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#wage#https#free#where#pay#minimum#welfare#financial#government#author
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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Try to leave that welfare paradise, you are still on hook as tax resident for extra three years after leaving!
If this was true, then the Eurozone crisis would not have been as severe as it was in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and France - all countries with broad and large social assistance programs.
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Also, the HN title is editorialized, the correct title is "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness"
The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
Is that sustainable? Argentina's predicament is basically caused by a variant of this. The Peronists gave handouts to buy votes, funded by money printing (ie. "The ECB could have brought government bond yields down"), but that has consequences and turned Argentina into an economic basket case. Of course, you might argue the EU doesn't have this problem because it's stronger economically and other states can prop them up, but that begs the question, why should member countries like Germany fund Southern Europeans's fiscal profligacy?
Germany had relatively reasonable debt and government spending relative to taxes.
Italy had entirely dysfunctional spending and Greece was essentially a house of cards built on fraud. Without the Eurozone, Greece would have faced bankruptcy and/or hyperinflation, but instead they got bailed out by the rest of the EU.
Check out Michael Lewis's book Boomerang that covers the distinct problems Iceland, Ireland and Greece faced. The TL;DR on Greece is a country with massive social spending and tiny tax receipts, that took out massive and entirely unsustainable debt thanks to the other Euro countries and then inevitably was unable to pay it back.
Germany was the hero who saved the EU from complete implosion, but instead of being thanked they get misplaced anger for being the only responsible ones in the room.
Of course it’s promoting Communism.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/22/amazon-gi...
At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.
Now it’s quite bad though, a whole generation of 16-20 year olds entering the job market and there’s just no jobs because you can hire a 30 year old for the same money
In any market, there is wide range of possible clearing prices with cost of production as a floor, and marginal value as a ceiling. Which price the market settles on is often a function of bargaining power as much as productivity. Minimum wage regulation is a heavy-handed way to change that bargaining relationship.
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
So it’s better that they don’t get hired at all and live entirely off support of the (forced) largesse of the tax payer?
As one of those tax payers I’d much rather they work and earn at least something.
The author writes for Jacobin, which promotes a failed ideology where you CAN force people to “hire anyone at a given wage.”
It’s an advertisement for a failed ideology.
Many of the states[0] have started offering free or low cost tuition for their public community colleges and trade schools, and low cost tuition for their colleges and universities. For example, Minnesota offers tuition at a state college starting at $6k a year[0] and free tuition at community colleges if you're earning under $80k[1]. Those prices are before financial aid, grants, scholarships, etc which are widely available from multiple sources.
[0] https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/states-with-free-tuition/
[1] https://www.minnstate.edu/admissions/affordability.html
[2] https://www.nhcc.edu/free-college-tuition-nhcc
As for the rest of your comment, you have a very distorted of what life in the US is like. Also, nothing you list is "free" in Europe, there's just a lot of rather regressive taxes that are collected to pay for it all. The US federal tax structure is actually rather progressive, but that also means there's less money for the feds to pay for all of those "free" things.
US average disposable income is $51,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
https://factually.co/fact-checks/business/walmart-workers-go...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
"Median weekly earnings of the nation's 120.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,251 in the second quarter of 2026"
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
Doesn’t feel objective.
Their analysis will yield false conclusions because they’re completely ignoring a number of variables.
For instance, the USSR had capital controls for financial and political reasons. The article assumes that politics plays no role, only finance.
Wall Street influences US financial policy, but so does politics.
The laziness of this research is shocking, so I looked up the author. He’s an author for the Communist blog “Jacobin.”
Why is this on Hacker News?
This paper is flimsy propaganda.
https://jacobin.com/author/martino-comelli