Poverty, Minimum Wage, UBI, and too basic of barely solutions...

I hate the minimum wage. It's one think that I agree with certain conservatives and libertarians on. I think it's a dumb idea. We're dealing with the fact that poor people can barely survive in the dumbest easiest way possible. Lets just make people pay them more!

Fact is that SOME can't really afford to pay people more for some jobs. SOME. Some companies. They do have budgets and such. And they are actually already paying for people's medical and other benefits. For some companies, raising the minimum wage might cut into everyone's benefits and hours.

Of course there are also a ton of companies that are paying their CEO's millions of dollars and giving most of their employees the bare minimum they can get away with while busting unions.

coughWalmart!cough Not that I was suggesting that they would do anything so horrible.

Anyway... A lot of companies can afford it. But that money won't come out of thin air. And putting it on the backs of companies really isn't fair.

There are also a ton of companies hiring illegals to get away with underpaying their workers.

Then ICE raids their factories, conveniently at a time when they just so happen to want to get rid of them because of union talk and court settlements and such, and they don't arrest anyone that is in charge.

Where I depart from my conservative brethren is that I actually support the reasons why most people support the minimum wage, if not the minimum wage itself. I don't think that people should have to work so hard just to barely scrape by.

People work more now days just to survive than they have in the long gone past. They've divvied up the world and sold it away to people and corporations and put us all in our little cardboard boxes and tell us what to do and where we can go and what we can do. It's weird. Its not normal. And now they tell us that we have to work our lives away just to survive, when it's nowhere near that hard for them to grow the food and harvest the wood.

In fact, the wood for your house was probably "illegally" harvested from some rain forest or some such. Even if it was "legally" harvested from land that wasn't stolen, it's still stealing trees that create oxygen for all of us to make money for some rich guy that hired some workers for slave wages.

And that's really the crux of the issue isn't? We're all working our lives away to barely get by.

People in America have it better in some ways than people in many countries, but it's actually really misleading the way it is.

A TV only costs $100, $200, meanwhile, your groceries for a week or two could be the same amount or more.

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That means that someone can have a house full of junk, and yet barely enough money to live.

A major cause of this is because of the minimum wage, combined with the exporting of jobs and importing of goods.

I think it's also because we resisted automation so much in America. We fought against it. I think it would be better if we had a ton of automation, versus the jobs going to China and other countries. Now China is rich and automating, and now they're gonna have all the plants, and all the jobs overseeing the automation.

Minimum wage jobs are shit jobs that anyone can do. They'd probably pay a lot less for them if they could. In fact, they don't even pay minimum wage for a lot of jobs like picking fruit and veggies. They pay by the bushel. Which, if you're fast, you can get an alright pay, in the hot sun.

So, if there are tons of jobs that aren't necessarily able to pay a ton of money out, and they might not even necessarily be worth it, and it might end up leaving the country if they have to pay more, what do you do?

Well you stop trying to always do shit the easiest way possible.

If people are working their life away and can't seem to make enough to not barely scrape by, you can either raise their income or lower their expenses.

To raise their income, there are quite a few ways you can do that. The minimum wage is one way. Giving them food stamps or EBT is another. Yet another way is a Universal Basic Income.

One of the Democratic candidates for President actually supports a Universal Basic Income, Andrew Yang. Problem is he supports it as an alternative to other forms of public assistance. So if you're on disability and getting food stamps, and likely barely scraping by, his proposal of a Universal Basic Income won't do jack shit for you likely. It will probably be less than you get already, since $12k a year isn't much.

Of course, it is something though, and would mean that quite a few would do quite a bit better.

It still feels like shit to me though. And just another cheap and easy way to do things.

I personally would rather do it the hard way. If it's too hard to live, just make it easier to live.

Food is too damn expensive in the US. Lower the cost of food.

There is a ton of food thrown away every day. Collect it all. Cook with it. Use it to feed the poor. Use it to feed pigs and cattle and compost the rest, lowering the cost of all that food, because you just made it cheaper to raise that cattle, and fertilized those plants for cheaper.

Also, collect all the methane and shit from that cattle, and process the shit, then use it as fertilizer, rather than letting it run into the lakes and rivers, causing algae plumes. Again, lowering the cost of food, just by ensuring the proper processing of the fertilizer, paying the farmers for it, and distributing it. Since you are paying the animal farmers, you have to charge for it, so it's not exactly free, and should probably be priced similarly to other fertilizers, but you could just create the backbone to collect, process, and distribute fertilizer, preferably sustainably, in an intelligent manner. You could use this backbone to work with current distributors and processing plants. Currently a lot of farmers don't collect methane, and just let the water from their shit lakes run off. This is horrible for the environment, and isn't making them any richer. You could literally make them more money and save the planet.

Housing is also expensive as hell. The funny thing is that a lot of different places spend a whole hell of a lot on dealing with homeless people, when it would literally be cheaper to just build them homes. So just build low cost homes. And make it easy to get in them if you're homeless.

If there were more affordable housing available all over the place, then people wouldn't spend so much on housing that's really kinda shitty anyway.

There's also all this cool shit that you can do with large buildings when it comes to saving energy and electricity and the environment. Like recycling waste heat. Or using grey water. Or having plants literally growing on the fucking walls, using the water that normally is wasted down your sink. How fucking cool is that?

We are very quickly approaching a post-scarcity world where everything could be built by robots, made from material that was either thrown away or mined by robots, and the only expense is energy. And that energy is collected from solar panels and wind turbines and other generators that were made by robots. And who the fuck is making all the money then? Robots don't need cash.

Maybe it's about time that we start realizing that people deserve to be treated with respect and taken care of, because we are all big cogs in this machine. So we should take care of each other.

That doesn't mean socialism or whatever boogey word you wanna use. It just means empathy and the realization that we really shouldn't be working our life away.

And we really shouldn't have to convince a bunch of people that we deserve help to be able to afford food and housing.

We shouldn't have all this red tape.

We should do things intelligently and work towards making things better.