> if the US government had a full employment program.
Like the US Military? Do you mean we should get some of the old anti-black laws on the books outlawing being unemployed?
> allocate them to something useful, possibly at cost.
I don't think the average person is ok with the government spending $5 to has a task done that will immediately require spending $20 to undo it and another $25 for somebody to do it correctly. People can do negative work. There's often a reason the private sector has passed over people for employment.
> a country of subsidized housing and scarce jobs would still be a pretty sad place
I don't think that would happen. There's a reason Amazon wanted to build HQ2 at NYC & NOVA; there's a ton of people here that could work for them. While people move for jobs; people also build factories/office parks where they can employ people.
Although it could be the case that people taking subsidized housing don't have the skill set Amazon is looking for so there may be a limit to what job opportunities they have in the nearby area. And of course Amazon isn't interested in running a training program into SWE when they can just hire people who paid for it themselves (college).
> There's often a reason the private sector has passed over people for employment.
Yes: because they could hire someone overseas for cheaper, or because the work in question would benefit society but the benefit would be hard for the business to capture, and other such good reasons.
> I don't think the average person is ok with the government spending $5
The average person would be so happy to not be under threat of unemployment anymore that they'd be ok with the government spending $5. The rich person, on the other hand.
Most people who cannot hold down a job are that way for basically psychological reasons, they can't bring themselves to consistently show up and quit any job you give them within days/weeks. What would help them the most is creating a new class of labor which works on a day-to-day basis with no paperwork/bureaucracy setup to hire them and fire them. I'm talking about legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed day-labor, so people who can't hold down a regular job can at least easily earn irregular money whenever they find themselves able. If it requires applying for one day then showing up the next, that disqualifies most chronically unemployed people.
Unfortunately well-meaning people will insist on creating bureaucratic roadblocks in this program ostensibly for the benifit of the workers, to make sure the workers are getting benefits, safety training, etc, that have the end result of making it a job you have to apply for in advance and show up for later. And once this is done, it will be no different from the normal sort of job that some people can't hold onto because they can't bring themselves to show up reliably.
> I'm talking about legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed day-labor, so people who can't hold down a regular job can at least easily earn irregular money whenever they find themselves able.
Doing what exactly? How would the labor discovery process work here? The only people I know who do this kind of "untaxed day labor" are semi-legal immigrants in front of home improvement stores.
> end result of making it a job you have to apply for in advance and show up for later. And once this is done, it will be no different from the normal sort of job that some people can't hold onto because they can't bring themselves to show up reliably.
Has it ever crossed your mind that reliability is a big component of gainful employment? In your example of this word salad arrangement (legalized and legitimized unorganized untaxed, whatever that means) what's stopping from a more reliable company to swoop in with their employees and starting taking this type of labor from "people who can't show up on time" ?
When I think "gig work" I think jobs that require you to use a smartphone app and your car, usually in a major urban area. It's work that requires you to interact with lots of strangers and travel around town all day and without supervision to keep you on task. These are daunting propositions to a lot of people.
The sort of jobs I'm talking about are ones where you just have to get yourself to one place, a guy hands you a shovel and points at where you dig, then pays you cash at the end of the day. These jobs do exist but they aren't legal or legitimate, or if they are then you have to do paperwork and commit to a schedule to get into the tax system and compliance with government regulations. This friction keeps people who are struggling with the basics of life from working, this kind of irregular work would be much easier for people if the government removed their bureaucratic restrictions on it. Does this clarify the "word salad" for you? (BTW I don't appreciate your implication that I'm mentally ill. If you don't understand what I'm saying, it's not because I'm schizophrenic. More likely it's because you're misconstruing disagreement with confusion.)
The bureaucratic roadblocks would be created because the employers would immediately exploit such a loophole in the employment law to treat their normal employees as just 'day-to-day' ones
And so there will continue to be people who are unemployable because they're unreliable. We need both kinds of jobs; it shouldn't be impossible to have an economy where both exist...
In fact we already do but the day-labor is done illegally under the table which makes it harder for low-motivation/ability people to get into. Besides, companies don't want unskilled day labor for most semi-skilled work anyway because the workers would do more damage than good, so regular jobs will still exist if irregular day labor is legalized and legitimized. For safe measure, make it illegal to refuse a day worker in Wednesday because he didn't show up on Tuesday, no implied fulltime contracts for day laborers, so companies will have to hire people on for regular jobs for work that requires training and regularity. Violations can be investigated at the government's expense, as is already the case with Department of Labor investigations.
> And so there will continue to be people who are unemployable because they're unreliable. We need both kinds of jobs; it shouldn't be impossible to have an economy where both exist...
I think I would rather these unreliable people be paid basic income to just live than to try and invent some convoluted employment scheme for them, that will ultimately 90% benefit the bureaucrats and 10% to those people and that will also inevitably balloon to 5x its intended original size.
