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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
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.
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.
>> $10k per child
The current problem with "per child" is that it is sometimes an incentive to have MORE children, especially if the cost to minimally clothe/feed/plug-em-into-TV is less than the offered incentive. For population control and family stability, you'd be better off with something like "$20K per adult, $45K for married couples - period. If you want kids, scale back your lifestyle or get a job/education that can support a higher standard of living."
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.
The idea is to tax everyone 17% (or similar number) of their income, then distribute the taxation equally to everyone. If you make the average amount, you will get your money back. If you make more than the average amount, you will get less than you were taxed. If you make less than the average amount, then you will end up with a big old tax return.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I am married and have five kids (three adopted). I could quit and make almost as much money under that plan. Why work? Never mind that I have a masters degree in engineering.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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!
But you have to work. Your taxes would be what pays all the other people who quit working, plus the current crop of welfare lifers.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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
So I just say - why not reduce everyone's tax burden by 10K or so and call it even instead of trying to redistribute wealth around the country.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
So who's actually going to do the work to pay the taxes?
I could work at Burger King or some other McJob that has a LOT less stress than designing ASICs, and would be strictly limited to 40 hours per week.
You don't want to know what happens to engineers as tape-out time starts to loom...
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
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!
And.... you've just demonstrated why it can't possibly work. Few people will want to work if they've just given enough money to live a decent life without working.
But, hey, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, comrades!
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."
Yes, exactly. 'Basic income' is the last, desperate attempt to impose communism, before we move into a post-industrial economy where communists are irrelevant.
'Seize the means of production, comrades!'
'Uh, I have it in my garage. It's called a 3D printer.'
'You! Seize his means of production, brother!'
'Why? I already have one.'
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.........
I disagree. I don't believe that what you described is the truth at all, caps lock or not.
The effects of poverty and racism are much more complicated than your rant allows for. This is subtle, complex stuff.
Ideally shitty jobs would pay people enough to live, but more often than not they don't. That's a big problem.
Moreover: Most people find fulfillment in their lives by doing things. The idea that if conditions that force people into poverty are alleviated, those people won't want to pursue meaningful goals is absurd. There's always going to be a certain amount of flakes ('nohopers' my grandad calls 'em) and there's nothing that can be done about that, but there are plenty of good people with real work ethics that are forced into poverty in America.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let's say society just consisted of two people on a desert island. You say "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve". Does your friend have a moral obligation to give you food so that you don't starve, even though you refuse to work? I don't think so.
So, why should it be any different when society is larger? At what size of a society does "I shouldn't have to work in order not to starve" turn from unacceptable selfishness into a moral principle?
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.
On the contrary. He's proposing to spend money on housing and food, forever (well, until he dies) and I can't fault the library idea: more and more, every form of human expression is free and attention is the only currency. You won't ever survive through working in game development, music, art etc. etc. because even to get attention is doing very well, much less getting paid.
Give me enough of these bored people living in a small apartment, eating and reading, and I will start a business selling them better food, or I'll write books and see if I can get the people to buy them. Unlike how things are today, they'll have a bit of superfluous capital and could spend money on such things, in small ways.
I will make the things people live a decent life WITH, and if everybody gets given the money to do that, hell, I could probably do without the Basic Income myself. I'm surviving self-employed even now, and this isn't an abstract concept to me: it might save my butt :)
And if I have the Basic Income too, I can take bigger chances. There's stuff I want to do. It amazes me how many people think the world will just grind to a stop if 'everybody' becomes a pure consumer, with disposable income, but outright stops doing all the things they used to do.
Some people just are not entrepreneurs. Basic Income is an entrepreneur's paradise. Suddenly everybody has money to spend, and many of them are not entering the market to compete against you! Think of it as 'world of consumers'. That's capitalism (and with very minimal regulation: no administrative overhead)
Everyone who wants stimulation or more money than is required for basic subsistence?
So, basically, you seem to agree that no-one will want to do any job that they currently do for pay rather than love? Hint: most people who aren't fighter pilots or astronauts don't actually love their jobs.
And there are tons of people who currently willingly work difficult jobs for mediocre pay.
Most of whom will quit those jobs once they're making that 'mediocre pay' for doing nothing.
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.
So they'd have to lower the stress to keep people. Some actual competition for workers would be godsent.
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.
It amazes me how many people think the world will just grind to a stop if 'everybody' becomes a pure consumer, with disposable income, but outright stops doing all the things they used to do.
