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The Campaign To Get Every American Free Money, Every Year
merbs writes: Supporters of a basic income have finally organized a proper political movement. Basic Income Action is, according to co-founder Dan O'Sullivan, "the first national organization educating and organizing the public to support a basic income. "He tells me that "Our goal is to educate and organize people to take action to win a basic income here in the U.S." This 2013 Economist article does a good job of summarizing the pro and con viewpoints on the (ahem) basic idea.
in the form of SS (old age, disability, survivor benefits), food stamps, etc, etc?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Move to Alaska.
How about instead of giving away section 8 housing, Obamaphones, welfare stamps, and imposing high minimum wages you just let us keep the money that we worked for and let us decide how to spend (or save) it.
So the wealth to distribute needs to come from somewhere seriously.
What is an answer to the 'BASIC INCOME HYPOTHESIS' especially with robot unemployment pace acceleration?
The 'Apollo Dividend' is what, check the Twitter feed found online, the answer astounds and we should get both mind you in this world.
We do have real 'Abundance', read the book from Peter Diamandis and couple it with the post Moon Express era, voila, lots of funding over time!
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
I'd be all for a simple system that supplied $20k per adult, $10k per child, and taxed everything above that at whatever rate was necessary to balance the budget on a 5 year moving average of tax receipts.
I'd also be OK with making the tax rates even more progressive than even that. Our current system of tons of incentives, exemptions, and loopholes is maddening and nothing approaching fair.
Just asking ...
The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is the taxpayers. Redistribution of wealth may be a good or bad thing depending on your political opinion, but giving out money has to be a cost to someone, somewhere - it is not free.
and
Can I borrow your wheelbarrow? I need a loaf of bread.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example:
- Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies
- Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work
- Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work
- Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs
- Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy"
- Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
in order to not stave. Only Republicans are mean enough to want people to die for not wanting to work.
http://budget.house.gov/waronpoverty/
Total yearly budget: $799B divided by 330 000 000 people (I know, it's more) is equal to 2421/yr per person.
Why not give everyone buckets of cash? The U.S. is the richest country in the world with a Chinese credit card.
Anywhere where Basic Income was deployed has generally been a Good Thing, with good results across the board.
You could even improve on it in general by limiting it to people under a certain income, say, under $75k a year. They are not as likely to feel the benefit of that money compared to those under that threshold.
Those above that threshold likely burn through the average amounts you see in Basic Income schemes on a daily basis, just as disposable spending, not bills or the like.
Of course, then you come across the issue of "but how can you assume that those earning a large wage aren't just as poor as those on low incomes? "
And, yes, it is true. Someone with a large wage could easily have barely any useful income because they use it to support a life that is fairly expensive. (such as living in a city, a yacht, expensive car or such)
Honestly? Couldn't care less. These people aren't vulnerable, they can easily change their lives, people on lesser incomes can't simply say "oh, hey, you know, I think I might downsize a little, get a cheaper car, maybe a cheaper house, wasting sooooooo much money".
Poorer people literally can't afford to downsize most times because it means either homelessness or death.
And in the case of America, it is even more painful for poorer people than in most modern countries because the welfare system is atrocious.
Regardless, It is "Anti-American", so good luck with that.
DEEEEMOCRACY. America isn't even a true democracy. Never has been. Never will be.
Get a job. Earn all this "free" money yourself.
Don't expect it to be given to you off the backs of hardworking people simply because you feel underprivileged or don't feel like doing "that job". Nobody deserves a free ride and expecting the rest of the working class to compensate you is not only wrong, it is unsustainable. "Eventually you run out of other people's money."
The problem is the regressive politicians have long been promising free-lunch to too many for too long, so we end up with a class of lazy grumblers who get angry when they don't have what their neighbor does.
As long as it is enough to cover a small apartment and food this would be awesome. My love is reading and the library has all the books I want. I could finally quit my job, get a small place near the library and just read books all day everyday!
I want free money too..
You want to see what happens if you guarantee "free income" to citizens? Just look at ANY ghetto in the USA, any "project" housing. THAT is the result of over 50 years of "welfare". I suppose you would prefer NO ONE work? Unless you give people a reason to get off their lazy ass and do something productive, the entire country will look like "project" houses in a few years. (mostly) blacks, have become nothing more than slaves to the United States government. Politicians, have turned them, into a guaranteed block of voters, who will almost always vote democratic, otherwise, they would have to get up off their butts, and WORK for a LIVING. Call me racist, call me this or that, I don't care, but YOU KNOW IT IS THE TRUTH!
./ back to being a podium for the Keynesians.
Reminder: Open Source is NOT Socialism. Open Source (i.e. Private individuals giving charity by their own free will for the greater good) is actually part of Capitalism. Open Source would be Socialism if the government mandated ownership of all code and forced people to make it open source.
Robot unemployment is the single biggest argument for Basic Income.
Money's the way to have an economy through which capital is exchanged for activity and resources. If robots and automation (and the connectivity of the internet: think about how much easier it is to find free options for things when you can really get busy googling for that one guy somewhere in the world who's doing it FOSS) lead to widespread inability to work at all, the mechanism for 'exchanging capital for stuff' needs to still function.
Therefore, you have to be supplying it to the robot-unemployed consumer SO THAT THEY can buy things and funnel that capital up to the rentiers and controllers of property/intellectual property/innovators/etc... without doing that, the captains of industry may 'deserve' all the capital but no more is entering the system. It becomes meaningless if it hasn't already.
We're already past the point where effort and merit translate to capital in any direct way: capital translates to more capital and that's all. There are no things to do that can enter into the system if you're not already in it. Total disconnect in inventing, music, game development soon it will be, total disconnect in willingness to do manual labor. Robots are better at that even than human slaves. Computers will soon be better at evolving business models than driven brilliant nerds in executive positions at Amazon.
We cannot stay ahead of this system with effort, brilliance, blood or even death.
The only solution is changing the rules of the system, with Basic Income, and returning capital to serving as a mechanism of exchange. It can't work as an engine of competition because it kills the host: awarding people percentages of $1000 by effort keeps people working, but awarding people percentages of $0 doesn't. It stops being theoretically possible to function in such a system.
Just like mandatory minimum wages, any effect giving everyone free money artificially will just wash out due to inflation in the real economy.
After maybe a few years we will be right back into having to qualify people for welfare to get more free money beyond the baseline, once prices rise due to the extra demand the free money baseline won't buy you very much.
If you are going to go that route, which i'm not saying we should, a guaranteed minimum income would be more practical and is pretty much what we have now through the Tax credit system where you can get more back on your tax returns than you paid in. If your yearly income is less than the minimum, you get a check for the difference. Then if you are unable to work for whatever reason, you can apply to get your free money distributed monthly and settle up at the end of the year.
My idea would be for...
Citizens and permanent residents (Green card holders)
$500/month for 22-66
$250/month for 21 and younger
$750/month for 67+ or social security, whichever is greater.
If someone is on SSI Disability, it's either or, whichever is greater.
Illegal immigrants lose out, which would probably appease some people.
Those who are incarcerated for 1+ years would get like $100/month in my idea, to be used for stuff such as toilet paper, toothpaste, and snacks. Untouchable by restitution attempts. The prison wouldn't get any extra monies from this.
I'd also push for a 10% UBI tax (universal basic income) on the reported federal AGI amount. This way, the tipping point is $60k for a single person, which should be good enough for everyone but the rich. This wouldn't cover everything, but would help.
If this basic income is enough to feed, clothe, and house a person, then there will be no incentive for people to take jobs that traditionally pay a lower wage, since basic income will enough to take care of basic needs that 99% of a person's income went towards anyways when they were working such jobs.
If it is not enough to take care of basic needs, then it is really pointless because the people that *could* otherwise have benefited the most from something like this will still not have enough to get by.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If you have a criminal history, neck tattoos, didn't work a single day during high school or summer, didn't go to college, got horrible grades or didn't graduate, didn't learn any interview skills, don't have a license because of multiple DUIs, and you're broke as can be because of child support payments all because you're an irresponsible, lazy, idiot then I don't think you "deserve" free money as they put it. The government isn't here to babysit you and give you a participation trophy just for almost trying at life. You screw up your life, there's consequences. People don't even realize how hard I worked to get where I am right now I make about $30,000 a year and live in a studio apartment. In life if you don't try and you make mistakes, you DON'T WIN and you DON'T GET FREE STUFF!
Why do people think are entitled to other people's money?
We've already seen what numerous entitlement programs have done to the USA. Our labor participation rate is the lowest it's been in my lifetime and I was born in the 70s. This is what happens when you over regulate an economy, over legislate entitlement programs, and don't require people to be productive in order to live.
Are there people that are truly down and out through no fault of their own? Absolutely! Is it really half of the US population? (47% don't pay federal income tax) Hell no. Maybe 5%. Let's scale back all of the unnecessary entitlements and get people being productive and working again.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Don't they call it communism?
Didn't it fail to work as well as capitalism? That's what I remember from the 80's...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Don't we (the US) already have that in the form of SS (old age, disability, survivor benefits), food stamps, etc, etc?
No we don't. Those are programs for people that meet specific criteria. Big portions of the population don't qualify for those programs for one reason or another. Even when you do qualify, sometimes they take a while to kick in. I know first hand that the process of SS disability can take quite a while.
I'd need a lot of evidence to make me think that something like this is not a stupid idea. I think the notion that this would lift people out of poverty would be quickly swamped by inflation. Prices aren't going to stay static. It also means that those who elect not to work for whatever reason would have to be supported by others though a pretty hefty progressive tax system. We have that to some degree now but it's unclear that this idea would improve things. Guaranteed there would be complaining (more than now) about those who are able bodied but choose not to work. It's also unclear how this would affect wages at companies and whether it would ultimately be a competitive issue. Whether the company pays workers directly or pays taxes that are passed through, there still is a cost involved and US workers are already pretty expensive.
Multiply 300 million people by a very modest ten thousand dollars a year. Now tell me where that's going to come from, comparing with current US tax revenues, then tell me how you intend to avoid rampant inflation if you somehow manage to come up with it.
I like the idea of a basic income, removing artificial scarcity that creates both billionaires and kids who go to bed hungry is generally a reasonable thing to do. But lets be serious, we are 200 years away from that kind of thinking.
As Americans we can't even get past the idea that it is the compassionate and responsible thing to do to give free insulin to a child or pull a rotted tooth from a homeless person's mouth before it kills them.
I am all for progressive thinking, but we need to start with providing for the common defense (against the common cold). Like every other industrialized nation in the world.
Where did the money in your pocket come from?
It came from presumably your employer. Where did they get it? They made things and consumers of some kind bought the things.
Where did the consumers get the money to spend?
