probably for both.. don't forget it includes an air conditioned place to live, food and internet plus a salary. In exchange they take care of domestic needs (cooking, shopping, house keeping)
This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already). Even the most consumerist of the super-rich spend that tiniest fraction on taxable consumables compared with any given salaried employee. Which means they have more to invest to increase their wealth (and gap between them and everyone else) even faster.
Wealth could be invested (impacts those borrowing), used on consumables (impacts businesses), or hidden under the mattress or equivalent (reduces the supply of money so acts deflationary).
I would argue that those 3 are the main downstream effects of having wealth -- and they all impact people at large enough values.
> This approach is the perfect "the richer get richer" inequality engine that would run things even faster than our current system (which works pretty well already).
That’s the idea. Lawyers accustomed to the patronage of wealthy clients need more of them to maintain their lifestyle.
Yes, when the budget is tight and the washing machine you got just two years ago has a major breakage (just outside the warranty period), the cost of fixing it or getting a new one become pretty close. Couple that with the fact that the washer you replaced it with worked fine for 30 years before it broke and I think the anger is very rightly justified.
The sad part is that Speed Queen, while absolutely worth it, costs 2-3x the price of the average pile of junk sold in [Home Depot, Lowes, etc]. Buy once, cry once and a legit example of the boots theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated
This is what the public school system is for. Post-secondary education was not meant to be for everyone. But the world has changed and universities and colleges only service as the gate-keepers to degrees and diplomas that every employer now has required to get a job (regardless of whether that education is needed for the actual job). It's not that young people passionate about learning as much as they can in a given field don't exist, its that university is not about them anymore.
Some countries do in fact do this by making post-secondary education free. But the key problem is the artificial requirements imposed by employers to people to have degrees to do jobs that in no way require them. Instead a degree is used as a proxy metric, and like Betterbridge keeps hammering at us, it stops being a good one once the everyone abuses it.
If we need to meet in the middle for now and only make all degrees required for jobs free I would be willing to do that, but I also won’t deny the obvious societal benefits to having a collection of people educated in the liberal arts.
I'll go ahead and deny the benefits of widespread tertiary liberal arts education. I honestly don't see it working; if anything modern "liberal arts" seem to be undermining liberalism. Certainly it's not obviously beneficial.
I do also think we need to reduce degree requirements. e.g. it should not require a university degree to teach elementary school. If we actually allowed people to fail high school, then a diploma would more than suffice. Likely the same for most "any degree required" type of jobs. Then we should have merit scholarships for things that actually require the additional education. Engineers and doctors should not have to pay for their degrees, but it should be hard to get them, and most people will not be capable. That's fine; you want very competent people there.
Some credentials could also be granted purely through tests again. e.g. my mom self-studied for her CPA. Now you can't do that. There's absolutely no reason you should need school for that.
It's not going to just affect 70 year olds. It's going to be a gradual descent downward. So just making up some numbers perhaps it's 40% or whatever of 60 year olds, 30% of 50 year olds, and so on. And then aggregated out across the population it's going to be a relatively high number, especially as fertility issues drive the average age ever higher.
Eep, just looked up the exact figure and yeah the median age is now just about 40. So if something affects 10% of people over 40 then it'd affect 5% of all people. So you can bring my made up numbers above way down, and still end up with 5%.
> Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies.
The politicians needed to change tax laws are owned by the tech companies. This is why its a hard problem. The tech companies set the rules now. Getting politicians elected that aren't owned by tech companies is also hard because tech companies effectively control all the information.
If this is your belief, the only reasonable conclusion is that time spent on fighting these chat control initiatives is wasted because it's all downstream of the power of the tech oligarchy. That's the battle you should be fighting rather than trying to play whack-a-mole on individual proposals like this.
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