LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
5d ago
Were you aware that this youtuber has been going around anywhere & everywhere relevant for at least a year now? He went to greenland, panama, LA, portland, DC, utah, etc., and posted his man-on-the-street interviews & footage from it all (often livestreamed before editing down to the relevant punchy parts). This wasn't like a james o'keefe style designed hit out of nowhere. Most of your comments seem to make more sense if you're missing the context of this guy's stuff.
LateMechanic
18d ago
That's part of the pitch for doing an Employer of Last Resort / Job Guarantee program, compared to UBI (or in addition to it). That there's still quite some inherent value in not encouraging people to just waste away on the couch, and that people who keep up some level of skills & pro-social behavior/habits are still suited to transitioning back into the private sector when there's more demand.
As for what people could do in these minimum wage programs, sure it could just be bullshit jobs, adult daycare, making art, organizing & participating in parties, etc. But it's also hard to imagine that we couldn't come up with various useful things for people to do, if we're not truly in some extreme futuristic abundance AGI world. The premise is typically that the national currency-issuing government foots the bill, as it always can, but that the administration would be decentralized at lower local levels everywhere, and people can decide what the enrollees are tasked with in their community/city/state (maybe tailored to the person as best as it can be). Money will still be useful as a technology for distribution (and to incentivize not getting fired from even your minimum wage public sector job) far into a transition toward the premised post-(real)work society.
LateMechanic
24d ago
Lol, lmao even. There is nothing people love more than gibs, and nothing they'll irrationally oppose more than taxes. There is no world in which that is politically tenable or happiness increasing.
I don't think that really fits the evidence we've seen in the world. There are tons of people who appear to get warm fuzzy feelings when the government deficit shrinks closer to balanced or even flips to surplus. Many still think fondly of the clinton/gingrich era in the late 90s, even though in reality that was the worst possible case for a government surplus: the rest of the world was still increasingly accumulating USD savings, but the US domestic private sector was dis-saving and running up big private debt unsustainably.
And the taxes going up scenario is about taxes paid, so it need not be the rates changing at all. It would be people spending down savings more and supercharging economic activity, automatically driving up the amount paid in taxes as incomes go up in aggregate. It's kind of hard for anyone to 'feel' that dynamic result as negative.
LateMechanic
24d ago
It doesn't matter which currency is used to conduct/settle trades: totally economically meaningless, because currencies are freely swappable for any of the buyers & sellers (before and after the settlement). So the only thing that slightly matters in this realm is what currency anyone chooses to save in.
So in this regard (of the US getting some free benefit from being the big dog), the 'dominos starting to fall' would look like the US trade deficit shrinking, as past savers start trying to spend down their USD reserves instead of amassing them. But we're currently in an environment where trump and some of his people are trying their damnedest to intentionally reduce the US trade deficit... So it's muddy, with various winners & losers there, and probably better to look at more solid economic indicators entirely (for any story of the world getting shittier for the US).
As for the prior comment about "the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits", it simultaneously seems like a pretty big burden (requiring correct macroeconomic management). Because decade-after-decade, century-after-century, new people continually come along with an incorrect gut-notion understanding of money, freak out about government deficits and debt, and try to wreck the economy in their misunderstanding. So if foreign & domestic people/firms/governments stopped having such a desire to increase their USD savings, and the US government no longer needed to run as large of a deficit to supply those desired savings, quite a lot of people would be even happier & content with that state of affairs (even if it meant taxes were relatively a bit higher compared to spending).
Well the point is that I don't think O'Keefe ever posted anything if it didn't further his political aims. If he didn't successfully get anyone to drunkenly try to brag about doing something politically untoward, we just wouldn't hear about it. Nick Shirley apparently just goes everywhere following whatever is in the recent news, and adds some ground-level footage of it, regardless of what anyone had to say, rather than creating the story itself. I watched his greenland, panama, LA/portland ICE, and no kings protests videos, which were fairly boring but seemed to give a pretty real perspective.
I just think there's a huge difference between "fbi to investigate further after viral video by nick shirley" vs "fbi to investigate further after viral video by james o'keefe". Which is that the former is like "duh, that's what you could have known the whole time", while the latter is more like a laura loomer style politically-targeted push.
But I would forgive anyone for not knowing the context of any of these people. As for you being a fan of O'Keefe's style and actually knowing more about Shirley than me (didn't know of him going to ukraine over a year ago), I guess I just totally misread your angle here.
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