Who's going to clean the sewers if they can live a decent life doing nothing?
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.
No. Communism is a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Not remotely the same thing.
Exactly the same thing, in the minds of the 'Basic Income' nutters who fantasize about a world of government-run robot factories that make the money that's then handed out as 'basic income'.
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.
Hell we could dispense with absolutist philosophical babble entirely and simply look to our neighbors who seem to strike a good balance. Some employ vastly different methods (i.e. Singapore versus Sweden) so the philosophy would lie in choosing which policies best suit the Western temperament.
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.
Our reproduction rate in the US is already below maintenance level. Your comments are just sick.
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 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."
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
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)
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
Our reproduction rate in the US is already below maintenance level.
Why do you care?
Industrial-era governments wanted more people to work in the factories. Those jobs no longer exist.
What would be the benefit to breeding more people who'll spend their entire lives just living off the productive? Other than to vote for left-wing politicians who promise them MOAR FREE STUFF?
Oh, I think I answered my own question.
It's not the size of society, it's the richness. If you're on a desert island with someone who doesn't want to work, and you have a source of food that provides a comfortable excess, you are absolutely morally obligated to give some food to the other person. That principle is also in the bible, if your the type who believes morality springs from a book.
Communism is working very well for China - it seems to be beating capitalism....
APK you haven't answered the question yet. The issue is, that his app after receiving escalation can do whatever it wants on the system, this is a huge security issue of your installer.
Please stop with this schizophrenia shit, we all know it is you sock puppeting, and it is lame in the extreme.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
People who want to do more than scrape by.
Your assertions that a basic income cannot possibly work are handily demolished by the fact that it has been implemented, on multiple occasions, in multiple places, and it does work.
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!
People who want to do more than scrape by.
So your 'basic income' is just going to allow people to 'scrape by'?
Then what's the point? What will the people do who can't 'scrape by' on that money, and can't get a job?
Oh no no. Nearly everybody wants to be creatives. Look at the music business, game development: those markets are both racing to the bottom and being flooded at exponential rates. These are not ways to earn a living.
Even without basic income, people are stampeding to that stuff out of desperation, making those markets ugly. It'd be nice if gaming, for instance, had fewer mobile game developers working like rabid weasels on how to 'monetize' as much as they possibly can. Everything's getting affected by the desperation everywhere. The jobs aren't there either: not enough of them.
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!
... 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!
Some economists suggest that a "helicopter stimulus" (direct printing of money) by the FR would have been a better option than a QE stimulus (or perhaps a combo). Without either, the inflation rate would be far too low, and is arguably still to low. QE gives the investor class more money, but investment money is not the bottleneck currently; consumption is. Giving the rich yet more money does very little to increase consumption.
Table-ized A.I.
If YOU got a raise, would you blow the money on cocaine and hookers?
Afterall if you had more and stable recurring money you would be free to spend more money on cocaine (or other), leading to more crime and death.
Well that's a bit nuts.
By replacing welfare with neverending free money though, you end the requirement of being a "welfare person" and the poor may be likely to spend more money at the laundry machine or on haircuts, say.
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.
Sign me the fuck up! Being over 50, I'd be happy to get a vasectomy in exchange for free money for the rest of my life.
Sounds nasty but not super hard. How many tens or hundreds of dollars an hour would it take to get you to supplement your basic income by doing that?
Might be a really time-efficient way to get a bunch of money, think about it.
A Basic Income is an inherently capitalist solution.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
Your employer presumably still needs someone to do work. If you quit they will raise the wage they offer until they can hire a new employee. The basic income gives power over employment to the employees instead of the employers. You will be tempted to work once the wage and benefits offered meets your demands.
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
If a basic income of $45k/yr was provided, I would quit my job and take the reduced pay in a heartbeat. Would I be idle with all that extra time? Hell no. With that kind of safetynet I can work on building my own enterprise without having to worry about becoming homeless in the process. The only reason I don't build the plan now is simply lack of time by owing that time to a traditional employer. I have to work for someone else to keep myself afloat, which eats up the time needed to put into other endeavors that would actually pull down triple that income once it got off the ground. I can't drop my hours or quit, because then I lose the income necessary to live. Unfortunately, in this case I'm also stuck with what happens if I'm ever let go... in the current situation I'm looking at a minimum of 6 months, no pay and using all my waking hours trying to pimp my free hours off to another company just so I can make enough money to live on and recoup the amount of savings that I burned through in that time.