This is where your concept fails. The basic income idea is so simple and obvious. It says 'okay, let's continue to have a relatively unregulated capital-based system, and this is where the money comes from'. It's nothing more than a negative feedback loop on a variable that would otherwise go into a runaway condition and crash the program.
If you don't believe 'capital' is going into a runaway condition and crashing capitalism, then you clearly do not run your own business and rely on customers having money to spend.
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee where the government is the employer of last resort. This is still a form of Keneysian intervention, but a very direct one. Decreasing unemployment raises aggregate demand and brings on recovery from the recession. Inflation doesn't occur until you approach full employment. But at the same time as the recession is over, and since such work offered by the public sector is at or just below minimum wage, most would move back to private sector jobs. "Free money" is not given to those who are able to work and are simply failing to find employment, and is reserved for the severely disabled and so on — unlike the current situation.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Does this money just magically appear?
Isn't the Fed Reserve already magically creating money for us...and that is just getting us further in debt?
While this sounds all warm and fuzzy...everyone likes "free" money...but WTF does it come from?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
LeftDot is losing another reader.
The level of economic ignorance by slashot editors is astounding. They do great with tech, but this is the stupidest most fucking commie ignorant idea. Pisses me off although I realize they are not to blame for not knowing any better
Are those who support this basic income contributing their own money to make it happen, or do they plan to do it with other people's money?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Basic income is a reasonable policy, provided you get rid of all the other government benefits: food stamps, social security, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.
Anyone over the age of 12 should realize nothing is free.
Well, certainly not for a prole such as you! Maybe if you were running a bank, we could talk.
It doesn't take 7 billion people to feed, clothe, shelter, and even communicate with 7 billion people.
So what do we do? We are TOO efficient for everyone to earn a living. So do we just murder the people who are not "needed?" Do we let them starve? Do we have massive unnecessary works to employ the unemployable? I am all for suggestions, but when society doesn't really need as many workers as it has, you have to either change the idea of work, or kill off some of the workers.
As if millions of voices cried out.
Holy crap, getta load of netsavior. He wants to go around pulling TEETH from the homeless' mouths! WHAT A MONSTER!
Democrapes already did this in Detroit, MI.
And we all know how that turned out.
And was tried in USSR.
We just need to eliminate the government including military and law enforcement's budgets. It's not like they're doing us any good anyway.
If we just cut everyone a check to replace social security, disability, food stamps, WIC, section whatever housing, welfare, unemployment, etc etc etc that would drastically reduce the size of the government.
Very doubtful that it would have a substantial impact on the size of the government. Probably would just shuffle things around a bit. And frankly the mere size of the government isn't really the important problem. There are well run governments that are larger percentages of their economies than the US government. Much of the size of our government is in things that have nothing to do with payouts like the ones you mentioned. The military, NASA, Dept of Education, Homeland Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Dept of State, etc would be completely unaffected. You might gain some efficiency if it worked (not a certainty) but it wouldn't drastically shrink the government.
No, THE problem is what is the government spending our money on and how are they getting that revenue. Right now we spend a ludicrous amount of money on an oversized military and we spend a similarly large amount of money on Medicare/Medicaid but we are unwilling to raise taxes to match the level of expenditures we demand. So we are borrowing huge sums and pushing the tax burden into the future where it will only get larger. THAT is the problem. The democrats don't want to cut benefits and the republicans don't want to raise taxes. Sooner or later that is going to bite us in the ass unless they figure out a compromise of some sort. So far we are in no danger of that happening.
(just wait until Medicare and Medicaid are replaced by "here's $100, buy your own damn insurance").
Won't happen because no rational insurance company wants to underwrite old people because there is no money in it. Old people consume by far the most medical care and routinely are not in a position to pay the full cost of their medical care. Hence we have to run it as a government program.
This is a campaign populist appeal, but the facts are that about 20% of Americans pay 80% of the bill already, and the bottom 50% pay almost zero income tax; so no matter the "tax breaks," the rich are still footing the nation's bill.
I truly wish there was a massive untapped, currently untaxed group not paying their fair share, but it is just campaign sloganeering not based on the actual federal budget numbers (in the US that is.... Hello to our Canadian friends! Tired of our campaign cycles yet?)
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
There is no such thing as free money.
It's a nice idea in concept, but just like we've seen in the stratospheric rise of college tuition, giving money to everyone will give a green light to every for-profit entity in the country (along with state and local governments) to raise their prices to get some of that 'free money', just like the colleges have, as greed like contaminated water will always find it's own level.
The only things that will save this (or any country) is well-regulated capitalism in place of cronyism, upper income tax rates rolled back to the Eisenhower era, and the total illegality imposed on any and all shell game, off-shoring tax dodges done by both the One Percent and corporations (THAT ARE NOT PERSONS IN ANY LEGAL SENSE).
So you are proposing Social Darwinism? Should our purpose be to take care of people, or breed them?
My opinion is that society is changing too fast for traditional evolution to keep up (in a practical sense). The best skill set for the 1950's are largely obsolete, and things will be very different in a few decades I'm sure.
Perhaps people can be easily generically modified to be smarter, more motivated, and better disciplined in the future. Today's "defects" won't matter just as being metabolically efficient doesn't matter today because food is relatively cheep in industrial nations (barring an apocalypses). Maybe many people are "lazy" because it made them metabolically efficient in the past, allowing them to avoid starvation or malnutrition. Similarly, why browbeat people today for the undesirable-trait-of-the-decade when it may matter very little in the future (easily repaired or irrelevant)?
Table-ized A.I.
Because creating cheap money for college has worked so well[1] we want to extend the idea to everyone for every thing. [1] a trillion dollars of debt that is likely to never be repaid - i.e. someone else's money
Read the Economist article linked in the original post before showing off your ignorance. The income is not created from nowhere, it's paid for by taxes, so prices won't have to happen to soak up the new money etc etc.
So the government will just cut everyone a check each month? Won't work. Some people on welfare are unwilling or unable to take care of themselves or their families. What will stop them from cashing the check and buying drugs or blowing it all at the racetrack instead of buying groceries or paying for housing, etc? You will end up with MORE people dying. Programs like WIC use vouchers so that people can get things they SHOULD be buying, like groceries. If you expect to transplant jobless people from one system to another, the government needs to make sure that they WILL take care of themselves, not that they theoretically could.
In theory, it sounds like it could work, but you are assuming people will take care of themselves. If something like this were to work, it needs to be combined with better healthcare for addicts, people with mental and behavioral issues, and people with medical issues in general. Are we even taking into account disabled people or folks with large medical bills? 20k per year is nothing. Something has to bridge the gap. I understand that jobs are an obvious choice, but not all people can work. What about disability?
I would definitely like to see a debate on this, but there are a lot of problems to work out.
With baby boomers retiring and the tax base (workers) growing smaller over the next 20 years, taxes have to go up to pay for everything else as Social Security/Medicare consumes two-thirds of the federal budget. You better plan on paying more than your fair share if you're still in the middle class.
Right now new capital enters the system via debt. Businesses and consumers borrow money the banks don't actually have. If it doesn't get to the consumers, it doesn't keep circulating. If it doesn't keep circulating, more businesses lay people off and there are fewer consumers spending less money.
The basic income idea is to put new money into circulation not from taxes necessarily, but probably from printing it into circulation. That creates some inflation, which is basically debt spread evenly across the entire economy. Then the economy keeps the money flowing, because there's a steady supply of it to people who aren't currently employed. It makes banks a secondary source of entry for currency rather than the primary one.
The government doesn't have to keep track of this program for rent, that program for health insurance, this other program for some other type of assistance, and then a complex tax code. The basic income subsidy and a simplified tax code makes the government much more streamlined so the tax rate can actually be lower or more of the money put into the subsidy.
It might not be an ideal solution, but it's not expected to be "free". It's actually a very profound macroeconomic idea for adjusting to booming per-worker productivity and a simultaneous lack of jobs. The problem it's trying to solve is that the reason the job market is so soft is that so few people need to work to produce the things that make everyone able to live comfortably. Demand for labor is down, which is causing demand for products to be down (via lack of means to pay). If more people could pay, more products could be sold. The corporations wouldn't need tax breaks as subsidies because nearly all products are subsidized on the buyer's side. Most of the tax burden could eventually be shifted onto the people owning the automation.
You seem to forget that the USA have issued debt to banks of $2.1 Trillion. This was intended to stimulate economic growth, but it is also a fancy way of devaluing currency, or "printing money".
That is $7,000 for everyone in the USA that could have been distributed - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#QE_for_the_people
Of course that would benefit normal people, rather than rich people exclusively.
My leanings are very much in the libertarian direction. I support property rights, free markets, etc, etc, etc.
With that in mind, if we, as a society, are going to have wealth redistribution, this method is the least offensive to me.
Inflation is an extraordinarily evil and offensive thing, but if we are going to create money out of thin air, the place where it can do the least harm is in the bank accounts of the people.
Government should stop debasing our money and stop encouraging idleness, but if they are going to do it anyway, this seems to be the least offensive option.
The catch is that it needs to coupled with responsibility. It needs to replace our other systems, to a large extent. It cannot simply be added to them, or the people will waste their free money, and come back looking for more.
See that "Preview" button?
Relevant topic - http://strikemag.org/bullshit-... Keynes predicted a 15 h work week and, in effect, given the level of time spent doing inessential or paper-pushing non-sense, we have just that. The closer we are to full-automation, the more a concept like basic income is attractive as we have to saturate the market with products and services no one really needs nor, at a certain point, will they want, which places increasing pressure on employment rates as more of the population comes to rely on these jobs. Or in the case of upper middle classes, put asses in seats where they won't do much of anything. Powers that be still demand 40, or suggest even longer hours for people to make ends meet. There's absolutely no need for it. Every year in the West we seem to lose capacity for productivity. Mind you I would go for an alternative to BI like a negative-tax of sorts which would still be very streamlined and cheap but would omit needlessly sending out cheques to those that don't need it.
All jobs will be outsourced or replaced by robots.
So people have to eat or else they'll riot.
So give them bread and circuses. The Roman Empire will never fall.
Getting unconditional basic income would be a huge boon for workers. If leaving work becomes a viable option for nearly everybody, then employers will no longer be able to abuse their employees. They'll actually have to offer decent working conditions, or the workers will just walk away. This should end bullshit practices like firing people for not working on holidays, or getting pregnant, or complaining about sexual harassment.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but a UBI would dramatically improve the employment marketplace for employees.
Guaranteed income is a good idea as long as it's predicated on mandatory sterilization for recipients.
Not to be "mean". Part of the original issue is increased efficiency of production together with population growth. We can provide all of the people with labor from a small portion. We need to restore balance to the production vs. consumption and part of the equation is reasonable population level.
