I've noticed some folks, seemingly on principle say that older folks should keep working, basically until they die, presumably because they don't want them to collect social security or other entitlements, but does that end up having the negative economic impact of making it harder for young folks to find jobs?
Only half true. You can, actually, decide to channel increased productivity into involuntary unemployment and it seems that to some extent we do just that.
Productivity and growth aren't zero-sum, but money definitely is. All the assets and liabilities in the economy sum to zero, so if you want to add new jobs you need to either deflate the economy or increase someone's debt level.
"the more people working the more growth and innovation and the more opportunities and capacity for employment"
So if I'm understanding this causal relationship you're suggesting, the problem is too many people are rejecting employment, and if more people wanted to work there would be more jobs?
Housing has perverse economic incentives, mucking it up.
It is also, obviously, a limited resource that doesn't compound directly. Although its usefulness could compound in terms of density and vertical use increasing housing.
The problem that slows that:
In almost all areas, "property taxes" actually tax both the land (the exclusionary resource that should be taxed since its use reduces land available for others) and the property on it (a wealth tax).
The result of it being a combination tax, is that increasing the value of property on land increases its tax as well. So there is a strong disincentive undercurrent reducing investments in increasing housing on property. It isn't as profitable as it should be.
Even worse, land which is underused, is only taxed as land. Basically getting a tax break relative to the same land nearby which has been developed for maximum use. Meanwhile, the land value goes up parasitically, if while holding but not improving land, neighbors invest in their properties.
The result makes owning land a very good passive parasitical value-growing investment.
Which makes it useful for rich people to store vast sums of money in. Driving prices way above the market value that simple housing should have.
Until the tax issue is fixed, housing can't be fixed. Other changes may be needed to, but just that would make a big difference to everyone's incentives.
(It does happen - but rarely. In 2002, Altoona, Pennsylvania adopted a pure land-value tax, meaning they taxed only the value of the land, not the structures. By 2011, this system fully replaced their traditional property tax, renormalizing so the total tax remained stable. I.e. land was taxed more, improvements none. The effect: owners of productive, developed parcels (homes, businesses) paid less tax, while holders of undeveloped or underused land, such as mansions rarely visited with lots of open acreage, paid more—effectively removing the financial instrument advantage, and turning them into money pits. Land prices declined, development increased, and affordability improved for locals. -- Unfortunately, in 2016 the property tax was reinstated as before.)
"More people working" merely contributes to growth and innovation. You need other inputs as well. The number of people working may or may not be a bottleneck.
But once you do have growth and innovation going one way or another, then that leads to more jobs.
That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.
anyone in corporate america in a hiring position knows the prevailing trend -- you either hire h1b (for maximum leverage) or overseas (for cost savings). we've been told to hire h1b ONLY.
I work at a Fortune 100 and for the most part, we can ONLY hire citizens and do not use H1Bs without a particularly strong reason. Curiously, I'd estimate we still hire 80% naturalized citizens.
I'm not blaming this on "old people", and certainly not "old people" who want to work, I'm blaming it on a government that artificially deflates the retirement rate.
Treason is a strong word. It is a knowingly detrimental action against American workers and companies to dodge requirements for hiring skilled foreign workers.
The focus and the main point remains: It's unethical, it's illegal, and I wish punishment on the companies and the individuals who fraudulently scam American workers out of jobs.
Treason isn't even a legal concept. Who cares about any given meaning without that? If it strikes you as treason, that's as good a reason to call it treason as any.
Personally, I think there's lots of treason that pervades our life. Hell you could argue the meaning of "national interest" used by our state department is itself treasonous.
Any definition of the word will come down to what you perceive as in our interests. For easy examples, see Snowden and Manning.
Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Even things that are treasonous in a colloquial sense are still pretty narrow, and tend to refer to other specific forms of betraying your country, that just happen to be other crimes -- like espionage, or insurrection.
I think it is anti-American to discriminate on the basis of origin. Where you are from has no bearing on many if not most jobs. I may not be making the point you think I’m making, I’m making a nuanced point that we have a duty to report treason, and we have a duty to report whatever it is when you have an ongoing state of affairs in which there exists a stated or effective policy of only (or never) hiring a certain group of people.
> Most of those things aren't joining up with a foreign adversary with whom we're officially at war.
Adversary to the people, or the state? These are wildly different concepts. Just because my state has beef with China doesn't mean they can't convince me that my life is better with China in it. Sometimes states just misrepresent the people.
Right, but in the same vein, the British crown has a documented history of applying that label to dissidents. It was part of why were revolted in the first place.
Our definition for what constitutes treason is purposely narrow specifically due to the abuse potential.
Report what? They say everything verbally in a closed office. There is no paper trail. Even if there was, the entire industry and current administration are in complete alignment on this issue. They want to reduce labor costs.
I actually do blame this on old people. The reason jobs are being shipped overseas is because western workers are not productive enough to justify their premium. Work culture is part of that, but stuff like zoning and the welfare state is the main culprit.
People who worked in the USA are entitled to collect Social Security once they are old enough. This applies regardless of whether they are still working. In other words, current income doesn't reduce Social Security benefits.
The social security taxes you pay are used to buy credits. You can buy a maximum of 4 credits per year. Once you have 40 credits you are allowed to draw benefits from the system - when you are old enough. If you only have 39 credits, you don’t get social security.
When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.
I never looked at it like that. Perhaps allowing folks to work after retirement age is a form of age discrimination to a certain reading. Social Security should be sufficient for everyone’s retirement. If it isn’t, that’s a separate issue, and is also effectively another form of age discrimination, promising a funded retirement and the other party not upholding their end of the bargain.
Interestingly you can trace the establishment of the retirement age, and of social security, directly to the frustration that younger people can't easily compete with lifelong workers.
This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.
There is no credible evidence that reasonable minimum wages have lowered employment in practice[0], and there are theoretical reason to believe it can increase it[1].
That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.
[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.
[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.
Curious what you think about the UK, then. A software engineer in the UK makes 45k GBP on average. A minimum wage salary there (at 12.21 GBP per hour) is ~22k a year. The wage squeeze between skilled professional and minimum wage surely lowers the amount of people entering skilled professions
Well it doesn't matter what I think, just what empirical evidence says.
That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.