Paying for everyone to have a basic income? How about this... drop all the current welfare plans and use the money that went to them to fill this coffer. If there's more money still needed to afford it, tax the goddamn corporations for the rest! Would also help if US did the same thing that some other countries do: If you want to sell a product here, it has to be built here. If you want to sell a service here, it has to have local support. If you're having problems finding people with the skills, take one of the many millions of STEM grads and spend some time and money training them to your need.
This is only a small part of what it would take to build a sustainable plan; and a sustainable plan will require quite a bit more complexity... but for me to work on it requires more time than I want to put into a small /. post.
And one bit of an aside to more directly tear down your point: As someone who has had to live on welfare temporarily during a few years of being on the down and out end of the spectrum: Meeting the all the appointments, gathering all the documentation to show you meet minimum requirements, and dealing with the bureaucracy behind the 40 different assistance programs just to get enough to stay on the right side of the cliffs edge requires more time than keeping a full time job. On top of that, trying to perform a job search to get out of the system...and there's 120 hrs a week blown for 3 years...fighting to get just a smidge of breathing room. Once I managed to get a full time position at RadioShack that paid $22k per year...guess what happened to all that assistance? Yeah... it completely disappeared. I worked my ass off trying to scrounge up enough to keep myself and a disabled wife from being homeless...and came to the knife's edge of losing everything multiple times. Now I'm in a position where we can finally live off the money we make and put a little bit away to prepare for the next shoe to drop. If I wasn't so worried about the next fight for my life that would ensue at that time, I'd have no qualms about a portion of my check going to other families that need it. A guaranteed $45k/year income for just living would take away so much of my worry that I'd be able to comfortably find other ways to put back into society...and if it came to fruition that I started a business that I could rake in $200k just for myself every year...I'd have no problem with 20% of that going right back into the basic income coffer.
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
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
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..
Inevitably a decent economy needs to employ things that also happen to be part of Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism.
You're making a pretty huge leap to assume that a stable civilization even has an "economy"
It works in Britain, France, Norway, and other nations. Tocqueville expressed an opinion. I counter it with real world data.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If we had such a source, the food would cost nothing. But food costs something. The amount of money that food costs reflects exactly the value of the sacrifices other people make to provide it. Food is cheap, though. You can easily get by with less than $100/week for food (average is $150 in the US).
I am in no way morally obligated to feed someone who could feed himself but simply chooses not to.
And if you try to force me to do so legally, there is something very wrong with your sense of morality.
You should be more concerned about where your sense of morality comes from, because you sound like a sociopath.
If you're going to refer to failed political/economic systems, fine. We can call Communism as implemented in the Twentieth Century a failure. Communism had the catchphrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" for its theoretical endgame (including the withering away of the state, universal happiness, unicorns, dogs and cats sleeping together, etc.). In practice, it was a totalitarian state that directly controlled the means of production.
Having a basic income does not require a totalitarian state, and is not in conflict with private ownership of capital. It's not "from each according to his ability", but "from each according to his taxable income". It's not "to each according to his need", but "to each this much". It really doesn't have much to do with Communist theory or practice.
Just because Communism was a failure doesn't mean that anything somebody wrongly characterizes as Communism will fail.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
Few people will want to work if they've just given enough money to live a decent life without working.
Your theoretical worker shortage will result in higher wages, which will drive more workers into the marketplace. See? Your example of why it wouldn't work is actually an example of how it does work.
It actually hasn't been tried much, so you're wrong about the historical lessons, much as you're wrong about homemade clocks.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
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
Right now, developed countries are experiencing negative population growth (sometimes masked by immigration). One reason is that children are expensive. If we provided extra money for parents, we might get closer to replacement level.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You do realize that I could be working a significantly less stressful job. It would probably be good for my health. It would also drop my income considerably, so I continue at this job. The universal income would be set at a "get-by" level, not a luxury level, so people who wanted more than the bare minimum out of life, which is almost everyone I know, would find jobs. (The exceptions, among the people I know, have serious medical problems. YMMV.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Obviously, we'll have to pay sewer cleaners enough to attract people. How do you think we get sewer cleaners now?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Almost everyone pays taxes. A good percentage pay no Federal income taxes, but there are plenty of other taxes to pay.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you've got a master's in engineering and some experience, couldn't you make more than $70K/year? Would it help to be able to take a few chances to wind up with a better, more productive, job? Right now, I'd guess that you aren't in a good position to take chances to advance yourself.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>> Why would a married couple without children get more money than two singles?
