> There's value in choice, and that value is being reaped by the worker precisely because of poverty programs make it possible.
It seems like you're ignoring the same thing you're objecting to: It's a dynamic system.
If long-haul trucking companies offer less desirable but higher paying jobs and easier jobs aren't paying a living wage then people would pick the harder job that lets them not starve. Which means the easier jobs would have to pay more in order to attract workers, unless those workers can get government assistance. If they can, the easier jobs can get people to work without paying more, because the assistance programs let them pick the easier job even at lower pay. In other words, the subsidies were supposed to go to the poor and instead they went to the lower-paying employers.
In a dynamic system the long-haul companies would then have to respond if it became more desirable to work somewhere the pay is low enough to get government assistance, but the phase outs give the low-paying employers another advantage.
Say the undesirability of the job is good for $15k/year in additional compensation. However, if you got paid $15k more, you'd lose $10k to government benefit phase outs and additional taxes. To actually get paid $15k more, you'd have to "get paid" $45k more. Which is to say, the employer with the low-paying job can pay you $45k less.
But it's a dynamic system, so they might "only" pay you $35k less and then hire more people. The trucking companies would then have to pay $45k more than them when it used to be $15k. Even with Walmart paying less than before, their relative advantage has increased. And there are two ways to get something a long distance over land: A long-haul truck the whole way, or a short-haul truck to the rail yard, a freight train, and then another short-haul truck. So then instead of a truck driver getting higher pay per mile over 2000 miles of driving, a different one gets lower pay per mile over 60 miles of driving twice, and a rail company gets the rest.
So the low-wage subsidies cause the amount of higher-wage labor demand to go down by making it less competitive with non-labor alternatives to perform the same function, as labor is diverted to the lower-paying jobs even while enabling them to pay even less.
> There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now.
All of that is already baked in to the existing numbers; the long-haul drivers get paid more because fewer people want to do it.
> Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level.
Only they're not exceptions. If you subsidize something you get more of it. What happens if you subsidize low-paying jobs but not higher-paying jobs?
It seems like you're ignoring the same thing you're objecting to: It's a dynamic system.
If long-haul trucking companies offer less desirable but higher paying jobs and easier jobs aren't paying a living wage then people would pick the harder job that lets them not starve. Which means the easier jobs would have to pay more in order to attract workers, unless those workers can get government assistance. If they can, the easier jobs can get people to work without paying more, because the assistance programs let them pick the easier job even at lower pay. In other words, the subsidies were supposed to go to the poor and instead they went to the lower-paying employers.
In a dynamic system the long-haul companies would then have to respond if it became more desirable to work somewhere the pay is low enough to get government assistance, but the phase outs give the low-paying employers another advantage.
Say the undesirability of the job is good for $15k/year in additional compensation. However, if you got paid $15k more, you'd lose $10k to government benefit phase outs and additional taxes. To actually get paid $15k more, you'd have to "get paid" $45k more. Which is to say, the employer with the low-paying job can pay you $45k less.
But it's a dynamic system, so they might "only" pay you $35k less and then hire more people. The trucking companies would then have to pay $45k more than them when it used to be $15k. Even with Walmart paying less than before, their relative advantage has increased. And there are two ways to get something a long distance over land: A long-haul truck the whole way, or a short-haul truck to the rail yard, a freight train, and then another short-haul truck. So then instead of a truck driver getting higher pay per mile over 2000 miles of driving, a different one gets lower pay per mile over 60 miles of driving twice, and a rail company gets the rest.
So the low-wage subsidies cause the amount of higher-wage labor demand to go down by making it less competitive with non-labor alternatives to perform the same function, as labor is diverted to the lower-paying jobs even while enabling them to pay even less.
> There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now.
All of that is already baked in to the existing numbers; the long-haul drivers get paid more because fewer people want to do it.
> Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level.
Only they're not exceptions. If you subsidize something you get more of it. What happens if you subsidize low-paying jobs but not higher-paying jobs?