The US in particular has embraced 401ks over pensions. The advantage is that you don’t lose the past 20 years of your life if you change jobs. The bad news is that you kinda need the economy to function.
But, regardless: how would you help “the people” without “the companies”? You can give someone 2 grand but that is worth jack all when it comes to paying rent for more than a few months (or one month…) and so forth.
And it still has the fundamental problem of a complete brain and capability drain.
You can help the people by funding social programs like social security, healthcare (medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies or better yet a full single-payer healthcare program), food assistance, housing assistance, education, childcare, direct monetary assistance for the working class (such as tax breaks or UBI), etc.
You can put the people before the companies by not bailing out the shareholders of stupid investments like AI, by cracking down on labor violations and monopolies, and by seriously increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in order to fund the social safety net. Reducing spending on the military industrial complex would probably help too.
Neither 401ks or corporate pensions are a good solution. They place a burden that should be caught by a social safety net on each individual, and further pressure each individual to engage in capitalism in order to secure their retirement, giving more power to the employers. Retirement should not be tied to employment, same as healthcare.
Take the amount of money that would be spent on a bailout. If you go ahead with the bailout, then the majority of that money goes to the wealthy because they are the ones who can afford most of those shares. Some working-class people get aided, but most of the money goes to maintain or even increase the power of the wealthy.
Now, take that same amount of money, and put it towards ACA subsidies, or any other social program that aids the working class. Now the vast majority of that money goes to those who really need it, and it lessens the pain which the working class would be burdened with following the crash.
You can put some of that money directly into useful research grants that aren’t AI related as well.
Whatever your concern is, you can spend the money directly addressing that concern with much more efficiency than a corporate bailout that benefits mostly the wealthy.
Yes. Which is why I specifically mentioned the need for grants and incentive programs to allow those companies and research groups/universities to pivot.
Because, yes, we very much need better social programs. But there are going to be a LOT of people out of jobs. And a LOT of early career/new grads who just spent the past 4-8 years of their life literally training themselves to do what the government et al demanded of them. And they’ll be shit out of luck.
All of which will very much overwhelm whatever half-assed social programs we rapidly implement.
Like… to be blunt, what you are suggesting is very comparable to the “trump healthcare plan” of giving every 2 grand and telling them to figure it out themselves. On the surface, maybe that sounds nice. But that is not much of an insurance premium and would get cleaned out the first time someone gets sick. It is not a solution.
The reality is that we desperately need actual social safety nets and we have needed them for decades at this point. But “We’ll figure something out in a few years, for real this time” doesn’t help people in even the medium term.
Sending everyone 2 grand would be much more effective than spending the equivalent amount of money on a corporate bailout. A corporate bailout would do nothing to help all those people out of jobs. They don’t have stocks. They don’t have useful skills, if they’re trained for AI specifically.
2 grand is not enough, but it would absolutely be more useful to give the money to them than to give it to their employers.
The democrats absolutely should oppose a corporate bailout. I have no faith that they would actually do that, but they should.
I also highly doubt that Trump would actually follow through on that 2 grand thing.
The US in particular has embraced 401ks over pensions. The advantage is that you don’t lose the past 20 years of your life if you change jobs. The bad news is that you kinda need the economy to function.
But, regardless: how would you help “the people” without “the companies”? You can give someone 2 grand but that is worth jack all when it comes to paying rent for more than a few months (or one month…) and so forth.
And it still has the fundamental problem of a complete brain and capability drain.
You can help the people by funding social programs like social security, healthcare (medicare, medicaid, and ACA subsidies or better yet a full single-payer healthcare program), food assistance, housing assistance, education, childcare, direct monetary assistance for the working class (such as tax breaks or UBI), etc.
You can put the people before the companies by not bailing out the shareholders of stupid investments like AI, by cracking down on labor violations and monopolies, and by seriously increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals in order to fund the social safety net. Reducing spending on the military industrial complex would probably help too.
Neither 401ks or corporate pensions are a good solution. They place a burden that should be caught by a social safety net on each individual, and further pressure each individual to engage in capitalism in order to secure their retirement, giving more power to the employers. Retirement should not be tied to employment, same as healthcare.
Okay. If we can get all of that infrastructure in place, sure.
Otherwise: A LOT of people in a LOT of industries will be suffering in the medium/long term without some form of offramp.
Okay, but hear me out.
Take the amount of money that would be spent on a bailout. If you go ahead with the bailout, then the majority of that money goes to the wealthy because they are the ones who can afford most of those shares. Some working-class people get aided, but most of the money goes to maintain or even increase the power of the wealthy.
Now, take that same amount of money, and put it towards ACA subsidies, or any other social program that aids the working class. Now the vast majority of that money goes to those who really need it, and it lessens the pain which the working class would be burdened with following the crash.
You can put some of that money directly into useful research grants that aren’t AI related as well.
Whatever your concern is, you can spend the money directly addressing that concern with much more efficiency than a corporate bailout that benefits mostly the wealthy.
Yes. Which is why I specifically mentioned the need for grants and incentive programs to allow those companies and research groups/universities to pivot.
Because, yes, we very much need better social programs. But there are going to be a LOT of people out of jobs. And a LOT of early career/new grads who just spent the past 4-8 years of their life literally training themselves to do what the government et al demanded of them. And they’ll be shit out of luck.
All of which will very much overwhelm whatever half-assed social programs we rapidly implement.
Like… to be blunt, what you are suggesting is very comparable to the “trump healthcare plan” of giving every 2 grand and telling them to figure it out themselves. On the surface, maybe that sounds nice. But that is not much of an insurance premium and would get cleaned out the first time someone gets sick. It is not a solution.
The reality is that we desperately need actual social safety nets and we have needed them for decades at this point. But “We’ll figure something out in a few years, for real this time” doesn’t help people in even the medium term.
Sending everyone 2 grand would be much more effective than spending the equivalent amount of money on a corporate bailout. A corporate bailout would do nothing to help all those people out of jobs. They don’t have stocks. They don’t have useful skills, if they’re trained for AI specifically.
2 grand is not enough, but it would absolutely be more useful to give the money to them than to give it to their employers.
The democrats absolutely should oppose a corporate bailout. I have no faith that they would actually do that, but they should.
I also highly doubt that Trump would actually follow through on that 2 grand thing.