CAR, if you haven’t seen any ideas from the capital side, you haven’t been reading.
There aren’t any easy solutions. As people have commented previously, the solutions range everywhere from tightening the safety net to restrict it to real need to structuring it to push people back into employment, to cracking down on employers and shutting the abused pipelines of illegal labor and H1B indentured servitude. Frankly, IMHO, the company in the original story with the 100s of illegal labor a few years ago SHOULD have had C-level executives wearing orange jumpsuits and spending time in prison.
Education is a major issue. I think we need more trade schools and apprenticeship programs. Our education is geared to pushing people into college and nothing else, it’s failing a large portion of the students.
I like the idea of a living wage, not because the worker is doing something that earns it, but because the citizens deserve not to have companies employing people that need government aid for the basics.
I also favor far more radical solutions such as changing the employment law so that if you make under $150K OR you do not have more than 3 direct report employees that you have hire/fire over you cannot be a salaried employee.
Similarly, I favor a change to the over time rules, overtime is 3x for companies employing more than 5 people. If a company provides health care to any employee, they need to provide it to all employees regardless if they work 1 hour or 40+.
Finally, I favor removal of the income tax and a replacement with a Federal Asset Tax and Sales Tax of 3%. The asset tax would apply to all financial instruments and holdings and real property on a quarterly basis. The sales tax would be on all retail/wholesale sold items.
