The insurance risk of someone who drives 40k miles/year on rural freeways is a lot lower than that of someone who drives 40k miles/year on city streets.

It won't, because your job involves driving. Now, you'd have to be an absolute moron to tell your insurance company you were out Ubering for spare cash when it happened - but if they found out, they'd deny you right then and there.

1. 1. Uber gives clearly posted rates and I've never had a bill higher than the expected maximum for the ride. Get a taxi to quote you the same thing.
2. 2. It's insanely trivial to identify who an Uber driver is - it's tied to their smartphone. Not so much with traditional taxis.
3. 3. A valid concern, one that Uber claims to have dealt with by having insurance themselves. However, it's not like you ask your taxi driver to show you an up-to-date, online verification of his insurance before you hop in, right? I mean, liability insurance is mandatory in my state... but I still have uninsured motorist coverage. So this is a general problem.
4. 4. Have you ever ridden in a cab? Jankiest things on the road.
5. 5. Uh, no, that's not how it works. If a company starts to abuse their position as a market leader, maybe you do that. But there's absolutely nothing illegal about being so damned good that you compete everyone else into bankruptcy. A monopoly is not inherently illegal, or even wrong.

As an aside, I have found that showing a taxi driver your destination on Google Maps on your phone is a very reliable way to insure that they take you via the quickest route. And Uber Black is well worth the small premium for the ride experience if you're not depending on it for day-to-day transportation.

And yet a lot more stuff was considered tax-deductible at the time, to the point that they instituted the alternative minimum tax because 155 high-income households had paid zero federal income tax. The AMT now routinely reaches into the upper middle class, but we don't have the deductions any more.

It's all awesome to me, but yes - it's all disco.

You have moved on to an aesthetic argument. That's suitable for discussions about how you spend your own money, but much less so when we're discussing the public fisc. Sociey may owe everyone a life without serious material want, but it doesn't owe them an ocean view.

Zillow has many listings down below $58K, none of them for trailers - check out, say, ZIP code 39212. I suggested four people could easily live on a median salary, not minimum wage. And as far as livability goes, it's highly undesirable, but that is more or less orthogonal to the issue of whether or not you can live there.

The average rental cost you can find is - I'm guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong - derived from online sources like Craigslist? That's not the average place on the market, which has a lot of Section 8. As for used trailers, look at something like this to get an idea of what's out there. And remember that Jackson is one of the most expensive places in the state... if you really get out in the boonies and know how to fix your own stuff (a $1500 car can last a lot more than a year if you know how to fix it yourself), it can be insanely cheap.

I'm not worried about the consumer surplus - I don't care if it's zero, in this particular case, because it's not Econ 101 but actual people with lives that need to have meaning and purpose.

The effective result is that society decides that people shouldn't starve just because they're not economically productive enough to feed themselves and their progeny, and society should own up to its duties and pay them the difference. Otherwise, what's the difference between you and your supposed conservative archenemy? You accuse them of lacking community spirit, but you want business owners to pay people lots of money just because you say they should, instead of contributing a non-negotiable part of your own paycheck (aka taxes) to pay for the social outcomes you want. Yeah, Walmart and McD's and a bunch of other business get cheap workers. But the alternative to that is that they adopt a different business model that involves a lot less people - Walmart vs Costco. Sure, it's a lot better to be a Costco employee than a Walmart one, but there are a hell of a lot less of them.

Hahaha, how funny. It just so happens that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and having family there still, I'm quite conversant with the local economics. I'm assuming that you got a median house price, or a median mortgage, of $58k from somewhere. That's not an entirely unreasonable number, but the distribution is anything but normal - it's at least biphasic, probably triphasic (large underclass, modest middle class, small upper middle class, tiny sprinkling of really wealthy people). In much of the city, a large number of properties that have been repossessed for taxes can't be sold because the simple requirement to pay up to three years' back taxes in order to take possession of the property completely eliminates the potential profit.

You can buy a habitable home in a not-so-great neighborhood for under $50k, or a used trailer for something like $10k. You can easily rent a 2BR apartment in a bad neighborhood for $200/mo. The people I knew didn't drive new cars, and if one died in a way they didn't know how to fix, they'd buy something for $1500, max. They also didn't pay anything like Jackson prices for housing.

Incidentally, since when is a minimum wage job supposed to support a family of four on one income? I said you could do that on a median income, or yourself pretty easily at poverty line.

I never asked for data, I asked for plausible arguments why, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing, we should stop at (say) $15/hr, or, more generally, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing for society, why should only business owners should bear the cost?

You are welcome to live any life you can afford, but if you want to idealize the 1950s as the height of worker power and complain that you can't live as well now as you could then, that's incorrect. You can. You just have to live like the real 1950s, not the ones in your head.

Decades? You think most of the people on here are under 25? This ain't Reddit. I'm in the original reader group and I'm 40... but plenty of guys here up into their 60s and 70s. Anyone over 80 in the audience?

And something like half the integrated circuit output of the entire world at the time.