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https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6503418-151/study-minimum-wage-increases-in-6-cities-working:
The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in Seattle are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study — and disagree about — the impact.
The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases in pay and no widespread job losses. That reinforces the conclusions the same group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers reached in 2017 after studying just in Seattle.
This time, the Berkeley researchers examined Seattle; San Francisco; Oakland, California; San Jose, California; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., where minimum wages at the end of 2016 ranged from $10 to $13.
"We find that they are working just as the policymakers and voters who enacted these policies intended," said Sylvia Allegretto, co-author of the report and co-chair of Berkeley's Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. "So far they are raising the earnings of low-wage workers without causing significant employment losses."
abstract https://www.nber.org/papers/w25043
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Friday September 28 2018, @02:50PM
On the other hand, if the US spent half as much as it does now on the military, it would still be the largest spender in the world and it would free up $300M, or 1.5% of GDP, for other projects.
Thanks to WIkipedia, some other spending figures:
- Social welfare programmes: $927B in 2010 so likely easily > $1T by now. Half was for medical care (not medicaid) so let's say $500M
- Social security: $900M
Total costs of current programmes >= $1.4T Say you can reduce the overhead by a very conservative 10% by moving to a single system (UBI vs. 100 other social programmes), add in $300M in reduced military spending, and you're up to $1.5T (sticking to two significant digits). Divide by 300M Americans and that's $5100 per American per year. Man, woman, child. Take out a conservative 30% in the workforce who will pay 100% of that back in taxes (e.g. you get $x in UBI but you pay $x more in taxes per year) and you're up to $6800/year.
That's before factoring in costs from scrapping unemployment insurance and all the other programmes I've probably missed here, plus other savings like a simplified tax code. Add in a medical system like every civilized country in the world and suddenly you've paid for universal basic income without even raising taxes.
Remember, it's universal BASIC income. Maybe it's not enough to live in NYC, but that's OK.