There are lots of reasons it might take someone 12 months to find work, and $9000 isn’t enough just for accommodation and sufficient food in most of Australia, let alone to be able afford transport necessary to get to job interviews etc. What else would you envisage people in such circumstances receiving?

If a 10 year old child can make $40 an hour washing car windscreens in a public carpark on a saturday morning, im sure there’s something grown adults can do too.

The problem is that under the current system there’s no point, because you don’t get to keep any of the money if you did.

That’s the whole point of the NIT.

That sorta depends on how you define work doesn’t it? There’s a big vibrant black economy out there which doesn’t show up in any official, formal or punditable figures.

From the little I’ve seen of those involved in twilight to black economy operations such as chop shops, drug cultivation and distribution and undocumented construction materials supply and service chains, the ones doing well are probably working harder in their own way than many cubicle farm drones employed by large legitimate organisations. Certainly taking more risks with their capital and labour.

Dunno. Mostly my impressions of it are ancedotal. I’m certainly not any sort of social scientist. And the stats are probably blurred. I’m sure we’ve had large numbers of immigrant groups moving into and then out of the bottom end of the income distribution. While a smaller core of intergenerational unemployed have been quietly ticking over. But don’t ask me to back it up. I’ll leave it to someone else to put in the hard yards and disprove me.

I’m sure I had this very discussion here a few months ago. It seems very familiar…

I fully agree about the need to break inter-generational poverty links, but I’m far from convinced that it can be done via an NIT and abolishing the minimum wage.

But that has nothing to do with my question of exactly what sort of benefit you would expect to see to Australia as nation were governments to slash spending to, say, 20% of GDP?

Jacques, regarding geography, what I meant is that Australia’s geography relative to Norway is a problem for employment, not for earning income through resource extraction.

This would be important if most sales weren’t free-on-board.

You’ve got me there, but my understanding is that right now BHP and Rio are preparing to work this into the next round of contracts.

Especially iron ore, where the other big supplier is Brazil, who are on the wrong side of a continent and an ocean.

This would be important if most sales weren’t free-on-board.

NPOV.

Yes I realised that you had made a mistake. I was just making fun.

I would happily retain the minimum wage if we could streamline employment regulation, down to about zero. As noted Denmark does this so why can’t we?

Can we fuse progressively on that point?

BTW I would suggest that Australia’s biggest disadvantage over Norway is probably geography.

Not at the moment. Australia’s proximity to China, India and Japan is a substantial competitive advantage in several export categories. Especially iron ore, where the other big supplier is Brazil, who are on the wrong side of a continent and an ocean.

In a heavily computerised age, financial calculations come very, very cheaply so it matters little how complicated or simple your schemes are, it disappears as soon as the programmers are finished with it.

The rate of bugs-per-line is pretty constant over large bodies of code. More complicated tax codes mean more code, ergo, more bugs.

There’s also the problem of verifiability. Small programs can be proved correct, in a mathematical sense. More to the point, you can have personal confidence in them because they’re small enough to fit in your head. This is less so for large programs.

Lastly, tax regulations are in computer terms pretty close to ’spaghetti code’, which increases the risk of errors and loopholes.

I find a lot of the liberal left grew up in middle and upper class city suburbs, went to school with peers from the same income groups, maybe met a few poorer but bright driven kids at uni, then settled into a comfortable middle class job with the same people. Provided the housing commission suburbs are stuck out to the west they will never have to come across podSydney, as my Russian born wife refers to it.

Whereas, coming from a little country town, we had the entire socio-economic group tumbled into one little primary school. The farm kids who were off to the most expensive boarding high school their parents could afford, followed by Uni, local working families who would be generally only finishing high school and looking for blue collar jobs and those from homes where nobody worked, who were sticking school out till they turned 15 and could get away and start getting welfare and having kids. One kid in particular turned 15 and left before finishing primary school. I don’t remember him as retarded, just uninterested. I think he repeated every class all the way through.

Anyway, point being that I care most of all for the kids born in those families, and I’d like to break that generational poverty link. And I think socialist welfare created the problems and free markets are the only way to fix them.

government spending in the UK is nearly 45% of GDP - higher even than Norway and Iceland (both 42%), and much much higher than the Australia’s level of 35%.

You’ll find Australia’s public sector is closer to 40-something percent when you include the other levels of government. The UK, Iceland and Norway have unitary systems which makes the figure appear higher because it gets aggregated to the central government’s count.

It’s actually hard to figure out the total for Australia because of the complexities of transfers between governments, especially due to odd incompatibilities of accounting. I set some DPL experts on this topic for Dave Tollner once, and even they had trouble working it out.

As for trialling an NIT - absolutely, I’d like to see it tried. Ultimately if it doesn’t work, democratic pressure will lead to modifications and adaptions.

One idea I was thinking about was simply implementing NIT and no minimum wage (NMW) for the long term unemployed and see where that takes us. But that still involves lots of government oversight and administration.

Ultimately the worlds a big enough place that these ideas are worth experimenting with in some jurisdictions. It’s not like the current system is perfect, or even good. If it doesn’t work after a few years it can always be rolled back.

Now, as it is, I simply don’t believe there are even as many as 1% of Australians who a) want to work and b) are not capable of generating wealth at a rate of at least $13.74 an hour. So at best I would accept that lowering (or scrapping) the minimum wage would help out a very small fraction of people who simply are physically or mentally incapable of being any more productive, but there’s no way it’s going to cut unemployment by from 4% to 0%.

The employer may decide that they can make more then $60 an hour as a consultant for large companies without the hassle, shut the business and be done with it.

But of course, what we are trying to do with NIT is bring another worker into the business. Everone’s wage may drop a bit and two new unskilled worker be brought in at $6 an hour. Or something. I don’t see a lot of value in this kind of hypothetical.

Now it if were true that a minimum wage of $13.74/hour basically causes every employer who think their employees are only worth $10/hour to fire them and force them on to the dole, then I’d agree that such an arrangement is pointless. But it seems pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case - rather, employers decide that they’ll just have pay such employees the minimum wage anyway, and work out various means to either increase their employee’s productivity so as to ensure a reasonable return, or perhaps even temper the wages paid to high-level workers - including themselves of course. If you’re an employer paying yourself $60 an hour, with 10 employees that you’re each paying the minimum wage, then next year the minimum wage is increased to, say, $15/hour, you have a whole bunch of choices:

a) Invest in training/more equipment to increase the productivity of your employees
b) Reduce your profit margin by a few percentage points
c) Reduce your own salary by ~$0 a hour
d) Let one of your workers go

Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine too many employers would jump at d) as a preferable option.