Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg supports an idea called universal basic income.

Because they are working half the hours.

 

How are you not getting this? You are paid based on value. Do you think if the CEO works 20 hours he gets half pay?

 

A CEO is on an individually negotiated contract. Most salary is individually negotiated. That doesnt work for hourly in most cases. Are you saying that all employers should be forced to put their workers on salary?

As for value, how do you plan to measure that?

 

Productivity is easily measured in some companies. If a company can make 100 widgets with workers working 40 or 20 hours.....why work 40 hours?

 

At the same time, why pay someone for 40 hours of work if they are working 20?

What about companies that dont have such an easily measurable metric. What about a plumber, or an electrician, or a cook?

 

But but hold on a second. If workers are making half and products are costing more ... who is buying the products?

 

Since the 1980's when wages started slipping and families had to have both parents working that was the start of the downfall of the so called middle class family. Mortality has nothing to do with income, if it was the ruling class ********ers wouldn't be ripping people off as we saw in 2008 n their latest episode of their "morality"

 

All of those jobs could be automated someday. You would not pay someone for 40 hours if the work week was established at 20

 

My point exactly. You arent going to pay someone 40 hours worth of wages for 20 hours worth of work.

 

Who said it's written anywhere? Simple fact is we have welfare and entitlement programs. If you want those just gutted without replacement, take a gander at polls - there's no support for that.

But if you'd like to reform existing programs to make them more efficient and stop KEEPING people poor (like welfare now does), this is at least a fix for those two problems.

 

If you can't tell the difference then it's not worth the effort

 

No. Let's assume for a minute that the dumpiest dump in your town rents for $200/M. You give the person who rents it say $18K a year, the landlord says, hey dumpy dump now can fetch $400K a month from Crackzilla. She's got the money. So next year we add up all the Crackzillas and realize their cost of housing had doubled, so then we have to raise our basic income checks to $19K, and so on and so on and so on. All it does is distort prices on all the "basic necessities" .

 

Your math is way off. Waaaayyy off.

 

Can you explain to me how a zero increase in spending would result in what you describe? I was pretty clear - as i proposed, there'd be zero new costs

 

Yes, I'm still talking about exactly what was discussed in the op. Dafuq?

 

Holy cow. What if they can make 100 widgets in 20 hours instead of 40. I can't make this simpler

 

No, it doesnt. We're talking about a flat national basic income - you'd get the same in rural Alabama as you would in NYC. there's really no reason to expect massive inflation. People ate food, bought clothes, and lived in housing before such a program - that's not going to change.

 

Yes it does....and nothing in the US just about is flat-rated nationally. Even milk subsidies get regionally adjusted and you would have a hard time finding a credible person who doesn't agree that those drive up the cost to consumers of milk. The same thing would happen with housing, wages, and everything else. Subsidies simply make things more expensive.

 

How many places do you know that pay based on output alone?

 

Leave the worker's pay at 20 hours of work and give the CEO a pay raise, of course.

 

Socialism in a nutshell

 

Spending has little to do with my reply. It is irrelevant when the administration is corrupt and whose primary interest is in control.

Everbody wants to believe that their ISM of choice is the great and wondeful thing. Forgetting that it is people who administer that wonderful thing. The same people who administer the other guys hated wonderful thing.

I am talking in generalities here ... people thrive when they have conflict and struggle. When they have motivation. Less conflict and struggle leads to Less motivation leads to complacency leads to subservience.

Give people what they want or even better tell people what they want first and then give it to them. You will have a subserviant population.

Or to simplify ... we humans are a lazy lot. As with electrons we take the path of least resistance.

 

Time for us to smarten up

 

Every single business in this country pays based on the value the employee brings to the company

 

To be fair, most employees don't hire employees to make a certain number of widgets an hour.

They hire to have the employee make as many widgets an hour as they possibly can.

And generally, the business that can make the most widgets to sell for the cheapest price is the most successful.