If you asked me if this was a good idea even 10 yrs ago I'd have said hell yes. But, a new living location has otherwise tainted my view and when it comes to a guaranteed income I have to say fuck no. I'm not wealthy. I barely afford my monthly living expenses and trust me they are meager as hell. (like $149/m food) I don't have any public assistance. Yet the homes on either side of me do. And this is why I'd rather see those people starve than get free money.
So what do my neighbors get:
1. they own their homes and do not pay for them. 1 house gets some sort of aid program that pays their mortgage. The other one inherited it from a mother who got what #1 did.
2. They get free gas. I don't own a dryer since I feel that 1. it's environmentally unsound when I can hang clothes to dry and 2. I cannot afford that kind of expense. Yet both these households dry several loads a week on YOUR dollar because they're too fucking lazy to hang up clothes to dry.
3. Food. They get a lot of it too. Both claim some manner of disability so get 7 hot meals delivered a week as they game that system. And get food stamps to the tune of $300+/m. You're paying for that too.
4. Property taxes, home insurance, both paid for from programs with the state.
5. cars. yep both have them, neither paid for them, fully insured. Gov't program for that too.
6. Cell phone, land line, satellite or cable, internet access. I don't have cable or sat, could not afford it anyway. But they get it for free too.
7. monthly living expense stipend from many sources. Both game their grandkids claiming they take care of them X hrs/week so they get paid by the state as a caretaker. That basically means the kids are allowed to run around fucking up everyone else's homes that are paying for them.
When I first moved in I thought what a great deal it was to get this house. Now I detest it. Seeing people live like this has embittered me in ways I could not have imagined. One of these people screams at the mail carrier whenever her checks are late as though that is the carrier's fault. She'll yell at her with: "How come I ain't got my money yet. They gotta give me my money. Where is it bitch?" LIke she is entitled just by the fact that she's alive.
As much as I think welfare systems can help, they also make career welfare people like this. One of the grand daughters in the case has been schooled to get pregant early. While working in my front yard, this girl was telling her friends about the boy down the street and how she was going to get her first baby with him as soon as she was ready. She's 11. Sink that in, 11 years old. Already planning on getting pregnant as soon as she can, and having a career out of it. Just like her mom, her grandmom, and her deceased grandmother.
Fuck them all. Cut off the nanny state and let the savages eat each other alive.
Here's the best FAQ I've found on the subject.
https://www.reddit.com/r/basic...
I can't think of any questions that aren't addressed.
So much wrong.
For one, increasing the minimum wage doesn't increase everybody's wages, and overall inflation is fixed by Federal Reserve policy. So no, you won't have a situation where prices rise to compensate for the wage increase. Some prices will go up. Others will go down. Overall there will be very little average change.
Second, since the 1970's, hourly wages have been falling compared to productivity, and are now around half of what we would have expected given the productivity of the US economy. There has been massive redistribution of wealth away from workers and towards the rich. That needs to be reversed. Also, given that the period from about 1950-1980 had higher economic growth than any period since, there's good reason to believe that redistributing the income back to where it was back then (when you could support a family on a full-time minimum wage job) would help rather than hurt the overall economy.
Also, illegal immigration makes US citizens richer. It's high time we stopped abusing them for helping us.
And there is no job shortage? What rock have you been living under?
If it's a guy that "fathers" a child and cannot pay child support then surgically remove their penis and balls.
If it's a gal that cannot keep her legs together then chemically sterlize her.
We don't need more welfare babies, we need children from people who actually contribute to society.
Once those gang members lose their members, they won't be so aggressive and violent without their testosterone to feed it.
If we do this by giving everyone half of (the average income minus their own income), then we basically guarantee that nobody makes less than half of average, we cost average people nothing to pay for it, and the burden on the rich who do pay for it scales with the inequality of income distribution automatically. In a market where income distribution was close to uniform already, this kind of distribution would automatically scale back to almost nothing. If a tiny handful of people get almost all the money and most people get almost none, then that tiny handful will be paying a lot to a lot of people. It creates a spring-like centerward pressure on everyone; people near average are barely affected at all, the further from average you get the harded it pulls you back toward average.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Historically, the displaced workers go down the food chain.
And the new industries host sprung up were labor intensive and were anble to soak up the new workers and create new jobs.
That no longer is true. New industries are not labor intensive by nature like Internet companies or are automated from the get go.
Tech firms generate roughly a million dollars in revenues per employee. Back in the day, it took 10 employees to generate that revenue - manufacturing as recently as in the 80s
We are still in the Industrial Revolution. Looking back on the 150 or so years and thinking the trend will continue is thinking in too narrow of a time frame.
Things are different now. A handful of automation engineers and techs can replace tens of thousands of employees.
And it is happening in all industries.
This idea that automation is going to create more jobs than it displaces and then some is being proven false by the labor stats. Blaming policy is completely wrong.
The future is for creatives and for janitors and retail workers.
You want a well paying job, Hollywood is the place to go.
[quote]Labor Participation Rate = Employed Population / Population.[/quote]
No, the formula is
LFPR = E/WAP
It's the percentage of the working-age population, not the entire population, and it is a very meaningful statistic, much more so than the official unemployment rate.
It doesn't matter if this is good economics or not, it's never going to happen. There is power in the current programs like SS, welfare, food stamps, etc, etc, etc. The people that wield that power will never willingly give it up. They control you and your vote with the promise of filling that need or this want or righting that economic injustice. They keep you divided and focused on the small things. Basic income like this has no power to control built into it. It's just not gonna happen.
The wealthiest country ever in human history, and (both privately and publicly) deeply in debt because we cannot afford all the things we want to buy.
And this doesn't merit even the faintest passing thought from most members of congress or the White House, whose job it is to lead this country and manage its spending.
-Styopa
Where's Honor Harrington when you need her? (author: David Weber)
The federal government received $3.02 Trillion in revenue in 2014, if you divided that up by all tax payers (about 136.5 Million) you Come to roughly $22k a year or about $1,840 per month. That is of course if you completely shut down the entire Federal government, not very likely.
Disclaimer: I'm a libertarian leaning supporter of a BIG.
1. If you check out their actual site, they're proposing a much more modest $800-1500/month.
2. No, the money comes from eliminating most other forms of welfare. This would fund about 3/4 of the BIG@1k/month
3. The rest could be funded through tax 'adjustments'. For example, put in a flat tax. It need not be progressive or have lots of deductions because 'everybody' gets the BIG, which serves as a huge tax deduction/credit. A flat 30% from $1 earned, for example, has you 'breaking even' at $40k worth of income. Don't give a break for long term capital gains, so people like Trump doesn't get away with only paying 20%(15% earlier), and you have your income back.
4. If they 'print' money instead by using the reserve, we aren't going deeper in debt so much as causing inflation. Which I've almost forgotten about recently...
Personally, I like the BIG because it's mechanical, neutral, fungible, and therefore free(libertarian leaning, remember). Mechanical - it's neutral. You don't have people using it to try to tell you how to live your life, as they do with welfare and taxes today. Fungible - use it for YOUR needs, which may not be the needs the legislature forsaw when they passed a welfare package with restricted spending. Eat cheap but need warm clothing? Too bad! EBT money is only for food, not clothing!
I might be libertarin - but I'm a practical minarchist, not an anarchist. I've seen enough research to believe that a practical safety net is cheaper than our current policies. Multiple research studies have shown that, for example, homeless people are extremely expensive, between shelters, emergency rooms, police, court, and such. To the tune of $250k per homeless person per year. Turns out that a 'shelter first' policy works better than requiring them to detox on the street. Worst case, ~$12k/year per person is a whole lot cheaper than $250k. And this is only one example of many.
While $12k might not seem like much - put 4 'would be homeless' into a house or apartment, and you're looking at a decent amount of purchasing power.
It also helps solve the 'welfare cliff' problems where earning extra money when you're on assistance can actually end up costing you money. Sure, you might be paying 30% of everything you earn in taxes, but you don't have any cases where earning $1 more makes you ineligible for a program, costing you $5k.
When Canada tried a similar program in a town, they found employment was maintained, but graduation rates went up, hospital visits went down, and mothers spent more time with their newborns.
I don't read AC A human right
But giving people income does not remove scarcity (artificial or otherwise). Scarcity is only removed if production increases.
All money can do is change the allocation of what already exists.
I do admit there is an indirect effect - changing the allocation of what exists can result in new wealth if the allocation change results in new production (e.g., someone uses the money to buy a tool to build some new things). But simply allowing someone to buy something doesn't guarantee more wealth.
Rather than trying to give people more money, I would rather see an approach that starts incentivizing production and reducing barriers to entry to all markets. Consumption taxes don't do this - I hate the "Fair Tax" idea because taxing consumption does nothing to encourage production and the resulting reduction in scarcity. Our current regulations don't help either - the ACA for example cannot fundamentally reduce costs because it puts up even more barriers to entry to providing health care than we had before.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Great.
If your parents worked harder to get you a better education, that's yours. Seize it and use it.
If you have contacts which can get you a better job or opportunities, use them...they are yours.
if you can get ahead by using tools and information that you accumulated, do it.
This White Privilege crap is bullshit.
And Fuck You and your "Normal People" bullshit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's "basic income". Emphasis on basic.
You'll get to keep your studio appartment and they won't be much richer. If they want your lifestyle, they'll have to work/earn money anyway.
It's about "basic income" - which means basically consolidating all transfer-payments into one generic monthly income for every citizen alive. It would also work as a automatic monthly paid negative income tax.
One of the arguments for this sort of thing is that by simply reducing the bureaucratic workload it would basically pay for itself. There is quite some truth to that. The other part of the argument is, that this would offer a slight distribution of the automation dividend. Which is a good thing too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
His app can't escalate on its own. You do. It's normal even to overwrite hosts manually yourself. Apk explained all that here but you're too stupid to know it http://interviews.slashdot.org... You obviously don't really understand how security in Windows works. Windows File Protection/System File Protection are why and to refresh or update a hosts file, it's how it is.
"I'm still waiting for the Republicans to introduce the jobs bill that they promised in the 2010 campaign."
I'm still waiting for you to realize there's no such thing as a "jobs bill".
Unless the "jobs bill" is "have the federal government hire all those people digging ditches and picking up trash"
"We don't need to add a new method for freeloaders to leach us dry"? State and federal welfare spending is 3% of GDP. Medicare and SS are on the same order. You're misunderestimating the amount the country spends on this.
Similarly, your concern that illegal immigrants are sending massive amounts of money out of the country is overinflated. The only numbers available on this I could find cited a 2006 estimate of $45B includes both legal and illegal immigrants. Counterfeiting "costs" us 5x that.