The idea is to create the least convoluted employment scheme conceivable. Convoluted employment schemes are exactly the problem that keeps people who can't handle their shit from working at all.
But they are not convoluted purposely to make employment difficult. They are just the result of bad actors cheating the system. A lot of time it's the general population who insist to add all these complications. Like with Uber where at first anybody could be a driver, but some bad things happened and people demanded that a driver has to have a clean criminal record. Same thing would happen to your simple 'day-to-day' employee scheme. It would get abused and the people would demand the abuse to be curbed
> The average person would be so happy to not be under threat of unemployment anymore that they'd be ok with the government spending $5.
I see you neglected to address the US Military comment. Which person are you thinking of that is so suited for a job that isn't employable by the military?
You also neglected to read the second half the sentence; it's not about the government spending $5; it's about the government spending $50 of which $25 is literal wasted spending. It's literally better to just give the person $5 to do nothing over having them work.
> I see you neglected to address the US Military comment. Which person are you thinking of that is so suited for a job that isn't employable by the military?
Such government program could provide different jobs, not only one. People have different expectations and different abilities. Military is not for everyone.
> It's literally better to just give the person $5 to do nothing over having them work.
Don't do negative works then. There's a lot of jobs that are not profitable, but still provide utility to society. If you pay $50 for nothing, or pay $50 for $10 worth job, in second case it's actually only $40 paid so much better.
Military is probably the most diverse employer you can find. Honestly besides C-suite / lobbyists / factory-work there's probably not a single private sector job that doesn't exist in the military. Plus the military will train you; good luck getting Boeing to shell out the money so you can get a pilot's license.
> Don't do negative works then. There's a lot of jobs that are not profitable, but still provide utility to society.
Not doing negative work isn't an option here. How will you handle people that nobody literally wants to work with? How will you handle people that literally cannot understand instruction? Wish I could find the blog posts people have done on Universal Jobs where they can outline people who cannot work.
What are the goal posts here? I'm going off the initial comment of providing literally every single person that wants it a job so that they're able to afford to live. There are no points for only getting to 99% as those remaining 1% will be the RV-ers living in the parking lot.
If we're ok with the goal posts being 99.9% than yeah sure things such as WPA [1] or CETA [2] are great. Probably even expand them to handle the national parks or develop more land into national parks would be neat.
> If you pay $50 for nothing, or pay $50 for $10 worth job, in second case it's actually only $40 paid so much better.
This isn't the option here. It's you have say $50 and can pay somebody (in need) $5 to do something and then pay somebody (not in need) $45 to fix up the mess. Or you could just give $5 to 10 people in need to do nothing. If your goal is to make sure everybody is housed then the second option is way cheaper.
> What are the goal posts here? I'm going off the initial comment of providing literally every single person that wants it a job so that they're able to afford to live.
Yes, so are for it or against it? I can't tell. Arguments like this:
> Not doing negative work isn't an option here. How will you handle people that nobody literally wants to work with?
Are matched with arguments like this:
> If we're ok with the goal posts being 99.9% than yeah sure things such as WPA [1] or CETA [2] are great.
99.9% would be a really great result. I don't believe you can actually have a solution which covers exactly 100% percent of people. People "who can't be worked with" in machining shop can be worked with for example in cleaning services. My wife manages such people. It's very hard and a lot of drama and missed spots and occasional non-showings but everyone who actually wants to work earns enough money to provide for himself. This is subsidized by Polish government, because most of those people have some form of disability which prevents them from holding "normal" jobs. And cleaning is a little cheaper. It's still better than just giving them money for sitting on their ass all day watching tv.
>There's a reason Amazon wanted to build HQ2 at NYC & NOVA
To quote Contact: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" They were likely given so much in tax incentives from local local and state governments that building 2 HQ2s was less than what one would have cost Amazon on its own. Furthermore, it makes sense to want to have HQs in both the Financial and Federal Government centers of the US.
Like the US Military? Do you mean we should get some of the old anti-black laws on the books outlawing being unemployed?
> allocate them to something useful, possibly at cost.
I don't think the average person is ok with the government spending $5 to has a task done that will immediately require spending $20 to undo it and another $25 for somebody to do it correctly. People can do negative work. There's often a reason the private sector has passed over people for employment.
> a country of subsidized housing and scarce jobs would still be a pretty sad place
I don't think that would happen. There's a reason Amazon wanted to build HQ2 at NYC & NOVA; there's a ton of people here that could work for them. While people move for jobs; people also build factories/office parks where they can employ people.
Although it could be the case that people taking subsidized housing don't have the skill set Amazon is looking for so there may be a limit to what job opportunities they have in the nearby area. And of course Amazon isn't interested in running a training program into SWE when they can just hire people who paid for it themselves (college).