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[jester]

*looks over the last 3 pages of 3 arguments going at once*

Wasnt one of the things that most people managed to agree on earlier is that there is not enough real work out there for all people to be properly employed?

I recently spent 9 months out of work, in that time I sent out over 500 resumes, got many interviews, all of which had 30+ people going for the same job, the job I got lasted for 4 months, then everybody got a call on friday night not to come on monday.......


  Oh and if you cut welfare too much you will be stabbed in the street for your shoes, its a fact.  The 'tough love, everybody contributes'  is great if you live in a fantasy land.

[Immortal]

Good to know Kaijyuu. I thought I had gave you one to your question.
I believe Truean gave you a great answer though, more wordy.

Summation: Rewarding people for being productive is fine and good. Punishing people for things they often can't control, isn't. "Choice" is fundamental to the idea of rewards and punishments. If you can't chose what you're doing, then it makes no sense to reward or punish you, because without that choice there is no "encouragement."

Which would mean we would not punish those who can not chose how they are born. Those who chose to do no work are not given a decent living though.

Mainiac - Do you really see the current US debt getting better? Its growing at an insane rate. A country can not continue to operate like that. 15 Trillion in debt is very steep. Getting out of that hole will be nigh impossible.


Sadly I'm done for the night. Cya guys.

[Truean]

Oh and if you cut welfare too much you will be stabbed in the street for your shoes, its a fact.  The 'tough love, everybody contributes'  is great if you live in a fantasy land.

^^
Yes. It's a bitch to look at your family and realize you can't afford food and are getting evicted.... From there, it goes south quickly. Real people, not "lazy bums," get screwed over by the harsh attitudes. Not that anyone cares, unfortunately, but they do. Rather than a boot in the ass, we might consider giving the guy some way to provide for himself if possible. It isn't like we don't have a failing infrastructure that desperately needs replaced or anything.... Unfortunately the cost of this program would require massive amounts of money, but it is a pay now or pay much more later situation.... We can't just let our people or our infrastructure rot forever.

Good to know Kaijyuu. I thought I had gave you one to your question.
I believe Truean gave you a great answer though, more wordy.

Summation: Rewarding people for being productive is fine and good. Punishing people for things they often can't control, isn't. "Choice" is fundamental to the idea of rewards and punishments. If you can't chose what you're doing, then it makes no sense to reward or punish you, because without that choice there is no "encouragement."

Which would mean we would not punish those who can not chose how they are born. Those who chose to do no work are not given a decent living though.

Mainiac - Do you really see the current US debt getting better? Its growing at an insane rate. A country can not continue to operate like that. 15 Trillion in debt is very steep. Getting out of that hole will be nigh impossible.


Sadly I'm done for the night. Cya guys.

If the spending were targeted well instead of wasted, we could spend our way out of this via government public works programs (costing trillions) and then pay for it once the place stabilized. Unfortunately, the spending would be wasted, to the tune of trillions. Sigh....

[mainiac]

Mainiac - Do you really see the current US debt getting better? Its growing at an insane rate. A country can not continue to operate like that. 15 Trillion in debt is very steep. Getting out of that hole will be nigh impossible.

Nigh impossible in the sense that countless other countries have paid down debt burdens of similar sizes and worse?  This must be some use of the words "nigh impossible" that I am previously unfamiliar with.

I use the words "nigh impossible" to mean something that is difficult to do and unlikely to happen.  So if for instance there were another country easily servicing a proportionally larger debt (Japan) and if the country most similar to our own (Canada) had recently reduced a proportionally comparable debt in the 90s, I would not describe such tasks as "nigh impossible".  I would in fact describe them as "possible".

Want to solve the deficit?  Keep to the budget as current law has it and toss in a 10% hike in taxes or cut in spending after the recession ends.  Keep to paygo laws after that.  Like magic, the deficit is gone.

Or you can listen to a bunch of politicians scream their heads off about how we are broke whenever there is domestic spending to be done.  Funny, they didn't sound the same when it came to trillion dollar military adventures or multi-trillion dollar boondoggle tax cuts or give aways to the prescription drug industry.

[kaijyuu]

Summation: Rewarding people for being productive is fine and good. Punishing people for things they often can't control, isn't. "Choice" is fundamental to the idea of rewards and punishments. If you can't chose what you're doing, then it makes no sense to reward or punish you, because without that choice there is no "encouragement."