Your assertion that immigrants do poorer quality work than domestic workers is unfounded and are very often performing jobs that domestic workers won't
The lack of empathy you show for other humans is borderline sociopathic and your understanding of economic and social problems in the US is very narrow and based on selective view of facts, if there are indeed any facts involved in your opinions.
The fact that this comment got modded to +5 or informative is a sad statement on the general understanding of many people here.
This should appeal to the stupid, the greedy, and those who want money for nothing.
What it will do is destroy the middle class, just like a 15 or 20$/hr min wage.
Would you rather give everyone on the planet 1,000,000$ US or 60 IQ points?
When you add a pile of money at the bottom everything costs more. Unless people in the middle get more, then they slide down the ladder as the money moves from the bottom to the top. Soon you are either born poor or born rich with nothing to work towards in the middle.
Also, if you are receiving this as your only income and are having baby(s) you are just engineering the failure of this system, beyond the built in failures.
We have a socialist future but the first step is to get people to stop breeding before all the work is gone not after the money and food is gone.
If you aren't part of the 1%, you aren't even middle class; you're just a serf. But congrats on actually having a job; serf.
If you're part of the 1%, congrats, you're now middle class, and you actually reap economic rewards reflecting the growing economy.
And if you aren't part of the 0.1%, you've finally made it; congrats!
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
If you assume $24000 per year per adult, that's what this would cost. Are there government services and other income sources paying citizens that would be eliminted? Someone please provide an estimate of those to subtract from the $6.2T..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This is about basic income, something there are a lot of very valid arguments for.
Saying in the title that its a campaign for "free money" takes away from the discussion.
1. Its not free - It is, in fact, paid by the collective taxes levied by the government on income, corporations, etc.
2. Saying that its trying to have the government give "free money" gets a gut reaction from a lot of people who think that huge portions of the population are freeloaders (welfare) and that they don't feel like they should pay for them and that "free money" will cause even more people to slack off and not work. Neither of these opinions are truths, and there are very valid arguments against them.
Something will need to be done in the fairly near future as automation does more of the work that can be done by humans, and this is a definite option that deserves consideration and actual understanding.
... or pull a rotted tooth from a homeless person's mouth before it kills them.
Great idea! Then we can pay the homeless with all the cash from the tooth fairy!
Economies run by central planners will never, ever approach the efficiency and productivity of an economy based on the free exchange of value for value, AKA capitalism. No matter how smart the masterminds think they are, their collective wisdom pales in comparison to millions of people making their own decisions, which we boil down to "supply and demand". This is just another central planning scheme that has zero chance of outperforming freedom in terms of providing the best standard of living for the largest number of people. As for the poor, we cannot build an economic system based on the premise of failure. The poor should be provided for by private charity, as happened for hundreds and hundreds of years before the emergence of the welfare state. This is explained very well by Austrian economist FA Hayek. I suggest "The Road to Serfdom" and "The Fatal Conceit".
Apk's app's proven safe by MalwareBytes + 57 antiviruses proven here http://interviews.slashdot.org... so it's no malware out to wrong anyone. It stops malware from wronging you in fact. His installer doesn't write anything other than its own files. Trace it yourself using Process Monitor by SysInternals/Microsoft. I just did and you're full of it and very stupid. From what I saw in that debate you were completely off topic and trolling. Apk must have really crushed you before since I saw he noted you always run from his fair challenge to you where you have never proven him validly technically wrong on a single point in his posts on hosts like that one.
Bro... if there were anywhere to go, I'd already be gone. You fucking retards are giving people no where else to go.
The west is getting taken over by various flavors of people like you and where else can a man go? To the totalitarian, theocratic. and oligarchic countries? We have no where else to go. You've succeeded in fucking up the entire planet and now you're busy fucking up one of the last places in the world where someone could be just left alone.
As to reading the fucking article... I didn't need to. The synopsis actually told me all I needed to know. But on the off chance that I was wrong, when you said that... I read it just to make sure. And that's 3 minutes I'm never getting back. So fuck you for that. The fucking article was exactly what I thought it was and my post addressed it correctly the first time.
As to being frightened... My fear is a sign of your strength or wisdom? A monkey playing with a A-Bombs is supposed to make me comfortable?
What I find distressing about people like you is that you're not actually ill meaning typically... you're just too stupid and ignorant to realize what you're fucking with or the ultimate consequences of your idiotic ideology.
As I said, I'm happy to offer the olive branch of letting you fuck up some isolated corner of the country without taking the rest of the country down the rat hole with you. But you won't tolerate that... and that fact alone reveals your fear more than mine. If you were confident you'd accept that and believe that the example of your success would convince the rest of the nation to follow you.
Given that your previous experiments were cities like what has become of Detroit... I think you know damn well at some level... perhaps subconsciously that you're a poison merchant. Or at the very least... you know that if you competed head to head without political games you'd get skull fucked by the disparity between the two systems.
I'll give you the last word... I have no patience to go back and forth with AC shitheads. Say whatever you like. I'm gone.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Libertarians need to think more deeply here.
The state of nature is one in which a natural person has de facto rights to fight for his survival — which includes not just his own personal survival but the right to sire and raise children to equally viable adulthood. When I use the word “fight” I mean it: Animals will fight for territorial access for the lives of themselves and their progeny. The Austrian and Lockean schools fail to recognize the situation which arises in nature when an animal is without the means of intergenerational sustenance, and the necessity of aggression in some of those situations. Civilization attempts to ignore this by proclaiming “property rights” as “natural” against “aggression”. This foolishness at the heart of these schools of thought renders them forever vulnerable to collectivists. The way out is trivially obvious: Follow Lysander Spooner’s definition of legitimate government as a mutual insurance company into which men voluntarily invest their natural rights in exchange for shares in and dividends from the company. The premiums paid for property rights take the place of taxes. The dividends take the place of social welfare. The violation of this simple and obvious paleolibertarian construct sacrifices the bedrock principle of liberty upon which civilization is founded for the high purpose of becoming politically impotent against collectivists.
As for socialists, all they need to do is find out who is responsible for ignoring Martin Luther King Jr’s final advice which was quite congruent with this paleolibertarian notion of natural rights investment being compensated by a dividend.
They need to find out who is responsible for ignoring MLK’s advice and do whatever it takes to neutralize their power — and I mean whatever it takes.
I’d start with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Seastead this.
There are LOADS of people who'd love to have the executive job. Supply outstrips demand. Yet their salary goes up under the current system. And you really don't NEED them. Try doing without the workers for a year. Now try the executives. Clearly it's wrong at the moment.
Cleaning toilets is done by people who have no other choice. But if the toilet cleaning paid as much as the executive pay, executives may whine about how it's unfair, but they wouldn't want to drop their job and clean the toilets. And if nobody cleans the toilets, they won't want to work there, so someone has to.
So the demand for someone is high, the supply of those who want to do it is low, therefore the price to employ SHOULD be high. If you don't like it, start cleaning toilets. The crappy jobs will be done because someone is willing to do it for the money, NOT because it's a choice between doing it and starving to death on the streets. The latter IS NOT a free market of jobs and opportunities.
Welfare is theft. I have no sympathy for people who make poor life choices. The consequences to their choices are not my responsibility to fix. I work my butt off just to have nearly half my paycheck stolen by the government already- money I earned through my hard work and could really use to improve my own life. What right does anyone else have to steal from my labor?
When it comes down to it-- He who does not work, should not eat. If you have nothing to contribute to society, either figure something, or starve. The makers in our society are already strained by the takers, and piling on more will only increase the speed we hit a breaking point. Sigh. Who is John Galt?
We have programs for people who can't work, I've used them.
We don't need to add a new method for freeloaders to leech us dry.
Wow, how did you not even see the hypocrisy of that as you were typing it?
Why is this not a completely winning argument in favor of a safety net for the homeless? I genuinely want to know.
Is it because attempts to house the homeless result in unlivable high crime slums that the homeless would rather be homeless than live in?
Is it because those in charge really want people they feel better than to suffer so badly that they're willing to pay MORE in order to ensure that happens?
Based on your numbers, I'm inclined to side with you, however, d'you have any references/URLs to point at? They'd be useful for winning over others who can be persuaded by facts (it's of course hopeless to use facts on many people.)
Best,
--PeterM
Let's print money with a perpetual motion machine!
The problem with this idea is the basic fact that the government has no money of its own. All the money the government gets comes from levies on the taxpayers. That's taxes.
The best indication of how naive this idea is comes right off their own page: http://www.basicincomeaction.o... -- Let's increase the money supply! If we print more, then we can give away more! Never mind that printing more money devalues the money that has already been printed. A death spiral.
To quote our friends from Monty Python: "what a stupid concept."
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Middle-class and wealthier people have known for years that when 51% of the country figured out they could just vote to have the 49% with more money "give it to them", we'd all have to leave.
Anyone else headed to Uruguay?
First two questions should be, "Where's the money coming from?" and "What about inflation from printing so much money?"
Well, the simplest and downright most efficient solution is to leverage our existing tax on income and employment. For employment taxation, the first N dollars earned in wages is used to recompense the federal income you receive. For the sake of a crude example, let's say the federal income is $20,000 annually. If you make $30,000, then your employer is actually paying you $10,000 in addition to the federal income. If your employer pays you $20,000, but grants some other benefits (e.g. travel allowances, free meals, additional health care, additional pension), you don't receive actual pay from the employer. So, even mediocre jobs (e.g. want fries with that) still have some incentive to offer to low income employees without paying more than the minimum federal income.
Since we're essentially exchanging one tax for the income for all workers, we avoid that potential for inflation. This works much like our modern FICA taxes and pension systems, but with a defined and stable benefit.
For all non-workers, the income is levied by the income tax on earnings above the federal income. This would be like our existing progressive taxation with a larger deduction at the bottom. Adjust as necessary.
End result: not necessarily more money in the economy overall, but a chunk is redistributed down the ladder. This is a redistribution writ large; decide for yourself if that's desirable.
I think there are a few more issues to consider like adding benefits for children without making "welfare baby" symptoms more prevalent. But I do prefer the notion that even juvenile citizens receive a benefit that pays for their food, shelter, education, and health care. Additionally, letting this benefit accrue in an escrow account gives a little nest egg to start post-secondary education, buy a house, get married, or start a business. That's not likely how it would work, see Social Security, but useful for an example.
We'd also need some level of bureaucracy to deal with abuse, especially among the remaining destitute and disabled. We'd still see things like payday loans, slum lords, and all the other financial drains.
This is something that I'm seeing a lot of - a seeming assumption that the payments can't be tuned.
As another poster put it - figure it as a redistributive tax - x% of income(they used 17%), equally distributed to all.
As long as you keep the percentage stable, it should quickly settle into a stable amount.
