You can't fix social problems by demanding capitalism be socialism.
You can't fix social problems by demanding capitalism be socialism.
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And bravo on your inexpensive living comment. I believe there's a huge need for reasonably priced housing, but zoning does not allow for it. I read somewhere about how mobile home parks are not getting built any more because middle class and up don't want to see them. It's a similar situation with nimbyism in places like San Francisco. This results in lower income folks spending the majority of their income on housing, widening the wealth gap.
What's interesting is it's the middle income and up who are screwing themselves in the long term by marginalizing the very people they depend on. What's even more interesting is that this situation is not the result of free market capitalism, but crony capitalism (aka. cronyism). The market is being manipulated by the wealthy who intentionally restrict choice of those who don't have a voice via the police power of the state (lobbying, etc).
Scandinavia is in deep trouble financially.
Denmark basically has the most indebted households on earth. Their economy hasn't expanded since 2007.
Finland has been in an eight year recession / stagnation. Their household debt to income ratio doubled from 2002-2012 or so. They've got a near 10% unemployment rate, which has been getting worse. Their economy hasn't expanded since 2007.
Sweden has done slightly better than those two, courtesy of market friendly reforms they performed a few decades ago. Prior to that reform, Sweden had several decades of terrible economic performance. Their household debt to income levels are also vastly inflated and unsustainable, nearly at 200%.
Norway is falling into a recession, taking the same commodity hit Canada and Australia are. Their economic success and much celebrated welfare state is almost solely dependent on the price of oil remaining high. There is now talk of having to cut into the sovereign fund to pay for deficits and spending demands. They have no other major exports to pick up the slack. Their GDP lifting off occurred directly in line with the price of oil soaring after 2001. They got rich on the back of irrational US policies around the dollar and the Iraq war. Prior to that, their GDP per capita was no better than the US or similar nations. Their household debt to income ratio is also dramatic, around 220%. That won't go well with a ten year slump in oil prices. If oil hangs around $40-$60 for ten years, Norway will look very different than it does today.
The picture is obvious: to maintain their standard of living, Scandinavia has been living far beyond its means to fake a better reality than the one they would otherwise have.
Young adults can be retrained, but there are lots of people in their 30s 40s etc. who don't have a secondary education some of which never finished elementary school in their native languages (thus illiterate). What happens to them? Do we let them find themselves back as they can't find a job and contribute to a high-skills economy?
So, if the US were to fix bottom end of poverty it would have to be in restructuring and probably centralizing the dispensation of welfare. I think no state or local government should be involved in the administration of said benefits since the lion's share of the funds come from the US government itself (not from the budgets of the state or local governments). But the chances of that happening is about as good as my chances of winning the Power Ball.
What if software engineering, hardware design, and all the other positions required to create autonomous things were paid 3-4x what they are now?
Sure that wouldn't necessarily be the case in the future, but certainly right now it is.
We should stop looking at the bottom and look at the top. CEO take-home has increased by orders of magnitude, making the bottom completely untenable.
Look up "Gravity Investments" in recent news.
To be fair it was the CEOs brother who sued and was part of a long time feud and not about the new minimum wage.
Short version: USA welfare benefits are very generous until you earn about $12/hr, peaking at a total income approaching $80k/yr. Above that point of earned income, welfare is rapidly cut off, plunging total income until earned reaches $38/hr. It's stupid and few realize how broken the very generous system is.
It's so annoying that the system works like this. It takes all of 5 minutes to realize that these should be sliding scales. I bet making these sliding in a revenue neutral way would make a great talking point for the upcoming presidential elections