Which would mean we would not punish those who can not chose how they are born. Those who chose to do no work are not given a decent living though.

Ah, so it's incentivizing by putting people's lives at stake? Not so much a difference in empathy thing, but rather a "do this or face the consequences/loss of privilege" thing.


How... parental. Threatening. At least there's some logic behind it, though the practical concerns are numerous.


I like welfare so people's lives aren't at stake if they're poor (for whatever reason; doesn't matter to me). I don't like welfare because those benefits are taken away once you reach a certain amount of financial independence. Aren't there problems in the UK where it's better to not work, due to having nearly as much income without having to lift a finger? As long as we're talking incentives to work, welfare seems to work contrary to that.

Of course we could say "nothing's perfect, and this is better than alternatives" and leave it at that, but I'll hop on the idealism train and say there are better alternatives. Commonly in this thread, people have advocated giving bare necessities (food, shelter, etc) for free. I'd expand that to giving everyone those things for free, regardless of financial standing (so Bill Gates could go get food stamps if he really wanted). That way working gives a significant boost to those on the bottom, as they no longer lose anything as their income goes up. Incentive is preserved and no one dies due to lack of productivity. Win-win.

[eerr]

date=1336620648"Wasnt one of the things that most people managed to agree on earlier is that there is not enough real work out there for all people to be properly employed?"

Bullshit!

The number of jobs out there scales with the number of people.

Though that fact might not be obvious.

With that said, some places don't have enough jobs-



If you can go someplace that doesn't have enough people, it should be real easy.

but that requires a growing economy!

[Drunken]

Let's not get sidetracked by money. Many people seem to forget that money is imaginary. I can write on a piece of paper "Legal Tender for one drunkendollar" and it becomes money. I may or may not honour the tender, and it's value in terms of real goods may be dependent on a vast array of factors that are somewhat opaque and complicated, but that is what money is. The idea that 'someone has to pay for it' is an absurd fallacy brought on by a narrow mindset taught to us from birth that money has an intrinsic value of it's own, like back in the days when all money was made of precious metals. Those days have been over for a very long time, and even then the price of metal was not constant. Don't get me wrong I am not anti-currency, I think having symbolic tokens representing material value is a genius idea and a wonderful way of regulating and distributing material value. It is just when people operate with the mindset that these tokens restrict our actions or capabilities in any way (as a society I mean, of course in the current system it is the primary tool for restricting individual capabilities). It is like saying "I cant pronounce Russian words because ASCII has no Cyrillic characters". It is just backwards.

Second point: In any debate of this nature the concept of "lazy people that just don't want to work" is mentioned. I can only find two perspectives to interpret this and neither is particularly relevant to this or any other debate. The first is people who don't like the mind numbing spirit crushing busy work that society allows them to do and would rather watch television. From this perspective everyone I know is a lazy person that just doesn't want to work. Everyone I have ever met. The other way to view it seems to be to interpret it as meaning people that don't want to do anything productive or useful ever, and are only willing to do something if it serves no useful purpose. I have never met anyone like this, nor heard of anyone. It seems to me that a distinction that either includes all or none of a set is a meaningless one that contains no information. I am happy to debate the nature of human desires and motivations (though perhaps another thread should be started for that), but as far as the debate about how to structure the economy more fairly and efficiently it is not exactly productive. In the first case we can just give people jobs they like better or at least have the feeling are worthwhile, and in the second case... well you will have to convince me such people even exist before I will consider that relevant.

I would like to try and turn the conversation towards possible measures to change things if I may. Some have been mentioned already, and many of the obstacles and difficulties for change have also been pointed out. What I would personally like to see in terms of results is a gradual reduction of working hours for the average worker. This should continue until the majority of unemployment is gone. Then it should continue further, this would result in a labour shortage which would cause wages to rise meaning people could survive much better on the reduced work. Then it should be reduced further until some of the less savoury aspects of pointless soul crushing busy work are shut down. Things like 90% of the advertising industry could be done away with, ideally the military too (political climate permitting), and also a lot of fat could be trimmed off the fashion and entertainment industries. Then we can stop.