The higher the payment, the fewer/less people work. The lower the payment, the more they work. By the same token, you also have the idea that if fewer workers are available(because they don't NEED to work), the better employers will have to treat their employees.
But still, it can be set up to be a 'self-solving' problem. Too many people lying about? The payments go down, reducing quality of living below acceptable for many of them, so they return to the work force.
Or, to put it another way - if employers are screaming that they need employees louder than workers are screaming that they need jobs, it's time to reduce payments. If it's the opposite, time to increase them.
I don't read AC A human right
Apollo Dividend pays for the whole enchilada and then some, along with a huge frontier on top of everything else opened up.
Kind of like how land from Louisiana Purchase really kind of paid for itself way beyond what it took.
The moon is worth so much more even with net present value back from a century from now.
Mars is even worth more yet after 200 years of net present value.
It really is amazing that everyone overlooks the obvious eh?
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
It's capitalists paying everyone else for the right to use all those natural resources. We never consented to those resources being privatized in the first place, and when things get really bad people will defend themselves.
My social security retirement benefit at 65 years old is going to be over $32,000 a year.
You try to pay me $10,000 for my social security benefits I've been paying into for over 30 years and I'll be coming for you with pitchfork, torch, and 12-gauge.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
It's like what Margaret Thatcher said:
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
We already have such a system.
It is called the Federal Reserve Banking System.
It prints money and per the FOIA requests I have requested, it is done in secret to the owners.
So we don't need a new system we already have one.
However, instead of printing the money for the owners, whoever they are, you would print money for the general masses.
Good luck with that.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I think the influx of immigrants, average age is teens I think, will be the growth we need in that base. Then hopefully we will restructure the system so that in the future ... HAHAHAHA I could't say that part with a straight face. We'll never do a long term structural fix.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Employers would use it as an excuse to lower wages because hey you're being subsidized by the government now. Or the providers of goods and services will charge that much more for goods and services and the purchasing power would be insufficient.
This country realized it's greatest success at a time when there were no government programs and whether you and your family made it was dependent on the level of effort put forth to succeed. I think getting back to the model is what would make this country great again.
If there is a baseline and everyone gets the same amount of money, WTF is the point of money at all? If you draw the line at American citizens, fine, have fun with THAT immigration nightmare. If not, then, well, it's a totally meaningless gesture. Traditional rules break down in a modern globalist society and whoever came up with this idea sounds like they did it after a night drinking post-economics class they took in the late 1950's.
I've done a cursory glance at the two links provided, and I don't see how giving everyone a $2K a month check will be paid for?
Does this money just magically appear?
Isn't the Fed Reserve already magically creating money for us...and that is just getting us further in debt?
While this sounds all warm and fuzzy...everyone likes "free" money...but WTF does it come from?
The money best is sourced based on a fresh source, the real estate conversion in the 'Apollo Dividend' takes care of it all and provides for space too.
Google Apollo Dividend and read up so you know where much more than just a few checks for people, but the entire world gets fixed.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
Why is this not a completely winning argument in favor of a safety net for the homeless? I genuinely want to know.
'lots' of safety nets actually exist. Homeless shelters are safety nets.
Citations - well, $250k was off, it's closer to $40k, around 2002. But you're still looking at housing them being half the cost. $35-150k to keep them on the street, as opposed to $13-25k to house them.
Is it because those in charge really want people they feel better than to suffer so badly that they're willing to pay MORE in order to ensure that happens?
Inertia and fear, I think.
Inertia - there's this belief that homeless people need to 'show' that they're ready for help, by doing things like drying out while still on the street.
Fear - that if they make it 'too nice' that people will be more willing to be or at least claim homelessness to get into the system and linger in it.
Don't get me wrong, I have my conservative aspects, which means that I'm all for studies and steady, measured, implimentation after things like pilot programs. But once you've developed and verified a working program, it's time for a superior program to be adopted elsewhere.
I don't read AC A human right
An economy requires effort. $1 corresponds to some unit of effort on my part and can be used to purchase the result of someone else's effort. You can print up more dollars but you can't print up more effort.
Basic Income via inflation is another way of saying, "tax the people who have money and give it to the people who don't"--that's all we're talking about here. It's called welfare and there's quite a bit of prior art on that.
Thanks Lenin
Some of the indirect effects are that people are more free to experiment with startups and the like, and that inefficient parts of the economy will be ruthlessly pruned. I'd expect it to increase total wealth.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Socialists are the leeches, leeching from the rich and giving to the undeserving poor.
This is oversimplified to the point of being incorrect. Your flaw is thinking that $1 corresponds to some unit of effort. In reality, $1 corresponds to some unit of productivity, whether it's you, a robot, some technological innovation, a new business process, or whatever.
Currently when companies realize gains in productivity, all of the additional money either gets paid out to the people at the top or reinvested in the company, which essentially pays it out to the investors. The employees get little or none of it, which is why the past three decades productivity has been skyrocketing and we've experienced an average of around 3.5% growth per year, but real wages have been stagnant.
One of the premises of a UBI is to ensure that some of that 3.5% growth ends up in the hands of the people who are working longer, harder hours, taking on multiple jobs to make ends meet, and actually creating the productivity gains that companies are benefiting from but not passing down.
*All* labor is going to be hit, and already is being hit. What happens if there are no factory jobs? Then everyone gets a college education and goes after the higher level jobs. (This has happened.) What happens if there are not a lot of higher level jobs? Then it becomes a race to the bottom, people desperate for work underbid everyone else's wages.
If labor got the same share of corporate productivity today that labor got in 1970, everyone would be getting paid twice as much in terms of purchasing power. However, wages have been held down and the fruits of corporate productivity has been going to the rich instead. It's only going to get worse as labor supply increases due to automation of ANYTHING else.
--PM
You are just increasing someone's debt towards those people.
What keeps prices from increasing is that there is a lot more variation in the goods the money goes towards. The goods in question are not all near substitutes for each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Because they won't command the resources to buy a printer or the resources to feed it raw materials it requires. They won't have land to live on or food to eat.
If you're a serf, you have nothing except what your masters let you have, and the masters will insist upon controlling 100% of the resources, 100% of the land, or at least, that's what seems to be the trend in this country.
In the seventies, labor got 2x the share of corporate productivity that labor gets now. As more workers bid on the same job (automation ensures this), labor will get even less of the pie.
The trend is that if you don't already command resources, you are screwed. The poor won't have 3D printers, they won't have a place to put a 3D printer, and they won't have raw materials to print 3D stuff with either, and they won't have an education to know what to 3D print even if they had a 3D printer.
--PM
The money comes from automation and productivity increases due to technology.
And who owns the equipment that provided automation and productivity increases? How much did they invest to get those production gains? Why are the gains from that smart investment being given to someone else who didn't make the investment and has zero to do with it?
I challenge your claim that entitlement programs are 2/3 overhead.
Social security overhead seems http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/...
Medicare, 1.4%.
http://pnhp.org/blog/2013/02/1...
SNAP http://www.politifact.com/trut...
Maybe you didn't bother doing any checking of the claim before repeating it?
--PeterM
Sweden couldn't pass a basic income.
I challenge your claim that entitlement programs are 2/3 overhead.
(corrected due to technical problems)
Social security overhead seems lower than 2%.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/...
Medicare, 1.4%.
http://pnhp.org/blog/2013/02/1...
SNAP lower than 1%.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
Maybe you didn't bother doing any checking of the claim before repeating it?
--PeterM
Universal basic income guarantee is not communism. It's simply a more efficient and low-overhead form of government welfare. Government welfare is not communism, either. Communist is public (or, in practice, usually state) ownership of the means of production. Nothing about UBI implies that, and nothing about it makes it impossible to earn millions and billions through your hard work, if you think you're up for it.
UBI specifically had several trials, and none of them were a failure. Look up "Mincome" for one example.
Consider two people on a desert island. One owns the island and gets to decide the disposition of every single resource. The other owns nothing and has to work for everything he gets.
The worker converts the capital into the food for the owner, and the owner refuses to work because he owns everything.
Or, the owner decides to do the work himself and graciously allows the worker to starve to death.
Now consider labor in 1970's. Labor got 2x the share of corporate productivity then that labor gets now in terms of purchasing power. The owners have now decided that labor gets 1/2 the share of corporate productivity, or less purchasing power that they got in 1970's. Soon, owners will decide that labor gets 0% of the purchasing power.
Get it now? Who is more deserving, the worker or the owner?
--PeterM
If you look at the Native American population, you can see the results of this 'experiment'. It disincentivizes work and plummets the community into further poverty. I've lived around reservation land and the monthly government check is a corrosive, corruptive, practice. Natives receive monthly allotments and in many cases even more from tribal casino money, free education (including college if they want it), yet few choose education and the regions with these 'benefits' are some of the poorest in the country. The problem is not one of minimum wage - the problem is that good jobs have been sent overseas and changing economic times. . We have people with degrees working at MickeyD's. Since the 1990's - the average age of a fast food worker has risen from 17 years old to 27 years old. People in their productive years are working for minimum wage because good working jobs are gone. Former high school workers now scramble and complete with college educated to scrub pots and pans. Look at the billions of dollars face book generates. All those advertising dollars used to support writers, editors, ect - and we - consumers of news and investigative journalism - received truth in the process. All those editors (who were very highly paid) are gone, their jobs gone, and the dollars once paid to them now support simple, instant gratification 'likes'. I don't even need to talk about good manufacturing jobs.
Government debt and personal debt aren't really comparable. Governments don't have the nasty tendency to die and their decisions aided by the economists in the banking system have to determine whether or not taking on debt, really injecting more money into the economy, will benefit everyone. Percentage of GDP is one of many factors in determining whether or not taking on more debt will be a good or bad thing.
People keep saying "why don't you send in your money, then?"
What's wrong with wanting to live under the same rules as everyone else? Obviously, this person could make a martyr of himself and pay a greater share than rightfully belongs to him of what needs to be done to maintain a civilized society, but is that fair?
How well do you think a Government by contribution would work? D'you think it could actually provide for a common defence? No?
OK, so what's the big deal with requiring everyone to contribute to that? OK, now what else is worthy of a required contribution? That is what we decide as a society. He's arguing that we need to be taxed more for better roads and healthier, educated kids. If we, as a society, decide that we want to pursue these goals, why is it *fair* that only those who care about those things be made to pay for them, instead of everyone who benefits, either directly or indirectly?
--PM
inflation, which is basically debt spread evenly across the entire economy.
I don't think that "debt" is a good model for understanding inflation. With debt, you get use of the money for a while, but then you have to pay it back later. Inflation works quite differently: The money is taken from you and then diffused among many other people, much like a tax is.
And no, inflation is not spread evenly at all. Inflation mostly impacts people who have saved money.
