Spending Money Is Good For The Economy

Reply to: It actually has nothing to do with morality, in all honestly.

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Paying a living wage makes good economic sense? Would it also make good economic sense if Medium minimized payment costs?

Here’s what you wrote in your second reply to my reply to your story…

As an aside, I actually do get paid to write. The stuff I post here is just my own thoughts in my spare time; things I think are important that I wouldn’t normally be paid for, things I don’t think I should be paid for, or just as a practice space.

Medium is where you come to share your worthless stories? Not me! This is where I come to share my worthy stories!

Let’s super pretend that you really valued my reply to your story. In fact, you valued it so much that you would be willing to pay me for my story. Unfortunately, Medium doesn’t facilitate payments. In technical terms, Medium doesn’t minimize payment costs.

Minimizing payment costs would be easy enough. Medium would simply give each of us a digital wallet that we could deposit money into using paypal. Under each story there would be some coin buttons…








If you clicked the empty heart button… then absolutely no money would be transferred from your digital wallet to my digital wallet. But if, on the other hand, you clicked the 1¢ button… then one penny would be instantly transferred from your digital wallet to my digital wallet.

Basically, Medium would be making it stupid quick and easy to pay people for their stories.

So what do you think? Do you think it would make good economic sense for Medium to minimize payment costs?

Perhaps it might help if you check out Scott Santens’ Patreon page. Here’s his Medium page. Santens is the biggest advocate of a Basic Income Guarantee. As you can see from his Patreon page… he is currently receiving $937.87/month.

How much more money would Santens receive if Medium minimized payment costs? Would you be willing to put any money into his digital wallet?

From your perspective… it makes good economic sense to force Starbucks to pay its employees twice as much money. Because… every employee is also a consumer. So the more money that goes into the pockets of employees… the more money that they’ll be able to spend as consumers. And the more money that they spend as consumers… the more money that Starbucks will receive. The more money that Starbucks receives… the more money that it will be able to put into the pockets of its employees.

From your perspective… a functioning economy depends on consumers having enough money to spend. So when the economy struggles… it’s because consumers don’t have enough money to spend. Which can be fixed easily enough simply by forcing employers to pay their workers more money.

It seems like there’s some premise that, if employers weren’t forced to spend twice as much money on workers… then this money wouldn’t get spent. And if employers aren’t spending this money… then evidently they must be saving it. Which is, of course, bad for the economy.

So this leads us to the premise that workers aren’t going to save the extra money that they earn when the minimum wage is doubled. Because if they did save it… then Starbucks wouldn’t receive more money. And if Starbucks doesn’t receive more money… then it wouldn’t have more money to pay its employees.

Essentially, your argument is that doubling the minimum wage is good for the economy because saving money is bad for the economy. The assumption being that people who earn the minimum wage have a very low propensity to save.

With this in mind, my guess is that you’re going to perceive that it’s good for the economy to minimize payment costs. Because… minimizing payment costs makes it easier for people to spend their money… and spending money is good for the economy.

Am I correct? Do you fully support Medium making it easier for members to spend their money?