To encourage them to get and stay married while rearing kids.
>> With the advantages of living together, they're going to spend quite a bit less...
That's doubtful. Walk around a part of the city where there are a lot of gay (mostly childless) and young (also mostly childless) couples, take a look in the restaurants, boutiques and theaters and then tell me there's less spending.
>> Just as soon as we make condoms and the morning-after pill free, and abortions easy and readily-available nationwide.
I believe we already have that.
http://www.plannedparenthood.o...
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
Except Stallman has never advocated corporate capitalism. Quite the contrary. Free Software is about as far away from communism or "genuine socialism" as you can get.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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 last, desperate attempt
If history is any lesson, they'll never give up.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
That's right! There are over 200 billionaires in China now thanks to communism.
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.
Patience, Grasshoppa.
I will, for one.
This whole "seizing the means of production" thing was supposed to be a recipe for getting to communism, not communism itself. Post-industrial economy of abundance, on the other hand, is communism.
That principle is also in the bible,
Though you can probably find anything you want in the bible I'm going to call for a citation. I remember things like: "If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat." Personally I might feel morally obligated to grant him a quick death but little else.
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.
tape-out time starts to loom...
I've been there :) Still not as bad as first FAA cert flight.
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
You mean the sudden population decrease that is causing all the strain on SS and medicare as the boomers move into needing it. You have noticed how the US had something like 25 contributors for everybody drawing out when the boomers parents voted to implement it and then the boomers started all the zero population growth nonsense and can't figure out why the system is falling apart with a 5:1 ratio.
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)
"Unlike how things are today, they'll have a bit of superfluous capital and could spend money on such things, in small ways." Yup, you nailed it right there. Ain't nobody printing books and making movies and releasing new records because ain't nobody buying them.
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
That's discretionary spending though. Necessities like housing and utilities will double since each person needs their own. Ask any divorced person how their financial life changed after the divorce.
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
"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
That would be the people who want to live above the poverty line, as opposed to merely at it... in other words, almost everybody, once they can finally quit their abusive shithole of a job and go finish school without winding up on the street in the process!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
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
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.
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.
How will I know I'm not poor if even the poor have money?
Play Command HQ online
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.
Agreed that children are a major problem. Either (a) you fund them and support some religiously motivated sect to have maximum babies and bankrupt the system, or (b) you give flat-payments to families and have to digest seeing some maximal-baby-pushers barely feeding and clothing their children in rags, or (c) you need enforced population controls, which nobody wants (but many early 20th century writers assumed was in the offing). Personally, I don't see any way out of this conundrum.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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).
We need to stop having people who are poor single parents with 4 kids...
If you want kids, you should be able to pay for them... we have WAY too many people adding to the world population who shouldn't be...
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.
If everyone is given a basic living income then the relative benefits of another kid are lower.
But I do agree. You'd probably want to ramp up the income over the first few years, and then transfer it to the child between about 16 and 18 years old.
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.
I could work at Burger King or some other McJob that has a LOT less stress than designing ASICs
So when given the choice (and equal pay), you'd rather work at Burger King than design ASICs?
I am married and have five kids (three adopted). I could quit and make almost as much money under that plan. Why work? Never mind that I have a masters degree in engineering.
You'd be earning a lot more if you worked on top of that income. OP was using round figures, but I imagine in reality the amounts wouldn't be so generous as to give families like yours $90K a year.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Everyone who wants stimulation or more money than is required for basic subsistence?
So, basically, you seem to agree that no-one will want to do any job that they currently do for pay rather than love? Hint: most people who aren't fighter pilots or astronauts don't actually love their jobs.
And there are tons of people who currently willingly work difficult jobs for mediocre pay.
Most of whom will quit those jobs once they're making that 'mediocre pay' for doing nothing.
Basic income wouldn't be "mediocre pay" it would be "survival pay".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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!
And.... you've just demonstrated why it can't possibly work. Few people will want to work if they've just given enough money to live a decent life without working.
But, hey, from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, comrades!
Not really, because most people would want more money than this bare minimum. I would also quite happily spend more of my time sitting in a room reading, but I would still want to be able to go out drinking cocktails, eating at nice restaurants, buying tech toys, getting some new clothes, going on holidays in the sun, buying a decent car, and so on, and so I'd need a job, ,aybe part time, but definitely some sort of work.