Inflation is basically a perpetual tax on people who have saved money. It's not legally considered to be a tax, of course -- but its economic effect is very similar. Many economists consider governmental monetary policy to be the most important factor in creating inflation, so (if you believe those economists) inflation is essentially money that's confiscated from us by the government, just like taxes are.
If someone does not have any money saved, then they are relatively less affected by inflation. That's because in the long term their income tends to rise to cover the inflated cost of living. Now, I'm not saying it's good to have no money saved -- but the fact is that inflation is the most damaging to those who keep money saved up for the longest time, because of the devastating power of compounding.
A significant percentage of people have money saved up. All those savings are a tremendously attractive pile of cash to the financial ruling class -- such as the politicians and central bankers -- to tap as needed. In the USA, the Federal Reserve has a policy to try to bleed about 3% of that cash away from savers every year via inflation. Rich people don't miss that 3% much. But people in the lower and middle classes who have money saved up for retirement are much more hurt by that 3% annual loss that the rich are. This is the "regressive flat tax" phenomenon at work: Flat-rate taxes (such as inflation) tend to make the overall tax burden less progressive.
I've always called inflation "the wost possible form of taxation". That's because it's a tax specifically on the one thing that we need people to do the most: to save money for their future. When people save more money, they make themselves (and by extension the entire economy) more robust, more resilient, and more able to persevere through hard times. There are few better investments we could make than to design our incentives to encourage people to save more -- especially people who are poor and middle-class -- and to preserve the value of their savings over the decades. (To be honest, I don't really care much about the savings of rich people, because they'll do fine no matter what happens.) Once someone finally feels that they have sufficient savings, they will usually be more willing to spend money to help the economy grow. And, of course, increased savings will also tend to reduce the overall amount of debt, which helps people to stop wasting so much money on interest payments. All of these many good things are hurt when we punish people by inflicting inflation on them.
What's "good" about inflation? Well, inflation makes it less painful to borrow money, because the loan is repaid in the future with cheaper dollars. But do we really need to encourage more borrowing? Sure, lots of borrowing can give the economy a burst of energy, like shot of cocaine -- but is it really the best policy to continue to prop up the economy by drugging it with artificial demand? I know everyone is focused like a laser now on increasing next quarter's corporate profits, but is that really the best culture to encourage? After quiet and thoughtful reflection, would a reasonable person seriously disagree with the idea of making the economy more robust in the long term by reducing our reliance on debt, increasing personal savings, and ensuring that those savings retain their value over the years? The elimination of inflation will help all those goals.
Nothing brings flies like honey, cats like fish or immigrants like socialism. You can see what it is doing to Sweden and France.
It would work if you were only helping out a minor number of people that are blood related to the ones WORKING.
But when you let in a flood of unrelated non-workers, that just live to breed more non-workers, the system is doomed to failure.
I work hard for MY MONEY, I don't want to just GIVE IT to some douche bag, just for walking into my country.
Rather I don't want MY MONEY - TAKEN from me by force by the Government that is buying votes to keep themselves in power.
Tell Washington and these douches to Stop Spending MY MONEY!.
If this Communist wants to help people out, spend HIS MONEY, not MINE!
everybody works less? Having more free time?
That ain't too Apocalyptic.
There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Somebody has to pay the bill, and it sure isn't those who want to get it for free.
Can we wait for examples, maybe from Europe, before jumping into this ourselves? Let's see a large-ish country like Germany offer basic income to all its residents (plus to all influxing refugees). If things improve, other welfare programs disappear, and everything becomes efficient and hunky-dory, maybe we can try it here (we can start in Vermont and California).
...just like with the minimum wage debate, UBI fails to account for how it affects inflation. It won't raise anyone out of poverty simply because it will change where the poverty line is with a direct correlation to the amount paid out via UBI; changes in UBI would have a lagging effect just like changes in minimum wage do.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Your proposal is interesting, and I had to think about it for a while.
My position comes down to opposing yours, mostly due to it being 'Taxation as social policy'. Which isn't liberty.
That being said, if the effect was more minor, or tied mostly to lower income people, I'd object less. Something like your first $10k of capital gains/interest in a year being tax-free.
Instead, what I'd do is allow long-term investment income to be spread over more years.
By the time you're as rich as Bill Gates, Trump, Perot, and such, you don't have any real choice but investments.
I don't read AC A human right
So these hundreds of economists you mention are going to provide the money for this? Or is this a rather immature appeal to authority?
This is one of the reasons slashdot sucks, idiots who think academics have all the answers.
According to their website, it only goes to adults.
So, what happens with a [poorly educated / disabled / day care is more expensive than wages] single parent with 4+ kids? You think the flat $800/mo. is going to keep food in the mouths of those babes? The mechanical part is simplistic, making it attractive to you... but it's so simplistic that it doesn't scale to provide a minimum standard of living for families.
They either need to (a) have a payout for the children too, (b) have a separate welfare program to deal with the many situations like the one I named, or (c) acknowledge that when they simplify the safety net, they're cutting a hole underneath a significant, vulnerable population.
Get an education, work harder and grow up.
There is no such thing as "free money". There is money that was taken from someone else by politicians with people with guns backing their play that they may give some of to you after taking their cut and paying all those needed to take that money. And you pay for all those middlemen. You pay again for the reduced productivity of those that produce more value than they consume.
Or the government just prints more and more money and gives you that. That is "free" right. Ask Zimbabwe what happens when the money printing press runs free. You get hit with all money being worth less and less. You get hit again with higher prices over time. And again if you happen to have any savings or fixed payments incoming that are now effectively reduced.
I have never seen one Guaranteed Income scheme that bothered to count its full costs, or talk honesty about who footed the bill how both directly and indirectly.
How can it possibly be "good economics" to take money from some effectively by government force to give to others or to further debase the currency or increase the already stupendous national debt? Anyone who things that can be good economics is an idiot.
Aye, good point and one I've often thought of when I see fear mongering articles about worker replacement, especially in agriculture. You see, I farm - that's how we earn our living. I have always farmed just myself and my family. No hired help. We get everything done ourselves. Tools have let us work more efficiently. The tools didn't put us out of work but rather they allowed us to do more. They helped us accomplish what wasn't possible.
First there was the digging stick. This let us poke holes in the ground saving us from wearing out our fingers and hands. Now we were able to plant more efficiently. Believe me this was a huge improvement in Vermont's hard rocky soil!
Then there was the rake. Yes, the simple rake is a wonderful invention that lets us broadcast large amounts of seed quickly and then get it in contact with the dirt so it grows better. (Later I perfected techniques of using storm, frost and mob but that's another story.)
Next we had shovels, hay knives, pitchforks, plows and eventually tractors. We now have two tractors that are able to do the combined pulling work of over 300 horses plus they have articulated arms (backhoe), forks, grabbers, bucket loader (super shovel), seeders and other handy attachments.
This has let us raise far more food yet none of us are out of work. Rather we are more productive. In fact, we were so productive the wife and I had time to fool around a bit and have another child so now our family was able to expand! That's a good thing - my genes say so since that's their main goal. All this tool use has been the opposite of the doom and gloomers predictions.
On top of that we have electric fences, 1" and 2" black water pipe that saves us from lugging buckets of water to the livestock and plants. Heck, we even have buckets so we didn't have to carry everything in our hands for that matter - try carrying 5 gallons of water in your bare hands! Very messy. At least it's messy half the year... (A Vermont Joke)
Then at the end of the last millennium along came this thing called the Internet and Web (invented long before most of you youngsters were born) that let us communicate with other farmers to share ideas. This led to an explosion of farming as more and more people learned how to do it.
All of these simple improvements in technology have been a wonderful boon. We weren't put out of work but rather we became more efficient. Our standard of living increased. We work fewer hours. We are healthier. Everyone's getting to eat more good food. Starvation has been dramatically reduced so that it is more of a political issue than anything else.
Bravo for advancing technology and shorter work weeks!
Walter
A real farmer
Just wait until everyone in the middle east not fighting is in Europe and everyone in South America ends up in the US/Canada. If we aren't going to take the money from the 5%, you'll create a 95% equality rate of all broke as fuck. Even if you do take it from them, they will just raise the price of everything until we are back to square one.
The planet also cannot sustain the whole world being consumers in the American fashion. Everyone can't drink almond milk and eat tree nuts because there just aren't enough.
"Where did the money in your pocket come from?"
I got my money from my customers.
They got their money from their customers.
It rolls around in a big loop.
The government and banks take little bites out of it as it passes by and they spend it, sometimes on me since some of them are also my customers and my customer's customers.
I make something. I take sunshine, dirt, water that fell from the sky, synthesize it into carbon based cellular structures and then pass it through another form of cellular structure that transforms it into high quality proteins and lipids called meat. e.g., I'm a pasture based farmer. I raise pastured pigs, slaughter them, cut them up, package them, deliver them weekly to my customers and get paid for doing this work. Perhaps most important job in our family farm is genetic manipulations - that is I keep track of the breeder animals and cull the lesser animals, about 94.5% of them, to meat. Breed the best of the best and eat the rest. That's how I make my money in my pocket.
If there was a basic income it would have been a heck of a lot easier for me to get to where I am to day. It took me about 40 years. I probably could have done it in 15 to 20 years with BIG. Hopefully BIG would free up many more people to do interesting projects and some of them might solve the big problems we're faced with. The rest who choose not to use their opportunity are just chaff - just like today.
I'm in the 90th percentile, or thereabouts, for income in the US. My taxes would probably go up a bit from this (by more than I would earn from the basic income itself) and/or my government-provided retirement money would decrease (since there wouldn't be anything like the current social security system based on past income). I'm in support of it. I live well below my means, despite living in one of the most expensive cities in the USA.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
What happens when joe buys that six pack, cigs, cellphone and god knows what else instead of food water clothing and shelter? Then what? He starves? Well hell yes he should. He didnt even make his on bed, someone else did and he still shit on it. But you know that wont happen... Cause bleeding hearts and all. If and only if, you could guarantee me that once you cut that check thats it no more and society can stand the stench of thousands and thousands in the gutter, then ok you got a deal.
Against:
I don't want to pay for other people! (I'm just summarizing what I'm reading here, I don't think this. Guess what. You already do)
For:
We could save a TON of money and bureaucracy by wiping out all of the limits, checks, paperwork, etc.
I would quit my job in a heartbeat, (freeing up my spot for someone else) and focus on my own small business, hopefully growing it and enabling me to hire some more people. People don't want to sit on the couch. Maybe YOU do, but most people are creative and WANT to do meaningful work. They DON'T want to slog away for the man. Giant Surprise, I know. Startups would flourish under this system, because they CAN.
