Slashdot Mirror
The Campaign To Get Every American Free Money, Every Year
merbs writes: Supporters of a basic income have finally organized a proper political movement. Basic Income Action is, according to co-founder Dan O'Sullivan, "the first national organization educating and organizing the public to support a basic income. "He tells me that "Our goal is to educate and organize people to take action to win a basic income here in the U.S." This 2013 Economist article does a good job of summarizing the pro and con viewpoints on the (ahem) basic idea.
Only if you qualify. Otherwise, tough luck.
The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is the taxpayers. Redistribution of wealth may be a good or bad thing depending on your political opinion, but giving out money has to be a cost to someone, somewhere - it is not free.
and
The idea behind a basic guaranteed income is that it replaces all that, and is universal. EVERYBODY, regardless of age, disability, location, job, or dead relatives is guaranteed the basic income. It replaces government pensions, welfare, food stamps, even the minimum wage, and all of the redundant bureaucratic apparatus (and chances to cheat) that are associated with those programs.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example:
- Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies
- Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work
- Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work
- Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs
- Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy"
- Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
Because it doesn't scale. Money has to keep moving or civilization collapses, and when you guys that turn the screws and get ALL the money keep it, it gets sucked out of the economy and stuck in the Cayman Islands or some such place.
This has happened before and was called the Gilded Age and led to the Great Depression. You guys simply don't produce as much economic activity as a thousand poor people each with a thousandth of the money.
Nations that don't figure this out are gonna die, so it's kind of up to them what they do about it.
It replaces government pensions, welfare, food stamps, even the minimum wage, and all of the redundant bureaucratic apparatus (and chances to cheat) that are associated with those programs.
And by simplifying and removing that bureaucracy, you can theoretically save money overall.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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."
Even cheap Chinese laborers are being replaced by machines now, a new era is quickly approaching. I once agreed with your opinion, but in an era where most college graduates have to move back in with their parents - laziness is not the problem.
If you have a criminal history, neck tattoos, didn't work a single day during high school or summer, didn't go to college, got horrible grades or didn't graduate, didn't learn any interview skills, don't have a license because of multiple DUIs, and you're broke as can be because of child support payments all because you're an irresponsible, lazy, idiot then I don't think you "deserve" free money as they put it. The government isn't here to babysit you and give you a participation trophy just for almost trying at life. You screw up your life, there's consequences. People don't even realize how hard I worked to get where I am right now I make about $30,000 a year and live in a studio apartment. In life if you don't try and you make mistakes, you DON'T WIN and you DON'T GET FREE STUFF!
Why do people think are entitled to other people's money?
We've already seen what numerous entitlement programs have done to the USA. Our labor participation rate is the lowest it's been in my lifetime and I was born in the 70s. This is what happens when you over regulate an economy, over legislate entitlement programs, and don't require people to be productive in order to live.
Are there people that are truly down and out through no fault of their own? Absolutely! Is it really half of the US population? (47% don't pay federal income tax) Hell no. Maybe 5%. Let's scale back all of the unnecessary entitlements and get people being productive and working again.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Where did the money in your pocket come from?
It came from presumably your employer. Where did they get it? They made things and consumers of some kind bought the things.
Where did the consumers get the money to spend?
This is where your concept fails. The basic income idea is so simple and obvious. It says 'okay, let's continue to have a relatively unregulated capital-based system, and this is where the money comes from'. It's nothing more than a negative feedback loop on a variable that would otherwise go into a runaway condition and crash the program.
If you don't believe 'capital' is going into a runaway condition and crashing capitalism, then you clearly do not run your own business and rely on customers having money to spend.
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee where the government is the employer of last resort. This is still a form of Keneysian intervention, but a very direct one. Decreasing unemployment raises aggregate demand and brings on recovery from the recession. Inflation doesn't occur until you approach full employment. But at the same time as the recession is over, and since such work offered by the public sector is at or just below minimum wage, most would move back to private sector jobs. "Free money" is not given to those who are able to work and are simply failing to find employment, and is reserved for the severely disabled and so on — unlike the current situation.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Does this money just magically appear?
