I dont like the complicated playing with the numbers, or "pork" that helps one person but not somebody else ...
Tax credits is more or less plugging a hole in a sinking boat, but there are still lots of holes. Better to replace the hull.
So, are you saying you are not for government assistance?
A family that lives far away from a hospital that specializes in a thing that other hospitals do not may need to travel to that hospital. Right now they can write off the travel expenses. Are you saying you would not be for that or do you have another solution?
No, I am not against government assistance. I would prefer for assisstance to be provided through its own spot on the budget, and handled close to "realtime" rather than at tax time.
For this particular case, all people who have medical related expenses should be able to itemize deductions for them, low income, medium income, high income .. doesn't matter.
I also support the idea of "basic income" and single payer national healthcare. Instead of taxing only middle class and wealthy and only benefitting extremely wealthy and poor, lets tax everybody, and try to come up with a system which works for everyone?
What do you think the minimum wage should be and why?
There shouldn't be a minimum wage. We shouldn't prevent people from doing value-add work just because it doesn't pay what Eskimospy thinks is a 'fair wage.' Telling people "I'd rather you be unemployed than do the work you're capable of at the wage you can receive for it" is a pretty shitty way of going about things. Besides being lousy policy to begin with such top-down attempts at control are doomed to fail in a gig based economy where a permanent job with a corporate employer is neither expected nor desired by many people in favor of task based work or alternative work arrangements like being a AirBnB host or Uber driver.
Are you worried about donations then? Usually the argument is made that a tax credit will give the incentive to donate more. So, take WWII for example. The government was spending a lot on the war. The gave people incentives to fill the gaps.
http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2016/04/26/gov-deal-signs-tax-credit-bill-to-help-rural.html
Take that article for example. How do you feel about that?
I think the point of minimum wage should be that the wage should be high enough that a companies employees are not subsidized in anyway. Safety nets should exist but an employee person should not have to rely on them.
Currently the call for raising the minimum wage has been to lift all wages but I see no evidence of that being an effect of raising minimum wage.
And guess the real question we should ask ourselves is what is the issue? Is it the ability to meet a minimum standard of living or is it wealth disparity? Or wage stagnation? All cannot be fixed the same way.
A gig economy is the result of a corporate economy not paying enough. What you are advocating for would simply exacerbate the situation what you are really advocating for is a race to the bottom. No thanks.
I guess at this point I should admit that its complicated, and a simple "this is bad" "this is good" approach is not a real/total solution. My personal opinion is that there is probably a better way to do this then though the tax code .. but, as a stop gap measure, or as a "make a bad thing less bad" it is certainly good.
The real issue is how to improve the skillsets of millions of people so their value proposition to a potential employer meets or exceeds the minimum wage, whether that min wage is $15 or $1.
If you're only looking at the wage paid to the worker and ignoring the economic value created by the worker who would get that wage, then your efforts will fail and no amount of calling people "greedy" for not employing people will work.
This simply may not be possible anymore. Almost any job that you could train millions of people for that would have a value proposition to a potential employer that exceeds the minimum wage would almost certainly be able to be done cheaper by a machine. As you train millions of people to do that job the value of the job naturally drops. What is valuable to a corporation is not the skills themselves but the rarity of them. Once a skill is no longer rare it is no longer valuable.
Our economy, and every economy, is still based on the idea that you need lots of hands to do jobs, some skilled and some not. But all that has changed. Now most jobs can be done with very few hands, and we are needing fewer and fewer every year. But those hands have not gone away.
Most workers generate many time more value than their pay.
This simply may not be possible anymore. Almost any job that you could train millions of people for that would have a value proposition to a potential employer that exceeds the minimum wage would almost certainly be able to be done cheaper by a machine. As you train millions of people to do that job the value of the job naturally drops. What is valuable to a corporation is not the skills themselves but the rarity of them. Once a skill is no longer rare it is no longer valuable.
Our economy, and every economy, is still based on the idea that you need lots of hands to do jobs, some skilled and some not. But all that has changed. Now most jobs can be done with very few hands, and we are needing fewer and fewer every year. But those hands have not gone away.
Most workers generate many time more value than their pay.
Thanks for exactly illustrating my point and being that guy who restates what I just said, "I'd rather you be unemployed than do the work you're capable of at the wage you can receive for it."
But a minimum wage is a business constraint that drives innovation!
There are people who believe this, so I'm not sure if you are joking.
But a minimum wage is a business constraint that drives innovation!
Then we don't need to raise minimum wage. If people that should make $15/hour already are, why do we need a law to mandate it?
Sure it does, for example we have innovations like a wide array of microwavable foods to avoid paying cooks, EZ Pass to avoid paying tollbooth attendants, Amazon reviews to avoid paying salespeople, RFID tags to replace barcodes which replaced paper price tags, the list goes on.
The one constant at every point is that innovation requires more of the fewer workers who receive higher wages in turn. Going from hunter-gatherers to agriculture required higher planning and reasoning skills, agriculture to industrial revolution required reading, information age required computer literacy, and so forth. We didn't go from being subsistence level Neanderthals to modern man by passing ever higher minimum wage laws, but rather because those who didn't improve their skills got left behind. It will be the same way in the 21st century as it was the 12th, but only now the uneducated rabble have an expectation that they can stay stupid yet still maintain middle class lifestyles.
What Buffett is saying is that he wants the government to go further into debt to give handouts to the poor. That's a real shocker! He is a buyer of that debt, so he is just talking his book.