Some suggested ways of going about this:

Legislating maximum hours per week. Pros: Very direct solution, deals with the problem at it's heart. Cons: Massive opposition from large sectors of society including virtually all businesses and a large proportion of workers, especially those with families.

Universal wage (pay everyone tax free minimum wage regardless of whether they work or what their financial status): Pros: No one would ever go hungry,  rich could not complain about high taxes because even if the tax rate was 9999999999999999999999999% they would still have enough money to buy food and housing etc. (Of course they would still complain, I just mean it would be easier to ignore). Cons: Expensive, opposition from powerful minorities and many workers.

Standard welfare system (I mean a working one not the sorry excuse we have now): Pros: Could easily be paid for by a minor financial transaction tax and a small bump in the corporate and top bracket income taxes. Cons: Seems to have a bad rep at the moment, mostly due to faux news propaganda in the USA.

Anyone got further suggestions? They don't have to be cure-all ideas, small cumulative steps are actually better.

Sorry about the wall of text. Just noticed in the preview that I might have gotten a bit carried away.

tl;dr=money is imaginary, almost everyone wants to be productive and successful, lets think of positive changes we could make to the system.

[jester]

Bullshit!

You realize your post contradicts itself?

[kaijyuu]

@jester
I believe he's saying there are enough jobs to go around, but they're just not evenly distributed geographically. Which is probably true to some degree... plus a bunch of other factors in addition to that.

[jester]

Mmmmmm, number of jobs in no way scales to the number of people, Location A has alot of factories, owned by the large financial center at location B, Location A will have more jobs, then people will move there, not the other way around and if the whole thing falls apart and the factories close, there are now X less jobs in the world, magic jobs dont appear at location C when people get laid off.

  Other option is (and this is what I think has happened) the factories at location A get automated over 10 years or so, the population has gone up, but all the factory jobs are gone and will never be back, a small amount of tech/engineering jobs are created in the short term then the whole factory is run by some front of house and a few maintenance people.

  Large populations can produce some jobs by themselves, but never enough to keep the whole population employed and the tech jobs created by modern systems will never employ as many people as the modern systems laid off in the first place.

  I think we are now in the position where the system we work in has to undergo some serious changes, but sadly I cant see it happening without blood in the streets, even though the system we have now seems to be geared to blood in the streets being the final outcome.

[Lagslayer]

Firs things first. Why is it always "Faux News" that gets singled out if all the major networks are just as much bullshit? Hmm...

Second. A new system won't last or work properly unless the people change first. It will all just become corrupt again if the people in charge are not kept in line by the masses. This absolutely must be addressed first, or any changes would only be fleeting!

[kaijyuu]

1) Certainly you've heard the term "liberal media"? Everyone accuses various news sources as being biased.

As for why Fox gets most the ire and not any of the other conservative leaning media outlets, it's because Fox is not exactly subtle about their bias. In fact, they use it to appeal to their viewers. My mother once said, word for word, "we watch Fox because it agrees with us."

2) Humans are creatures of habit. Any dramatic shift probably won't last. Of course the authority needs to be kept in check by the masses, but were we in the USA to revolt and instill a new government, it wouldn't be too different than our current one. These things need to be gradual if they are to happen without lopping off the heads of everyone who disagrees.

[Lagslayer]

1) Certainly you've heard the term "liberal media"? Everyone accuses various news sources as being biased.

As for why Fox gets most the ire and not any of the other conservative leaning media outlets, it's because Fox is not exactly subtle about their bias. In fact, they use it to appeal to their viewers. My mother once said, word for word, "we watch Fox because it agrees with us."

2) Humans are creatures of habit. Any dramatic shift probably won't last. Of course the authority needs to be kept in check by the masses, but were we in the USA to revolt and instill a new government, it wouldn't be too different than our current one. These things need to be gradual if they are to happen without lopping off the heads of everyone who disagrees.

1) Fair enough. Never connected those two terms in that way before. Watching news that you agree with could be applied to pretty much anyone, however, regardless of weather or not your particular news source claims to be biased.
2) I agree. It would take at least a large cultural change first (possibly more, depending on how ingrained it is in our DNA). Culture does not change overnight.

[Lord Dullard]

Truean, I'm nominating you for president. Get your ass on the campaign trail.

[kaijyuu]

I dunno. Should we really put the big red "nuke the world" button within Truean's reach?