Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman Demonstrate How to Not Think About Economics

What if Spotify was 80% Spin Doctors?

Image from Tom Williams via Getty.

Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman have co-authored a bill. We really need to get them these t-shirts:

The bill is called the The Living Wage for Musicians Act, though a better name would be the Shitty DJs Unite To Reduce Access To Music People Actually Want To Listen To Act. The bill is inconsequential and won’t pass — Tlaib and Bowman are marginalized loons who exist to be thwarted by people who know stuff. But the bill is worth looking at because it’s a museum piece demonstrating the flawed economic thinking that’s common on the far left.

The bill targets Spotify and its competitors (mostly Apple Music and Amazon). In a statement, Tlaib said that an artist would need more than 800,000 Spotify streams a month to earn the equivalent of a full-time $15/hour job. The bill seeks to triple payments to artist from 0.3 cents per stream to 1 cent per stream (Tlaib’s numbers are debatable but whatever — let’s make this simple and just use her numbers). Tlaib and Bowman would fund this increase in payments in two ways: 1) Subscription fees would rise by 50%, and 2) Payments would be capped at one million streams, and revenue beyond that would go into a fund to pay out the low-earners.