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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.
Only if you qualify. Otherwise, tough luck.
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.
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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.
Because it doesn't scale. Money has to keep moving or civilization collapses, and when you guys that turn the screws and get ALL the money keep it, it gets sucked out of the economy and stuck in the Cayman Islands or some such place.
This has happened before and was called the Gilded Age and led to the Great Depression. You guys simply don't produce as much economic activity as a thousand poor people each with a thousandth of the money.
Nations that don't figure this out are gonna die, so it's kind of up to them what they do about it.
It replaces government pensions, welfare, food stamps, even the minimum wage, and all of the redundant bureaucratic apparatus (and chances to cheat) that are associated with those programs.
And by simplifying and removing that bureaucracy, you can theoretically save money overall.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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
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.
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.........
If you get a job, you get that money on top of the basic income. A job or no job could be the difference between ramen every night and having real food and a car.
What we have now is not pure Capitalism, what the Soviets had was not pure Communism, and so forth.
Central planning of an economy has been shown to be very inefficient. Rapacious unbridled capitalism has been shown to be rapacious. No pure doctrine has ever survived the test of time. Inevitably a decent economy needs to employ things that also happen to be part of Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism.
How about we have a philosophical/economic debate without immediately siloing ideas and arguments as a way to dismiss them entirely?
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.
And when was the last time you heard of any major tax or department in govt that was fully and successfully defunded or removed entirely?
Hell, it took almost 108 years to remove the Phone Excise Tax ....something as archaic as that took forever to fully remove.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Historically, this is false. Automation just increases worker productivity as last step automation is always more expensive and so non-cost effective as to be permanently pointless and prohibitive. From the period 1936 to 1970, wages rose with productivity in a perfect correlation, as they are expected to in all fair markets, those higher wages turn into consumer demand, which spawns new markets, creates new jobs, keeps the markets growing. If it didn't work that way, we wouldn't have progressed since 50k years ago whatsoever. Unemployment, low wages are caused by market structure, consolidation, currency pegs/manipulation, etc. Not by automation. So long as we have a market structure that creates massive unemployment, we need welfare to deal with it. If we don't, then we are forcibly killing people. Laziness has never been a problem.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Exactly this. Machines are replacing people, which is fine in itself. However, the money generated by those machines goes into the hands of the few, and the people whose jobs are lost are left high and dry. Machines should be helping people, but because of the way they are used, they are helping only a small minority.
replaces government pensions, welfare, food stamps,
To me this is the basic flaw of basic income. By handing out free money, you are still going to have all the social ills those programs are at least mitigating, but now you have fewer people in your society who are working profitably (or at least I will assume so). Further, the flaw with currency has always been that its value is not fixed by any hard force, but rather floats based on a complicated set of functions that surely will not favor the poor. The outcome I see is that you give that currency out, and prices of things will go up, and people are still having a hard time scraping by (and bad decisions with that money will further conflate the issue).
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income. Every person can get X amount of food, show up and be treated for medical concerns, have day care, be provided with A place to live suitable for themselves alone, with heat and enough electricity for a single person. Do not give out money, give out basic and enabling services people in hard times can use. None of this would be posh, but it would provide basic living needs. You could do nothing at all and exist for as long as you live. This would have less inflationary impact, and would allow companies to hire/fire at will (which they arguably need to do), and allow citizens to retrain themselves as technology renders disciplines obsolete, and ultimately provide the safety net I think a civilized country should have, but leaving the best parts of capitalism. There will be considerable incentive incentive to get out of and an impetus to return the individual to productivity, which is actually the primary force for economic health in a country anyway. Some never will... and the success or failure of this program will be determined by how many such people exist.
But if you want to run a socialist experiment, this is how I'd start it, not by handing out a check.
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.
So you want to tax wage earners so you can, in turn, pay everyone a stipend that comes with a debt+interest burden? With today's western governments running deficits, that's essentially what you're suggesting. You're crazy. You can't just print money when people need/want more.
The people who really can afford to have kids without worrying about what happens if they lose their job etc. are the people who aren't having any kids. If everyone took your advice (and somehow, magically, birth control became 100% effective), we would quickly have a population collapse. A huge number of kids these days are being born to poor and lower-income people; they're keeping our numbers up. How that's going to play out long-term, I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound good. What the answer to this is, I don't know. Honestly, I think that if we don't want a societal collapse within 2 generations (because the more productive people in society aren't replacing themselves with kids, and the kids of the unproductive people aren't generally becoming productive to replace the older productive ones), we need to work really hard on life-extension therapies so people can live past 150.
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
Historically being the key word, because historically, 'automation' has meant giving workers tools that let them do the same job more efficiently. Rather than displacing workers, it just increases productivity, because those humans were still needed as operators. The problem is, that's becoming less and less the case. I'm not sure it is the case on a large enough scale, yet, but we can clearly see that someday it will be. We've already gone from an era where all it took to make a passable living was to be an able-bodied adult that was willing to work hard, without any special skills, to one where that increasingly just doesn't cut it for getting along yourself, let alone to support a family.
For instance, consider taxi drivers, regional and long haul truckers - what happens when they get replaced by self-driving robots? It's certainly a hell of a lot more efficient, but do you think that's going to create new jobs? The guy at the dispatch center and the mechanic already have a job. Maybe we get a new computer tech who specializes in fixing the computer side, but that's minuscule compared to the number of human roles eliminated. Worse, the job roles that are being eliminated are relatively low-complexity/low-education. Even if there were enough jobs, how many of those drivers do you think are going to be capable of retraining to do much more advanced analytical work?
We do have a serious problem in that from about the 70s/80s onward, the gains in productivity have become increasingly decoupled from wages. All the benefits are going to the rich, especially the seriously rich. But I disagree that automation - real automation, not just augmenting/aiding human workers - will never lead to increased unemployment.
FTFY. As the cost of labor trends to zero, the cost of goods trends to the cost of raw materials.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This is probably an over-generalization, but I've got to say: only an American could so thoroughly miss the point of a basic / guaranteed income as to think this is even a question. (Yes, I'm an American too, I just spend a lot of time outside of our political echo chambers.) The whole point of this system is that *everybody* gets it.
It replaces a wide swath of other social programs and regulations. Social Security and Unemployment and so forth are the obvious ones, but it goes much further than that. Minimum wage goes away, and people are instead paid what the market will actually support for their work (without the risk that they will be left without enough to get by on). Food stamps (which go to people who are working, even working full-time, under the current system) go away.
Yes, this means Bill Gates gets as much from this program as an 18-year-old who is trying to get her garage band off the ground... but that's OK. Gates doesn't need the money, but it's not worth the overhead to make sure he doesn't get it; easier to just let *everybody* get it. As for the 18-year-old, she can pursue her art without worrying that she'll end up out on the street. It also addresses inequality, contrary to what The Economist claims; even though the absolute difference in their incomes doesn't change, the ratio sure as hell does.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...