higher incomes force inflation at greater rates than the lower incomes can manage and this disparity grows over time; for example average home prices of $1 million in a city like San Francisco. It's at this point that society/government must provide tangible services and/or financial assistance. I don't see how this disparity and it's effects can ever be changed...

 

But you avoid reality; most people are not going to move and most businesses are not going to locate in an area that is not commensurate with the requirements of business. Unfortunately just the logistics place a huge burden on many Americans...

 

This is not accurate? All government levels in the US combined spend $7 trillion per year TOTAL...

 

Experience in other countries suggests that much of working poverty is avoidable. It has very little to do with maximum human capital characteristics.

Your position of the income distribution typically reflects other factors (e.g. daddy's income). There is no meritocracy.

Welfare goes way beyond simply helping the poorest. It is needed to reduce the consequence of income inequalities and how it feeds class divides. Is it enough? Of course not. Meritocracy would have go hand in hand with an assault on inefficient wealth divides[/quote]

 

The reality is that the unemployed are much more likely to find employment where businesses are hiring. Those who are avoiding reality are the ones who need employment and refuse to move to where hiring is taking place. We appear to agree that the primary function of businesses is not simply to employ people.
The logistics is relatively simple today, considering the ease of communication and traveling great distances relatively quickly.

 

The fact is, there are always unfilled jobs available and a great many of them so not require special skills. Many of them may not be jobs people would like to make a career of, but they would reduce the amount of assistance one would need until more desirable employment became available. Why would you think anyone would seek employment paying a lower wage?
While I agree that there will ALWAYS be people requiring assistance, government is a poor source of providing such assistance as unlike society itself it tends to eliminate limits leading to increased fraud, corruption, and waste.

 

most Americans moved away from liberal Europe to the USA and learned a new language to get a better job!!! Hard to imagine you didn't know that.

 

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As long as all people are not going to earn the same amount, are not going to accumulate the same wealth, there will always be people spread across the financial spectrum...you cannot change this...government cannot change this.

Talking about 'daddy's' income is jealousy.

You dwell on a philosophical position but in reality all of us are different. We are not going to achieve the same wages and the same wealth. Government can intervene and assist in some ways but none of this will ever create a wage/wealth panacea...

 

If anything you say here was true we would not have the problems we've been talking about...

 

You cannot force people to work. You can threaten them by terminating their assistance but this still will not work.

 

There's no need for equality in outcome. However, equality in opportunity should always be pursued. If you had that opportunity working poverty would tumble. Countries such as the UK and the US have structurally flawed economies where low skilled equilibria develop. It isn't a supply side problem, it doesn't reflect individual ability.

Its a key aspect for why inefficient social class divides develop. We know, for example, that the US underperforms in intergenerational mobility. Wealth is skewed towards a relatively small number of families and innate abilities are not necessarily developed among the rest.

Its actually an empirical position. Working poverty, for example, is easily measured and compared.

 

You can force people to work, but we have a name for that.

I am human being. There are some jobs I just won't take.
I'm in the job and all I see is the slow death.
Unhappy every day, with no way out... trapped in the job, because it takes all my waking hours to provide for myself only.
Don't enjoy it, it's physically painful and my entire life is now misery. No chance of advancement in the work no chance of development in my life, can't afford a girlfriend or a family.
Meh, no thanks. I don't think I'll bother. Prefer to starve quickly.

How many of my jobs have paid less than the cost of living? Oh so many. These jobs... also better to have no job. Time to find an alternative is preferable to the slow death.

Yay! Quit my dead end job yesterday. 10 hours later, different city different side of the country, real work offered and accepted. Back in the professions again. Nice.


In all honesty the kind of assistence I want from the state is work.
Give me two days work instead of benefits and I might accept it.
Offer me benefits and I won't take it. Rather starve than give up.

 

That makes no sense, I'm pointing out WHY the problems we've been talking about exist.

 

I said nothing about forcing people to work, simply offering to provide them assistance more relative to their displayed desire to survive. Terminating their assistance is NOT a threat, but simply a rational response when it is determined that the assistance being provided is producing no positive results.

 

Unemployment benefit is crucial for capitalism. First, it enables better job search and therefore reduces productivity harming job mismatches. Second, the unemployed serve a key role in capitalism: a discipline device on the employed. Maintaining physical efficiency of the reserve army is critical after all.

Right wing arguments against welfare typically are demanding a deficient form of capitalism (e.g. over reliance on production of goods with low income elasticity of demand, as employer-employee relationships shift away from high wage-high productivity outcomes). Bit of a shame really!

 

In the US all kids have a public education system K-12, they can obtain scholarships to attend college, or they can pay their way...these opportunities exist for all Americans. The only variable in this is how much effort the individual invests? Yes it's easier for some than others but so what? It does reflect individual ability.

There will always be a small number of families with wealth...this proves how difficult it is to achieve...but it is achievable.

If you believe you can remove poverty then what's your ideas?

 

You say there are jobs for everyone...I'm saying if that were true we would not be having this discussion...

 

Nothing is rational about taking away money that people depend on. I'm all for means testing anyone receiving government assistance...either it is required or it is not...

 

That's what corporate for profit prisons with convict labor leasing and stocks traded on Wall Street are for. The power structure can turn $40-50K per year, per hominid, and offload the cost onto the public.

Fweedumb. Crapitalism.

 

Again, I have no problem with unemployment benefits but only in the short term...3-6 months...

 

Cute. Only if this is NOT systemic.

 

The Wall Street/donor/"job creator" class first decided they no longer required "expensive" american workers for production in their endless pursuit of profit margin growth to infinity. Then later on they decided they no longer required american workers for mass consumption either. So they don’t need to pay a livable wage to labor. And how does capital always seek to increase profit? Reduce labor costs among other things, but this is always being whittled away at, along with benefits. Wealth redistribution by the Wall Street/donor/"job creator" class who have no ties to any nation state or people other than the aristocracy.

Fweedumb. Crapitalism.

 

But that wouldn't fit with the needs of capitalism. Take, for example, efficiency wage analysis. That refers to how worker compliance is related to the threat of replacement by someone unemployed. The point being, capitalism naturally maintains unemployment and government is tasked to ensure that the unemployed are looked after (such that they continue as 'potential' employees)

 

yes all agree the longer unemployment benefits the longer unemployment.


Writing for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii and Kurt Mitman treat the 2014 bene-fits cutoff as a natural experiment. The extra federal benefits ranged from nothing to 47 weeks state by state, and then all at once fell to 26 weeks nationwide. This variation allowed them to compare the employment effects between states sponsoring more generous benefits and those with less.iPhoneAssuming that the pre-2014 trends would have continued among the two groups, the authors find that “the cut in unemployment benefit dura-tion led to a 2% increase in aggregate employment, accounting for nearly all of the remarkable em-ployment growth in the U.S. in 2014.” They then confirm these results with a second experiment that compares adjacent counties in different states whose economies are otherwise equal ex-cept for their unemployment benefits.

 

It's about equality of opportunity, not that some opportunity exists. Of course we see some social mobility. However, that rate is pitiful in the US.

It's bad here too of course. However, we can track the blame to 1066 and William the Bastard.

We already know that social democracy delivers much lower levels of poverty. Of course I'd go further with socialism. Income distributions naturally exist and, at least according to the relative poverty methodology, that means zero poverty isn't an option. However, socialism does deliver on equality of opportunity.