I am baffled. Immigration "tackles" inflation by driving down working-class wages. That benefits the upper-middle class.
And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.
And also, driving up the rent and increasing traffic.
Take Jeff Bezos. He doesn't like to pay salaries to warehouse employees, but his employees will not give up the few dollars per hour that keep them from starving and homelessness.
Now, we flood the "low skilled" labor market. What if there are twice as many workers available? Sure, someone will be willing to swap unemployment for a job with a somewhat lower salary?
Now, instead of companies competing with each other for labor... we have workers competing with each other for jobs! That's fantastic news for the upper class! They will work for peanuts, because otherwise they'll starve and have to live in a car in a poor neighborhood... checkmate!
Thinking you can run out of jobs is an artifact of the US’s bad monetary/industrial policy from 2000-2020, but if you look around you’ll see that’s over. We’re in a full employment economy now.
So how could we generate more demand?
https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour...
> UK research suggests that immigration has a small impact on average wages of existing workers but more significant effects for certain groups: low-wage workers lose while medium and high-paid workers gain.
The wage effects of immigration are likely to be greatest for resident workers who are immigrants themselves.
Research does not find a significant impact of overall immigration on unemployment in the UK, but the evidence suggests that immigration from outside the EU could have a negative impact on the employment of UK-born workers, especially during an economic downturn.
The impacts of immigration on the labour market depend on the skills of migrants, the skills of existing workers, and the characteristics of the host economy. This means that research evidence on the labour market effects of immigration is always specific to time and place.
For both wages and employment, short run effects of immigration differ from long run effects: any declines in the wages and employment of UK-born workers in the short run can be offset by rising wages and employment in the long run.
Do you understand the incentives you're creating when you have only a small minority of productive people subsidize everyone else?
Yes. I believe that being poor is miserable and that we should make the lives of our fellow citizens less miserable. I don’t see any need not to attach strings to it either. There’s nothing morally wrong with saying you have to be a net tax payer to vote, for example.
> Do you understand the incentives you're creating when you have only a small minority of productive people subsidize everyone else?
It’s not a small minority though. A small minority of people make the most money but something near a majority of people who work for money are net tax payers over their life. The magnitude of their contribution varies enormously but I’d be shocked if most people who work 30 years or more aren’t net tax payers.
But more importantly, it absolutely makes sense to have the poorest be subsidized by the richest. That's what Europe does, and they are doing great. I would much rather be taxed highly in Europe and know that the money is making sure everyone around me has healthcare and a roof above their head than thinking that my productivity is some God-given ability that supersedes a compassionate and rational way to structure society.