Isn't the Fed Reserve already magically creating money for us...and that is just getting us further in debt?
While this sounds all warm and fuzzy...everyone likes "free" money...but WTF does it come from?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If you get a job, you get that money on top of the basic income. A job or no job could be the difference between ramen every night and having real food and a car.
What we have now is not pure Capitalism, what the Soviets had was not pure Communism, and so forth.
Central planning of an economy has been shown to be very inefficient. Rapacious unbridled capitalism has been shown to be rapacious. No pure doctrine has ever survived the test of time. Inevitably a decent economy needs to employ things that also happen to be part of Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism.
How about we have a philosophical/economic debate without immediately siloing ideas and arguments as a way to dismiss them entirely?
It doesn't take 7 billion people to feed, clothe, shelter, and even communicate with 7 billion people.
So what do we do? We are TOO efficient for everyone to earn a living. So do we just murder the people who are not "needed?" Do we let them starve? Do we have massive unnecessary works to employ the unemployable? I am all for suggestions, but when society doesn't really need as many workers as it has, you have to either change the idea of work, or kill off some of the workers.
And when was the last time you heard of any major tax or department in govt that was fully and successfully defunded or removed entirely?
Hell, it took almost 108 years to remove the Phone Excise Tax ....something as archaic as that took forever to fully remove.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ah, but then it comes down to the criteria for qualifying for public assistance, and the decisions that one makes and how those decisions affect the individual's life.
A friend of mine peaked in his early twenties. He was doing highly skilled technical work on embedded electronics. They moved the job and he couldn't bicycle or bus-ride to get there anymore. He worked computer repair for a depot place, but they closed. He ended up at a computer big-box store that is now closed. He followed coworkers from that big-box store into retail. He eventually had supervisors that didn't like him and would only give him ten hours a week to try to get him to quit, but he wouldn't quit to go anywhere else. Eventually they were fired and the new supervisors gave him full-time again, but shlepping retail packages to restock store shelves has taken its toll on him and it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone else would hire him.
He made a significant series of missteps along the way, arguably starting with not getting a driver's license. He's been geographically stuck and that has severely limited his options. Unfortunately I fully expect him to work to the grave because he doesn't qualify for much in the way of financial assistance because he has no dependents, nor is he physically bad enough off to qualify as disabled. I can't even say if I feel he deserves extra help or not. He has made his own way, and while it hasn't led him to bounty it has been full of opportunities that he did not exercise.
I believe that there should be safety-nets. I don't believe that there should be a basic living stipend, unless everyone, even those who work, receive it. I think it makes much more sense start using the stick approach to employers, to have tax levels that reflect the burden that not paying workers for full-time employment, and to reduce those taxes the more employees are full-time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
GPD of USA last years was 18.14 Trillion
300 Million times $10,000 is 3 trillion. So we need to capture 16% of the GDP in taxation to pay for this.
$869 Million of social security payments would be replaced by this. As would $949 Million of welfare payments. So the majority of this would be covered by the costs of the programs it would replace, and there are many smaller programs this would replace that I am not going to take the time to chase down and add up.
Has social security caused rampant inflation? How about child tax credits? Have welfare payments caused our currently explosive 1% inflation?
The simple math does not sound too bad.
Historically, this is false. Automation just increases worker productivity as last step automation is always more expensive and so non-cost effective as to be permanently pointless and prohibitive. From the period 1936 to 1970, wages rose with productivity in a perfect correlation, as they are expected to in all fair markets, those higher wages turn into consumer demand, which spawns new markets, creates new jobs, keeps the markets growing. If it didn't work that way, we wouldn't have progressed since 50k years ago whatsoever. Unemployment, low wages are caused by market structure, consolidation, currency pegs/manipulation, etc. Not by automation. So long as we have a market structure that creates massive unemployment, we need welfare to deal with it. If we don't, then we are forcibly killing people. Laziness has never been a problem.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Exactly this. Machines are replacing people, which is fine in itself. However, the money generated by those machines goes into the hands of the few, and the people whose jobs are lost are left high and dry. Machines should be helping people, but because of the way they are used, they are helping only a small minority.
