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Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
All other things being equal, union jobs are always more expensive than non-union jobs because they pay workers more. That's the entire point.
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This started from something Sebby said about the effectiveness of stimulus. If the entire point of making infrastructure spending go to union jobs is that they are more expensive and you think you get more of it, OK, but I think what actually happens is that Congress appropriates whatever it's going to appropriate and if it goes to union projects then there are fewer of them, and the same aggregate spending.
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You have done nothing to clear up my confusion. Even if we lived in fiction land and you could spend the exact same amount of money on a union job or a non-union job, the union project would allocate a higher percentage of your spend to union salaries and that means that more money goes into the pockets of average people who will spend it (and will create a much higher stimulative effect) as opposed to the wealthy people pitching for the project, who will bank it.
TM
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You guys keep explaining the concept to me as if I don't understand it. I get it. I just think the delta is pretty small. I concede I'm not backing that up with anything other than an intuition that in all the money spent on an infrastructure project on materials and land and etc., the delta between union and non-union wages is a pretty small thing. It's not small to the workers involved, but it does seem pretty small when you are trying to assess the stimulative effects. Also, (a) the money that goest to the wealthy has some stimulative effect, just not as much, and (b) if the non-union projects are really cheaper, then the mix of work is different -- e.g., your federal highway spending bill gets you 28 highway projects instead of 26, so more non-union workers are getting work than union workers are.
To this, GGG offers me a hypothetical where union wages are 3x non-union wages, and TM asserts theres "a much highly stimulative effect," as if just saying that way answers the question instead of restates it. Hey, I just spent a few minutes Googling and I couldn't find anything useful on point, so it's not like I'm saying anything new at this point either. If I were designing federal infrastructure spending packages, I would still steer the work to union shops, but I wouldn't tout the heightened stimulus effects as the reason to do it.