This is completely ignoring everyone with children or other responsibilities.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
It amazes me how many people think the world will just grind to a stop if 'everybody' becomes a pure consumer, with disposable income, but outright stops doing all the things they used to do.
Who's going to clean the sewers if they can live a decent life doing nothing?
If you pay enough, someone will do it. It's called a free market.
Anyway, your argument is based on the false assumption that the basic income will be high enough to make it pointless working at anything to earn any more money.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You make it sound as though Star Trek style replicators are just around the corner.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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!
Communism is working very well for China - it seems to be beating capitalism....
Not really.. Where China is doing so well is where they've instituted free market reforms... Oh, and let's not forget that China doesn't care about the environment, has cheap labor because they don't provide much pay or benefits, and energy prices are rock bottom because they don't care how the produce it.
China is actually a textbook example of how capitalistic free markets can produce great increases in wealth over the other systems out there, such as the Communism system it is slowly replacing.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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?
Under who's definition?
Capitalism implies taking risks and having personal freedom to do so. But it also implies that we ENCOURAGE such behaviors as personal responsibility, hard work, and investment by allowing big rewards. Where a minimum income is a laudable goal, and I'm not opposed to helping people who cannot help themselves, providing a comfortable living for those who could otherwise support themselves by working is cruel in the long run and stifles economic growth and productivity. People naturally become more lazy and dependent when they are not expected to take responsibility for themselves which is counter to the way capitalism works.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No, but history is a pretty good indication that failure is likely...
It is the height of hubris to think that we somehow in this more unlighted age can somehow manage a previously failed concept better when we do it over what happened historically. Sorry, but we are NOT smarter than the people from history...
But the argument from history is about principles that guide the idea, and not necessarily the details of the program in question. Historically, just giving away a minimum living has not worked out well in principle OR in practice...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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?
Under who's definition?
A Basic Income implies, by its nature, providing individuals with an amount of money which creates a profit opportunity for businesses which provide minimum services.
providing a comfortable living for those who could otherwise support themselves by working
I usually specify, for a single individual, a 224 square foot apartment, and food stapled on beans and rice with 2-3 days per week allowing a small meat portion, as well as a vegetable portion, at 2000kcal per day. The amount required, given market rates including the profit margins, plus risk margins on top (33% additional above the cost of rent, 200% additional above the cost of food), plus an additional risk control to handle economic fluctuations (in 2013, that's 8%), is $546--untaxed--per single individual person per month, 2013 numbers. That allocates $300 for rent--at a base rate of $1/sqft, plus 33% on top just to make sure it's enough--and $100 for food--with a base cost computed at $35 per month to feed one person, mostly dry beans or dry rice, plus a lot more to handle the *severe* fluctuations of over-expenditure. It also covers clothing, utilities, and personal care. I've also considered encouraging capsule apartments, 100 square foot models targeting single individuals. The opportunities of the combined income of a couple are left as an exercise for the reader, but couples are more space-efficient and will have more slack in their combined budget.
Much of your rambling is platitudes based in dogma. It comes into play when people talk about giving a "middle-class income" and trying to hand everyone $12,000/year or $20,000/year or whatever ridiculously high number; so does mass inflation. It doesn't come into play below a certain threshold; and it's tempered quite nicely by the fact that any wage tends to dramatically increase cost of living, raising the social standing. At high numbers like $20,000/year--that's a full $40,000/year for a couple--that effect is sharply diminished; however, at sustainable, livable, survivable levels at the levels I provide, the effect is approximately equal to full-time employment at $3.41/hr take-home pay, and so a wage of, say, $5/hr more than doubles a person's prospective standard of living.
Those numbers and their effective buying power actually increase over time, but they decrease as a percentage of the total buying power: while the standard of living does increase as the wealth of society increases, the impact of having a low-class wage remains enormous, and the impact of a middle-class income dwarfs the benefit. At the same time, no increase in earned income ever decreases the individual's Dividend, and so the modern welfare traps which make it rationally better to *not* have a job when you have welfare benefits--the reduction of total income because benefits are higher, or the diminishing of wage benefits because the net difference between working and not-working is some 50 cents per hour when your unemployment check is $10.75/hr and the job is $11.25/hr--suddenly evaporates. Nobody would ever hesitate to get a job on the basis of not wanting to lose their Dividend, as they do on the basis of not wanting to lose their welfare income.
