This first statement and your last statement are incongruent. We’ll have time before it’s too late, but also people need to see it happening? You realize when they see it happening, it’s far too late to prepare people, right?
No. This is a nation with 180M working people, and the automation problem has been discussed for a decade now. You’re making it sound like there is some sort of tipping point out there where everything will be fine one day, and there will be riots on the street the next. That’s nonsense. Nothing moves that fast with a workforce as large as ours.
What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter if it’s early, in fact I believe it would better prepare us.
You may be right, but I don’t agree.
Your faith in our government is astounding if you think a federal jobs guarantee is 1. feasible and 2. not frighteningly Orwellian.
I have very little faith in government. However, I do have faith in their ability to hire people and pay people. I also have a bias towards local solutions, which I am suggesting, especially considering the problem that you’re concerned about is not going to be equally distributed throughout our geography.
Your point about capital flight does not work when the tax being raised is VAT.
It actually does work (see below), but the VAT is a nonstarter. It’s regressive in nature, the lower your income, the harder it smacks you. There aren’t more than 20% of the Democrats in Congress that will vote for it, and none of the republicans will back it; and if they DO vote for it, they hand control right back to the Republicans, who will take the VAT out back and put a bullet through its head.
You simply can’t function in our economy without it. Do you think any of these companies would look at a 10% VAT, and decide to exit a $20 trillion market?
Of course not. What those companies already do is acquire/manufacture product in the lowest cost locales possible. So, the VAT produces additional incentive for Amazon and Wal Mart to buy more cheap shit from China, as well as increases the pressure on manufacturing to move over seas (as if they needed more incentive).
Plus statement is essentially saying we should leave Amazon alone and not try to implement a corporate tax that works.
We already have a corporate tax that works. I wouldn’t be opposed to a minimum tax to keep the largest 50 companies or so from avoiding taxation, which is a known problem (Warren has suggested something like this, to her credit, although she blows the problem out of proportion) but the current code works fine for the bulk of the corporations.
How are we paying for all these federal jobs in that world?
Who said anything about federal jobs? Screw that. The needs are at the local level, and I have a lot more faith in my mayor and city council to manage something like a jobs guarantee than I do the Feds. We need gardeners and road workers and hospital orderlies and teacher’s aids; and that’s all local.
People do see the problem. That’s why Andrew Yang is running.
We saw it before Yang. But more broadly, just because I don’t like his solution doesn’t mean I don’t agree that there’s a problem. What we’re debating is the event horizon and the solution.