Many stay at home parents would actually be PAID for their efforts under a BI. This would be a giant boon to families everywhere, allowing one parent to stay at home and care for their kids. This opens MORE jobs, and makes sure our children are raised by US.
McDonalds and other crappy jobs would have to bump their pay. Who would slave away for a basic income when it's given for free? This would end a lot of really bad work practices outright.
I can think of more, but I'm supposed to be working right now.... :D
Not only will we have zero choice but we must supply incomes that are reasonably robust to the point that the basic income provides extra spending money. We are quite rapidly replacing human labor in every field. At one time we had animal labor in which animals did a lot of the work. Then we had machines plus human labor. The new wave is machine labor minus humans. Entire trades are vanishing at a rapid rate. People do not wish to sense what is going on. Teaching is an endangered trade. The construction industry is under pressure to automate. Professional drivers are about to vanish. With Tesla cars most automotive employment will cease as they simply need very little maintenance and don't require dealerships at all. High quality robots can now unload trucks for businesses. Mcdonald's is in the process of eliminating human employees. Cashiers are vanishing. The pace of change is getting faster and faster. In the end we must put cash in peoples' hands as businesses will have no working customers available to buy their products. To prevent utter chaos we will simply have to make certain that all citizens are potential customers.
This is a reasonably simple concept when only discussing individual adults but there are huge holes. $1000/mo. in Oklahoma and the same amount in San Diego don't look anything alike. If you adjust for cost of living what is to keep everyone from "registering" in San Francisco and taking their money to Nebraska? Most existing programs also scale by number of dependants to cover the increased costs.. If a single female has 5 children; under a BIG does she have to raise all 5 kids on $1000/mo? Do the kids start receiving their BIG at birth so she gets $5k/mo? Both of those are real problemss. Dave
This can't come soon enough. I just quit my job because I didn't like working. I spend most of my time hanging out with friends now. Much more fun. So far the credit card companies haven't figure it out yet...
Anyway, I love this idea. We need to get this all the support we can.
--
Hillary 2016!
The problem with most UBI plans is that they want to give people the equivalent wages of a half-descent full time job. That would never work. If it were done, inflation would adjust upward very quickly, eroding the high amount, and be very disruptive to the economy in the process. It would also be far too expensive for the tax payer to afford. But if the UBI were equivalent to a part-time minimum wage job, then it could work. It's enough to lift people out of poverty who choose to make the best use of it, but not high enough to cause excessive inflation or overly burden the taxpayer. It would actually be a nice boon for consumer business too.
You think we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom--why not just say that? We've done that many times in the history of our country and we can do it again through reforming the tax structure, raising minimum wage, improving benefits (like government sponsored health care), or any number of ways.
Sure, UBI is one of those ways--it just seems like a horrible one to me. Or put more delicately, "great idea, wrong species": Cash payments for doing nothing is spectacular way to encourage people to do nothing and make lots more babies.
Better to raise the minimum wage.
Lets evaluate whether this is even feasible based on numbers. According to Wikipedia US federal spending for 2014 is as follows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
$845B on Social Security
$831B on Healthcare
$596B on Defense Department
$583B on Non-Defense Discretionary
$420B on Other Mandatory
$229B on Interest
Total Spending = 3,504B
Net Income = 3,021B
Now lets evaluate how much this program would cost. Total US population is at 318.9 million 74.2 million of those are children. Although it is a bit short sited to assume that the US government wouldn’t have to reimburse families for their children's expenses that are below the poverty line lets assume this to make our analysis easier. 318.9M – 74.2 M = 244.7M. Proposing we give all citizens $2000 monthly. Lets further break this down:
$2000 x 244.7M = $489,400M or 489.4B
489.4B x 12(months) = 5,872.8B
Let assume that the government will cut all spending to fund this program. That means no more roads no more military (Putin invades). So the total our expenses become is the 5,872.8B that this program costs:
(Net income) 3,021B – 5872.8B (Expenses) = -2851.8B a year. If we half the proposed $2000 so total expenses become 2,936.4B that leaves us with total income of 84.6 billion. Some how we are supposed to pay for the governments expenses (minus the ones replaced by this program like Social Security) with 84.6 billion. Can some one explain how this is even an option?
The entire economy basically works on the fact that if you have a big pile of money you can make more money off it for nothing.
All they want to do is stop giving that money to people who are already rich, and split it evenly amongst the people who actually produce it.
They just might not put it exactly that way since that would scare the "I've got mine, everyone else can burn" crowd. ;-)
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
giving people no where else to go
I've heard Somalia is pretty fucking awesome this time of the year. You can count on their government to leave you alone, on account of the fact that they haven't had a functioning one in decades. If that is still too much government oppression you could always try Afghanistan as well. There are plenty of options if you seek them out.
My fear is a sign of your strength or wisdom
Your fear is mostly a sign of your lack of comprehension. It is not uncommon for uneducated people to fear things they don't understand.
Lack of money is one of those barriers to entry to all markets. Think of UBI as venture capital financing on a ubiquitous scale; the return sought is a more advanced civilization with a higher quality of life for all concerned.
Where did you get the idea that a UBI is communist?
Are you using some strange definition of communism that would not only allow but provide individuals to have money to spend as they choose, on products from whomever they choose, without the state dictating who they can buy from and at what prices?
Even a poorly-regulated UBI would be a vast improvement over the hodge-podge of shoddy cronyistic "welfare" programs (e.g. food stamps) implemented by committees of (maybe) well-intentioned do-gooders that we have now.
I get it.. you know what is appropriate and right and want to dictate to all citizens within the 350 Million in the US on what they should do. There are not many industrialized nations in the world that i really respect so I'm not convinced they make a good model.
Germany.. Killed over 50+ Million people in the last 100 years. Doesn't respect US first amendment right. As a republic, voted Hitler into office. Has had a protected republic/democracy for the last 60 years. Has done nothing in the world stage.
France: Hasn't won a war in 150 years and its capital has been taken twice. Let 2 Million men die in in WWI and WWII. Has a massive racial issue causing major tension and an unemployment rate over 10%. Thankfully done nothing on the world stage in the last 60 years except sink a Green Peace boat.
UK. Country is struggling to keep it's "states" within the union between Wales and Scotland. Lost 2 Million soldiers in the last 2 world wars (out of a population of 60M.) Seems allied with most US policy initiatives, but can't get enough cameras to monitor and track their citizens.
Italy.. No one in there right mind would suggest the Italy is a reasonable model for the United states. Outside of very small or fast cars that break down, over priced fashions and food that almost every country can make as well as them... the only redeeming value might be their olive oil. Their political system seems to be be the integration of the worse aspects of the United State Louisiana, New Jersey, Chicago and Canada's Toronto.
Japan: Like here is a growing / dynamic economy NOT!!.. it has be stagent for the last 15 years. They got full of themselves to the point that "White" US executives are managing Japanese companies. 39% of the people in Japan are over 55 vs. 27% in the US. The society is quite closed with a Japanese making up 98.5% of the population. At least 10 years ago, typical Japanese were quite racists against local born Koreans (0.5%)
The only others in the G8 are Russia and Canada. Russia is the next war unless Putin et al are killed off. Not a single rational person would hold up Russia as any model except for a totally screwed up society.
Canada just doesn't realize that is just the other 13 states within the US. As a single state their total population they would only rank as second largest state .. as 13 states Ontario would make the top 10, Quebec the top 15, the rest would be in the lower half. They don't have the racial diversity nor the world presence of the US. They mostly live close to US border and defense budget is 1/3 of the US (1% of the GNP vs. 3.3% for the US). They have money to waste because of Santa Claus lives just south of the 49/43 parallel.
So what country do you want to model after.. but you have to go the whole way. Outside of the UK and Canada, not ONE of them have had a stable government for more that 70 years... NOT ONE! Millions have died as those G8 countries keep rebuilding themselves for their next melt down.
The US as survived (in spite of a Civil War) for 230 years. Only 2 other country can claim over a 100, UK and Canada. The rest have been massive disasters to their own citizens and the great world community within the last 100 years. Until they demonstrate a sustainable social structure that can last a life time, I think it is premature to use them as exemplars.
So what really is your point
How will I know I'm not poor if even the poor have money?
Play Command HQ online
Could you handle this / look at this similar to a modified Alaska permanent fund. Our ability to work, our output, our throughput, is a natural resource. We tax a percentage of income or vat or whatever to collect some amount. This amount is invested nationally and some portion of each years profits are distributed as a dividend.
This will tie the basic income to product of the nation. You have an incentive to work harder, to get a greater yearly dividend. If a bad investment is made, bad fiscal policy, etc, you have the government to blame.
I'd flesh this out more, but my BlackBerry Classic is being a POS.
Sure sure... anyone that has any issue with any government policy must want to live in Somalia. Great argument.
You're a moron.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It will be interesting to watch the liberal ideal of mass immigration to the US vs the idea of a basic income. A basic income could be made to work but would open the immigration flood gates even more than they are now. The left has not fully come to grips with mass immigration being bad for existing citizens and ruling out a basic income any more than the far right has acknowledged tax cuts raise deficits unless you also cut spending. Both are obvious yet to even a casual observer yet both paradoxes persist. You can have a nice country or you can have mass immigration.
So you'd subsidize a junkie's heroin addiction? Because your concept would do exactly that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Yes, I'm perfectly fine with that. The overhead that the existing system has is so high that if we replace it with UBI, we can spend the remainder to help way more heroine junkies (etc).
The UBI should be enough to survive, but not enough to really live.
So enough for 2000 calories a day, 2 changes of clothes a year, and a bed in a dorm.
So no one starves or freezes to death, but everyone would definitely want to do at least _some_ work, and most will want to do more.
I'm thinking closer to $USD7000 a year.
Wealth is *created*. What is the incentive to create wealth if one can loaf in a hammock all day and receive a guaranteed income? As the Russians used to say about the Soviets "We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us". If your very, very basic livelihood is guaranteed then why would *anyone* bother to get out of bed to work? This is a staggeringly silly idea that is contrary to the fundamental principle of economics that "wealth is **created**".
I'm not subsidizing addictions.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Lets see some numbers. Total personal income in 2014 was 14.7 trillion dollars. population over 18: 210 million If you would give everyone 2000 dollars a month in basic income it would cost around 5 trillion dollars or 33% of the total income earned currently. On top of that you have to pay for military, healthcare, people with disabilities, infrastructure and education and more. US federal spending was in 2014 3.5 trillion dollars. Of that 850 billion was social security and i guess you can remove much of that money from the budget incase of a UBI-system. You can probably also remove the cost of some of the bureaucracy involved in the current system. Lets put it low and say you can spend 500 billion here and we end up with a 3 trillion dollar budget minus UBI. Total expenses would then be 8 trillion dollars, and with a total income of 14.7 trillion, you would need a flat tax of 54,5% of your income. Honestly it doesnt seem that impossible if you only look at the numbers. Infact several european countries have a taxrate nearing that currently.