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.
That just highlights even more problems, for example the $869 billion is divided between 59 million Americans, so most of those - the neediest - are going to be taking a substantial hit. Retired workers average at about $1300 a month, dropped under your vision to $800 a month. Disabled workers would lose about a third of their income. Over half of the $949 billion goes on medical care, and I'm willing to wager that's likewise divided up between a relatively small number of people.
As appealing as UI sounds on the face of it, it's a really ignorant idea at this point in our economic development.
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.
replaces government pensions, welfare, food stamps,
To me this is the basic flaw of basic income. By handing out free money, you are still going to have all the social ills those programs are at least mitigating, but now you have fewer people in your society who are working profitably (or at least I will assume so). Further, the flaw with currency has always been that its value is not fixed by any hard force, but rather floats based on a complicated set of functions that surely will not favor the poor. The outcome I see is that you give that currency out, and prices of things will go up, and people are still having a hard time scraping by (and bad decisions with that money will further conflate the issue).
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income. Every person can get X amount of food, show up and be treated for medical concerns, have day care, be provided with A place to live suitable for themselves alone, with heat and enough electricity for a single person. Do not give out money, give out basic and enabling services people in hard times can use. None of this would be posh, but it would provide basic living needs. You could do nothing at all and exist for as long as you live. This would have less inflationary impact, and would allow companies to hire/fire at will (which they arguably need to do), and allow citizens to retrain themselves as technology renders disciplines obsolete, and ultimately provide the safety net I think a civilized country should have, but leaving the best parts of capitalism. There will be considerable incentive incentive to get out of and an impetus to return the individual to productivity, which is actually the primary force for economic health in a country anyway. Some never will... and the success or failure of this program will be determined by how many such people exist.
But if you want to run a socialist experiment, this is how I'd start it, not by handing out a check.
Getting unconditional basic income would be a huge boon for workers. If leaving work becomes a viable option for nearly everybody, then employers will no longer be able to abuse their employees. They'll actually have to offer decent working conditions, or the workers will just walk away. This should end bullshit practices like firing people for not working on holidays, or getting pregnant, or complaining about sexual harassment.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but a UBI would dramatically improve the employment marketplace for employees.
Or maybe some people have kids and then things turn south? If I lost my job and I spent my savings while looking for a new one, I wouldn't be able to just give away my kids because I couldn't afford them anymore.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So you want to tax wage earners so you can, in turn, pay everyone a stipend that comes with a debt+interest burden? With today's western governments running deficits, that's essentially what you're suggesting. You're crazy. You can't just print money when people need/want more.
The people who really can afford to have kids without worrying about what happens if they lose their job etc. are the people who aren't having any kids. If everyone took your advice (and somehow, magically, birth control became 100% effective), we would quickly have a population collapse. A huge number of kids these days are being born to poor and lower-income people; they're keeping our numbers up. How that's going to play out long-term, I'm not sure, but it doesn't sound good. What the answer to this is, I don't know. Honestly, I think that if we don't want a societal collapse within 2 generations (because the more productive people in society aren't replacing themselves with kids, and the kids of the unproductive people aren't generally becoming productive to replace the older productive ones), we need to work really hard on life-extension therapies so people can live past 150.
Disclaimer: I'm a libertarian leaning supporter of a BIG.
1. If you check out their actual site, they're proposing a much more modest $800-1500/month.
2. No, the money comes from eliminating most other forms of welfare. This would fund about 3/4 of the BIG@1k/month
3. The rest could be funded through tax 'adjustments'. For example, put in a flat tax. It need not be progressive or have lots of deductions because 'everybody' gets the BIG, which serves as a huge tax deduction/credit. A flat 30% from $1 earned, for example, has you 'breaking even' at $40k worth of income. Don't give a break for long term capital gains, so people like Trump doesn't get away with only paying 20%(15% earlier), and you have your income back.
