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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
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
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example:
- Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies
- Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work
- Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work
- Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs
- Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy"
- Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
Because it doesn't scale. Money has to keep moving or civilization collapses, and when you guys that turn the screws and get ALL the money keep it, it gets sucked out of the economy and stuck in the Cayman Islands or some such place.
This has happened before and was called the Gilded Age and led to the Great Depression. You guys simply don't produce as much economic activity as a thousand poor people each with a thousandth of the money.
Nations that don't figure this out are gonna die, so it's kind of up to them what they do about it.
A lot of people can't wrap their head around this. I once posed the question, "What would happen if one king owned all the gold?", and I got some pretty bizarre responses. Some people just couldn't wrap their head around the fact that when money leaves the economy, the economy switches to a different form of money and becomes degenerate before that happens. One poster seemed to think that gold would somehow still be required for tax payments, despite the fact that all the gold was already in the treasury and was thus impossible to render as payment. Many refused to see the king as being potentially capital and/or government. They were locked into the idea that he was one or the other, based on their ingrained political philosophy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
>> $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."
I lean fiscally conservative, but anyone who believes it's this simple is...well, I'll be a little tactful...very wrong.
Ask new high school grads how easy it is to "get a job". It's possible, but it can take months, and the job you get won't be great and won't pay much. I've also known very intelligent and capable people who were long term unemployed. They aren't anymore, but a year or two out of work completely discounts any "get a job" nonsense. There aren't always jobs for everyone who wants one to get.
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!
The amount of US wealth owned by the top 1% has fluctuated between 34% and 37% since the early 1960s. There's no runaway train of the richest amassing more and more (relatively) of the wealth.
Why do people think are entitled to other people's money?
We've already seen what numerous entitlement programs have done to the USA. Our labor participation rate is the lowest it's been in my lifetime and I was born in the 70s. This is what happens when you over regulate an economy, over legislate entitlement programs, and don't require people to be productive in order to live.
Are there people that are truly down and out through no fault of their own? Absolutely! Is it really half of the US population? (47% don't pay federal income tax) Hell no. Maybe 5%. Let's scale back all of the unnecessary entitlements and get people being productive and working again.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Don't 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.
How about End This Depression Now! by Nobel Price by Nobel Price winner and macroeconomist Paul Krugman? You've honestly never heard of this idea!?
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."
Here: https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline
It isn't the huge waste people make it out to be, but it is quite the outdated program.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Does this money just magically appear?
Isn't the Fed Reserve already magically creating money for us...and that is just getting us further in debt?
While this sounds all warm and fuzzy...everyone likes "free" money...but WTF does it come from?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you get a job, you get that money on top of the basic income. A job or no job could be the difference between ramen every night and having real food and a car.
What we have now is not pure Capitalism, what the Soviets had was not pure Communism, and so forth.
Central planning of an economy has been shown to be very inefficient. Rapacious unbridled capitalism has been shown to be rapacious. No pure doctrine has ever survived the test of time. Inevitably a decent economy needs to employ things that also happen to be part of Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism.
How about we have a philosophical/economic debate without immediately siloing ideas and arguments as a way to dismiss them entirely?
It doesn't take 7 billion people to feed, clothe, shelter, and even communicate with 7 billion people.
So what do we do? We are TOO efficient for everyone to earn a living. So do we just murder the people who are not "needed?" Do we let them starve? Do we have massive unnecessary works to employ the unemployable? I am all for suggestions, but when society doesn't really need as many workers as it has, you have to either change the idea of work, or kill off some of the workers.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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 sad really, because they miss who the real 'welfare queens' dining on champagne and caviar, with gilded iphones paid for by the Government - here's a hint, they're also referred to as "Beltway Bandits" or "Defense/Government Contracting firms."
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.
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
You mean like, for example, Shockley, Mullis, Lenard, Pauling, or Josephson? The Nobel Prize is often awarded for important contributions in a narrow technical field. A consequence of the Nobel Prize is that its recipients often suffer delusions of grandeur, believing themselves to be experts on everything in their field and beyond. And that's the real Nobel Prize, no the joke that's awarded to economists.
Krugman got his prize for his work on spatial economics, and there mostly not for sharp predictions, but just for mucking around with it and popularizing the area. That doesn't make him an expert central economic planner or prognosticator. In fact, Krugman's economic policy statements border on the crackpot.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.