What would it take?

[CRedskinsRule]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

I guess my concern would be how do you set a living wage at a level that ensures a minimum safety net, yet doesn't completely remove all incentive to perform jobs that barely clear the minimum wage?

Let's say you give your guaranteed living wage of $400 per week (equivalent to $10 per hour at 40 hours). Do you create a moral hazard where bus drivers and EMTs and countless other folks in similar positions say you know what I'd rather sit at home because the couple extra bucks aren't worth it?

And my second concern would be, damn, it would take a very highly graduated tax bracket structure to pay for this. The Netherlands used to have its highest tax bracket set at 72% prior to 1990, but since moved it down to 52%. Not sure how they pay for everything in their system, but I do know that if your top tax bracket is too high you have a way of squelching innovation.

How can we get stats on the number of new products, new life-saving medical advancements and drugs, come from the Netherlands? Because that to me is the crux of the whole thing. Investing in a new idea takes immense guts and risk, both personal and financial, and there needs to be immense reward on the other side of it. Without that reward it's quite obvious that fewer people would take the risk on new ideas.

So I'm not sure, but I'd have concerns about anything that raises the top tax bracket too high. The immense financial reward available in the US is the carrot dangling in front of a lot of scientific and medical advancements.

I don't know, but maybe tax rates ought to be based on how many multiples of the living wage your gross individual income is. if living wage is 20,000 as an example, and you earn 20,000 apart from living wage, you have 1 multiple of living wage. 200,000 = 10 multiples, etc etc. So one scale would be something like:

100000+ you keep .1% or 2million as a minimum and up
10000-99999 you keep 1% or 2million as a minimum up to 20 million
1000-9999 you keep 10% or 2million as a minimum up to 20million
100-999 you keep 20% or 400k up to 3.98 million
50-99 you keep 30% or 300k up to 600,000
25-49 multiples you keep 70% so earn 500k, keep 350,000
10-24 multiples you keep 85% so earn 200k, keep 170,000
1-10 multiples you keep 95% so a minimum yearly life would be 39,000 (base 20000+19000).


In addition, you charge all company's regardless of size a 5% living wage tax.

Again, no idea whether any of these numbers work, which of course means I just wasted about 15-20 minutes making this crud up, because I must like to see myself type.

I do think something like this, along with getting rid of minimum wage, and alot of bureaucracy around thousands of different government welfare programs would have a tremendous effect on the economy. I think it would be positive. (oh and if you waste the 20,000 and look for more handouts we let Achmed handle it)

of course 20,000 is a number, I don't know what that really is, but it wouldn't take a cray supercomputer to figure it out.