Capitalism works by encouragement of action by profit motive. A Basic Income works directly on this. The Citizen's Dividend I designed supplies this in a stable, sustainable manner, encouraging greater employment, eliminating all poverty, and commanding less expense than our current welfare system both currently and in the future in total. In total, it will likely not increase employment--the limiting factor for employment isn't workforce willingness, but job availability, which comes down to productivity and wealth--but it will increase wealth at all levels by increasing the rapidity of the wealth cycle while lessening and shortening the periods of economic drag caused by that cycle.
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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
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.
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,
Still, giving away resources to folks who can otherwise support themselves is a bad idea for a government. Once you accept the argument that it's the government's job to make sure everybody is at some minimum level, regardless of their ability to support themselves, there is literally no way to keep what I call "Scope Creep" from happening.... "Well, if you provide this service, we should provide this additional service too because it makes sense..." The problem is, we end up having to provide a long list of services to people who could otherwise support themselves just fine and blowing though more money than the Bureau of Engraving can print.
Right now 60+% of the money spent by the Federal government goes to entitlements which is totally out of line with reality and unsustainable. Adding some other entitlement won't help that for sure, won't really help anybody out of poverty and will likely cause more folks to fall into poverty as welfare becomes more comfortable.
Now, if you want to start a program to produce jobs for people, retrain people with marketable skills, provide employer tax credits for hiring the chronically unemployed and stuff like that, we can talk... But this minimum standard of living talk is a non-starter in my book.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Knowingly receiving stolen goods is a crime. Under universal basic income, everybody will be a criminal.
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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
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
Still, giving away resources to folks who can otherwise support themselves is a bad idea for a government.
Begging the question.
Right now 60+% of the money spent by the Federal government goes to entitlements which is totally out of line with reality and unsustainable.
I know; I've done the government's finances for them. The current welfare system also cost 1.5% of AGI in 1950, and costs 17.2% as of 2015; it gets more expensive over time. My system would have cost 120%-135%, but now is as low as 17%.
Adding some other entitlement won't help that for sure, won't really help anybody out of poverty and will likely cause more folks to fall into poverty as welfare becomes more comfortable.
You have to replace the existing system with the new system. The effect you describe isn't a problem, because having a job is way better than poverty; it's a long discussion.
there is literally no way to keep what I call "Scope Creep" from happening.... "Well, if you provide this service, we should provide this additional service too because it makes sense..." The problem is, we end up having to provide a long list of services to people who could otherwise support themselves just fine and blowing though more money than the Bureau of Engraving can print.
We have that now.
The system I propose eliminates welfare traps--you no longer have to decide if you're going to lose enough money that your extra 50 cents wage isn't worth working that $11/hr job over collecting $10.50/hr in unemployment, or find yourself as a single mother with $58,000/year of support only able to find $32,000/year jobs--and so people are not discouraged from employment. On top of that, you can keep talking about new systems to add.
My system has a complex economic effect of getting stronger over time. I fix a 17% tax on all income; but the total buying power of an economy is the total productive output, and the value of a dollar is the total income divided by that buying power, and the essential wealth of a nation is the total buying power divided by population. Every economic change which allows us to expand population also reduces the per-unit cost of the bottleneck good (this requires a complex discussion of scarcity to explain), so that 17% never spreads thin; wealth *always* increases.
The end result is you can always argue that the system *is* constantly paying everyone more. It not only scales to inflation, but it provides more buying power over time. At the same time, it supplies a limited amount of buying power, to so much of a degree that any fair wage for any job doubles your income: you'll never be middle-class or upper-poor-class without a working income, and the difference in lifestyle and social status is phenomenal. All this without ever actually raising the tax associated, so the expense doesn't grow out of control like modern welfare systems.
Now, there is the slight problem that politicians like to pander, raising welfare benefits and creating new systems to get votes; but that's a problem in our current system--and easier to hide and argue for, to boot, since our system is consistently inadequate--and not really new. My system is easier to examine financially, and provides many good arguments for not fucking touching it.
Now, if you want to start a program to produce jobs for people, retrain people with marketable skills, provide employer tax credits for hiring the chronically unemployed and stuff like that, we can talk.
Jobs don't just come out of nowhere. Jobs come from markets, and must produce, lest they make the nation less wealthy. Each time we find a new, efficient way to do something, we become capable of producing more of that good or service with less invested labor time. That means we can rid ourselves of some employment, and reduce the cost of that good or service. Over time, competition, consu
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