4. If they 'print' money instead by using the reserve, we aren't going deeper in debt so much as causing inflation. Which I've almost forgotten about recently...
Personally, I like the BIG because it's mechanical, neutral, fungible, and therefore free(libertarian leaning, remember). Mechanical - it's neutral. You don't have people using it to try to tell you how to live your life, as they do with welfare and taxes today. Fungible - use it for YOUR needs, which may not be the needs the legislature forsaw when they passed a welfare package with restricted spending. Eat cheap but need warm clothing? Too bad! EBT money is only for food, not clothing!
I might be libertarin - but I'm a practical minarchist, not an anarchist. I've seen enough research to believe that a practical safety net is cheaper than our current policies. Multiple research studies have shown that, for example, homeless people are extremely expensive, between shelters, emergency rooms, police, court, and such. To the tune of $250k per homeless person per year. Turns out that a 'shelter first' policy works better than requiring them to detox on the street. Worst case, ~$12k/year per person is a whole lot cheaper than $250k. And this is only one example of many.
While $12k might not seem like much - put 4 'would be homeless' into a house or apartment, and you're looking at a decent amount of purchasing power.
It also helps solve the 'welfare cliff' problems where earning extra money when you're on assistance can actually end up costing you money. Sure, you might be paying 30% of everything you earn in taxes, but you don't have any cases where earning $1 more makes you ineligible for a program, costing you $5k.
When Canada tried a similar program in a town, they found employment was maintained, but graduation rates went up, hospital visits went down, and mothers spent more time with their newborns.
I don't read AC A human right
Historically being the key word, because historically, 'automation' has meant giving workers tools that let them do the same job more efficiently. Rather than displacing workers, it just increases productivity, because those humans were still needed as operators. The problem is, that's becoming less and less the case. I'm not sure it is the case on a large enough scale, yet, but we can clearly see that someday it will be. We've already gone from an era where all it took to make a passable living was to be an able-bodied adult that was willing to work hard, without any special skills, to one where that increasingly just doesn't cut it for getting along yourself, let alone to support a family.
For instance, consider taxi drivers, regional and long haul truckers - what happens when they get replaced by self-driving robots? It's certainly a hell of a lot more efficient, but do you think that's going to create new jobs? The guy at the dispatch center and the mechanic already have a job. Maybe we get a new computer tech who specializes in fixing the computer side, but that's minuscule compared to the number of human roles eliminated. Worse, the job roles that are being eliminated are relatively low-complexity/low-education. Even if there were enough jobs, how many of those drivers do you think are going to be capable of retraining to do much more advanced analytical work?
We do have a serious problem in that from about the 70s/80s onward, the gains in productivity have become increasingly decoupled from wages. All the benefits are going to the rich, especially the seriously rich. But I disagree that automation - real automation, not just augmenting/aiding human workers - will never lead to increased unemployment.
Already being done, on a massive scale. Not working.
You're advocating for basically a feedback loop, a way for a functioning system to flip out and cease to function.
Pretty much the whole concept of Basic Income is to say that some aggregations of capital are superfluous. You don't 'need' a billion dollars as an individual. Nothing about you is 'worth' that kind of power and influence, especially since the people who get that kind of money tend to be psychos.
Therefore, the superfluous capital is nothing but a prize. So here, have a trophy cup saying you beat everybody else, and then the government through taxation seizes your superfluous capital and takes it and uses it. (It's proposing to give it to your customers, so go and sell more stuff to them, keep it moving)
FOSS is about accumulated information and tools ALSO being in circulation. You'll still have your education and your contacts, plus your contacts will also be taxed like you so you'll still be in the same relative position you were before (this is why Donald Trump wants to jack up taxes on the rich: winning is relative, plus he doesn't respect the rich people he's personally seen, and thinks they're losers)
FTFY. As the cost of labor trends to zero, the cost of goods trends to the cost of raw materials.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This is probably an over-generalization, but I've got to say: only an American could so thoroughly miss the point of a basic / guaranteed income as to think this is even a question. (Yes, I'm an American too, I just spend a lot of time outside of our political echo chambers.) The whole point of this system is that *everybody* gets it.