The suggestion that you should consider moving to Somalia is a solid counter to your previous claim that there is no country you can live in that has a government that is less intrusive than the US. You don't have to want to go there, but you could at least be mature enough to admit that it exists and meets your criteria.
that's not what TFA said. Follow the link and read before you comment.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Your argument is literally an argument stupid people make. It is a stupid argument.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Its Bush's fault
Scarcity is ultimately what gives money value. Traditionally currencies were backed by some scarce material such as precious metals. In the past few hundred years, currency has had a shift from being backed to being a fiat (trust) based system where the value of the currency is determined by a group of international banks.
All this proposed "everyone gets money for free" nonsense will do is devalue the currency to East Germany levels post WW1.
The economy has a lot of feedback which makes it hard to model. But the unemployment problem from automation is not the result of automation itself. Generally, long term, automation may eliminate jobs, but that's because it's cheaper. This means savings for the rest of the economy, so other things become cheaper, to varying degrees. Some number of things pass an affordability threshold, and become more popular, leading to some booming sectors, which need people, and employment rises to a stable level again.
The two main problems are: Short term, the interim change isn't good for those unemployed - a big disruption until replacement employment is available. And the rich and powerful changing the system to benefit themselves over the rest, which is independent of the automation, but they can certainly use it for leverage. It's the system changing for the rich that's the main cause of the income disparity and wage stagnation lately.
Basically, feudalism is inherent in human activity (based on ratio of people who's desire is productive work vs. wealth accumulation, the accumulators spend more time on it), unless some system of governance modifies it to benefit more people (usually government, but could be consumer activism, unions, the press, violent mobs, or just smart rich people who know better).
When technology changes quickly, a lot of short term unemployment disruptions can build up into what seems to be a long term problem. Government can (and should) help with that too, but it's not yet clear that it'll become a long term problem.
People here need to migrate their feelers to the 'new scientist' magazine.
This is a load of crap.
The jobs are being created as fast as they are going away. But the difference is the complexity of those new jobs is increasing. So not 'just anybody' can fill those jobs. When one industry is automated, the manually laborer jobs are gone.
People need to adjust by making a choice of how to earn money. There are 500,000 IT jobs in America unclaimed and this number is rising fast, not shrinking. Health Care is also big and gets bigger each day as the population increases each day. The jobs are there. PLENTY OF THEM. Most people are just too lazy to put the effort in that it takes to learn an IT skill. It is hard. It takes time. It takes brain muscle instead of back muscle.
If you lose your job and get help for a few months, fine. But hand outs are never good for the majority of people. They cause laziness. They cause entitlement. Spoiled brat syndrome. Fat couch potato syndrome. etc... Handouts only rarely work out well. For everyone that used the hand out to start their own business and become a successful entrepreneur there are hundreds that did nothing but collect the money and sit around.
If you lose your job, don't go sit on your ass. Take a moment and look at the world. Look at the different industries and their job markets. Work hard, study hard, and move into a new rising job market. There are so many jobs in IT and health care that the really is no excuse.
You are responsible for you!
It appears you started by whining that there is no place that meets your ideal concept of a government leaving you alone. The AC replied by saying that Somalia and Afghanistan will leave you alone. How is that a "stupid" argument when it directly addresses your complaint?
You are, actually. The junkie will find his fix anyway, and you'll be subsidizing his addiction in various other ways. For example, if he needs to rob someone to get it, then you may well be subsidizing it with your own wallet; or if you're not the victim, you'll be subsidizing it through police, court and prison budgets. Or maybe he has the money, but only for the cheapest, dirty stuff, and then you'll be subsidizing his trip to ER.
Don't prisons provide this service?
It's a tough discussion to have in the US, mostly because of decades of malfeasance of the corrupt pay for play, two party system.
Political parties are no different than unions or any other special interest group. They are really just religions -- the progressive democrats are based on the Human Religion (it's a real thing, with three published manifestos) and the GOP has been strongly influenced by the so-called Moral Majority.
How often have good solutions been derailed because of extreme positions on abortion, the 2nd amendment, or consensual adult behaviors? Clearly, the two party system benefits greatly from the legalism and complexity entrenched in the President's 17 executive cabinets. Both parties lock horns over every good idea, eventually trying to drag in guns, gods, gays, or gametes into every issue and solution.
They chatterbox and posture on CSPAN. An hour of intro and self-congratulatory gibberish is par for the course, as is an extended outro of thanksgiving. Bills like the Patriot Act or ObamaCare are tens of thousands of pages long, a gibberish or legalese and boilerplate, often expanding into a hundred thousand new regulations or more. Rarely does a legislative panel write a bill that is a simple, performance based contract, let alone discuss the issue, solution, spending, and timeframe as an actual project to be completed.
An actual DoD or NASA managed Fraud, Waste, and Abuse investigation of all 17 executive cabinets would probably find massive overlap in mission statements, ineffective plans, lack of well defined milestones, lack of success defined, and low percentage of mission complete. We should expect it after 100+ years of ad hoc expansion, roughly correlating to the progressive democrats and their attempts to create a social system that can compete with communism and socialism.
We really need an issue tracked government. If an issue needs resolution, define it, objectify it, measure the attributes, develop methods to bring the attributes closer to acceptability. Note that progressive democrats appear to promote emotion driven, poor solutions -- they seem to continually promise things that the nation cannot afford, particularly in election seasons. The executive cabinets they've created since ~1912 mostly have waffly mission statements and forever funding. The DoD and NASA get proposals and sign contracts -- and they usually treat failure harshly, unless it's a moonshot effort. Imagine if the rest of the 17 cabinets were managed with contracts, verification, and validation.
While several nations in Europe have policies that encourage women to test early and often, and utilize chemically induced miscarry whenever possible instead of surgical abortion, we still have this ugly political football that derails reform in other areas. Any attempt to regulate abortion technologies results in the same morass of fist-pumping uglies demanding nine month surgical rights or the moral majority demanding outright bans. Overwhelmingly, We the People do not want a ban or grisly late term harvesting of zombie babies for profit.
Look at the 2nd amendment. It's a Bill of Rights guarantee, at the same level as free speech and freedom of religion. Still the progressive democrats demand a path to ban, decade after decade, even though they've been caught several times funding manipulative and biased gun violence studies. Anyone who's familiar with gun control politics knows there is a liar in the room, every time, and it's the progressive democrats. Murder is murder, legal ownership is something else. Overwhelmingly, We the People want the right to self defense restored, preserved, and strengthened.
Grover Norquist has said many times -- no new taxes (and here's the part that always eludes the mainstream media and the zombie progressive democrats) "except in the context of major spending reform".
A basic income is redistribution. Most Libertarians, believe it or not, support redistribution. The problem is efficacy. So often we see criminality and low or negativ
http://worldif.economist.com/a...
Casteism
Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is a giant Pyramid scheme and Zero-sum WITHOUT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
$1.38 trillion CASH.
$18.24 trillion is DEBT.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/...
http://www.moneymeters.org/
Casteism
Get a Job and you'll have an income. What the heck???
Inflation is "indirect" way of taxing people;
Casteism
As an activist working within the GOP I use this idea as part of an overall philosophical and pragmatic solution to the failure of free markets to deal with boundary layer conditions (which I invoke because I am a mathematician who has studied the equations, one of my posters in my office is of the Keynesian mathematical model). When I use it, I am talking with the people who see failures in current policy as being the result of wishful "unicorn" beliefs among the wishful thinkers whose belief in a goal outweighs their understanding of people, markets and freedom (see "Heaven on Earth").
The pragmatic argument I use is that a reasonable minimum salary, properly implemented, can allow us to shut off all the "death by a thousand cuts" that modern victimhood-rewarding strategies use to buy votes using the taxpayers' own money.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Its called Socialism and does not work - these people need to study their history.....Fall of the USSR anyone.....
The whole basic income idea has two precepts, one moral, another financial:
1) Moral: Society has an obligation to look after those who cannot look after themselves.
2) Financial: It would be cheaper to just give everyone a flat rate than to administer multiple programs and their eligibility criteria.
These would seem at odds from a conservative standpoint. On one hand many conservatives have more an eye for an eye, survival of the fittest sort of morality. On the other hand they like to think they are tight fiscally. They also like markets to run things, and smaller government.
That is exactly what basic income is. You scuttle the idea that some people deserve help, while others do not. You understand that there will always be those people that game the system. You settle on the idea that everyone needs a basic amount to just get by. You eliminate multiple massive government programs that try manage to only dole out money to those that meet specific criteria, and you don't try to enforce or audit any of those criteria over time. The government at the same time are not providing services, simply money. Which how people spend it is entirely up to them. Need child care, buy some, need food, buy that also. The market will provide so to speak.
Anyway it is an intriguing idea. There could even be more fiscal and societal spin offs. Like for example, some crime is financial desperation motivated, which if provided with a minimal stipend, could eliminate those crimes, the ensuing police costs, court costs, incarceration costs, etc...
It is an idea that is strangest in its simplicity as well as its applicability to both left and right ideologies, which lends itself however radical to actually getting done,
I own a business, and do not, in fact, believe this.
Availability of customers with capital works pretty much like it always has. Sorry if you're in a rough area, but plenty of businesses are doing just fine.
Knowingly receiving stolen goods is a crime. Under universal basic income, everybody will be a criminal.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Though not as dependent on federal assistance programs as Maine or Louisiana, the Green Mountain State has its fair share of folks not doing as well as you.
The Welfare Problem affects a great number of New Englanders. Consider it likely you are the exception, not the rule.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Everything Karmashock doesn't want to face is stupid, that's just the way of things.
In Kindergarten.
Sure, I said that the faster money is moving, the more economic activity it generate. I then immediately put a disclaimer in that it's possible to 'fake out' the metric. So I counter, again, that you're agreeing with me in a disagreeable fashion.
As for my second statement - again, 'on average'. Exceptions exist, as both you and I have pointed out. I just didn't list examples of said exceptions, in the interests of not writing a book, IE a huge post.
As for stimulating the economy, making money move faster, how it can move 'too fast', I agree. The only problem I have is your claiming that I don't know this stuff when I'm putting exceptions into the very posts you attack, even using pretty much the same argument as my listed exception!
What the government can, and should, do is use estimates of this 'velocity', which is a fairly abstract concept, to help determine the most effective forms of intervention. That's a lot of the problem - they keep using methods that are known not to work well. Turns out, giving poor people money tends to give pretty good results. Better than rich type, at least.
I don't read AC A human right