It replaces a wide swath of other social programs and regulations. Social Security and Unemployment and so forth are the obvious ones, but it goes much further than that. Minimum wage goes away, and people are instead paid what the market will actually support for their work (without the risk that they will be left without enough to get by on). Food stamps (which go to people who are working, even working full-time, under the current system) go away.
Yes, this means Bill Gates gets as much from this program as an 18-year-old who is trying to get her garage band off the ground... but that's OK. Gates doesn't need the money, but it's not worth the overhead to make sure he doesn't get it; easier to just let *everybody* get it. As for the 18-year-old, she can pursue her art without worrying that she'll end up out on the street. It also addresses inequality, contrary to what The Economist claims; even though the absolute difference in their incomes doesn't change, the ratio sure as hell does.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
That's the problem. *SOME* wealthy people will use their wealth in a socially beneficial manner (or at least in a way that explores the possibility of social benefit). But most of them won't.
If you don't have extremely rich people, there will be some options that are never explored. Some of those options will be extremely valuable. Most of them, however,...
Governments and corporations have not be very good at exploring high risk/high payoff scenarios. We need those areas explored. (How rapidly?) What alternative structures will accomplish this? The alternatives wouldn't need to be very efficient to be better than the current approach. A change in the laws to encourage thinks like corporations creating entities like Bell Labs was might suffice, but they need to be able to accumulate stashes of cash that cannot be raided except for advanced projects.
That said, I'm in favor of totally replacing the non-retirement portion of Social Security (and part of that) with a basic income...which everyone gets. Somehow it needs to be tied to the actual cost of living, but "somehow" is dangerously vague. Perhaps the "basic income" should equal the current minimum wage, and then remove all minimum wage rules & laws. (At least in my area the minimum wage is considerably below the actual poverty level. I don't know what the law says the poverty level is.) I believe that *eventually* the basic income should be above the actual poverty level, though not by much. And that education should be free at all levels. So if you want to devote your life to polishing your skills for a decade, you should be able to do so. Perhaps internet access should also be freely available at, say, the speed of a 100 kB/s. Perhaps a bit slower.
The idea here is to be prepared for the (already incipient) future where robots increasingly replace jobs. Eventually, of course, all jobs will be replaced, but that's several decades off. In the mean time SOME people will need to be employed, and will need to prepare themselves for employment, with no guarantee that the job will still be available by the time they are ready. Many people will need to prepare for 10 years for a job that will be automated away shortly before they are qualified (or very soon afterwards). This is already happening to people, but it's still rather uncommon. It won't remain uncommon. A sign of this is the number of articles saying "People should consider the concept of a career to be obsolete" and similar things. They emphasize the need to be always ready to retrain, but many careers require an extensive preparation. Doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, etc. And the initial signs of automation are just that fewer new people are currently being hired. This is almost always disguised in the reported statistics, or attributed to a temporary economic slowdown. And currently much of it is accurately attributed to off-shoring. But new articles seem to be indicating that many of those jobs that were off-shored are being automated because even Javanese workers aren't as cheap as robots. (OK, most factory automation doesn't involve real robots. But that's the way it's being reported.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It should be noted that such programs have been trialed in small areas. They're not only generally met with wide support, but they tell an interesting story. The rate of people working does drop, but only in certain categories: generally only 1) teenagers and young adults, who use the time to get a better education when they would otherwise have worked; and 2) new parents, who take more time to spend with their children. In other groups, the rate of work does not change. For those two groups, the lack of work is still a sacrifice - the basic income is well less than what one could earn with a proper job. But it lets people focus on what's important in their lives - for their happiness and their future.
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers