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SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe
jones_supa writes: Saxo Bank, an investment bank based in Denmark, has released a list of its outrageous predictions for 2016. Among these predictions, economist Christopher Dembik claims that Europe will consider the introduction of a universal basic income to ensure that all citizens can meet their basic needs in the face of rising inequality and unemployment. This will come on the back of increased interest in basic income from Spain, Finland, Switzerland, and France.
This would first require ending of right to free movement (otherwise whole Eastern Europe would move to countries with ubs) and then really dealing with immigration to prevent whole Africa from moving to Europe. In other words: no way.
The EU may propose it, and "Europe" may adopt it, but after the mass muslim invaderism that has occured, lots of countries will leave the EU in order to not adopt it.
Automation and adoption of AI is replacing human labor at an accelerating rate, and not just for menial labor. Computers can now do much of work of doctors, lawyers, financial analysts, and a wide array of service occupations. Touch screen vending machines will soon replace counter and kitchen workers in fast food restaurants. This increased productivity (production per person-hour) means higher profits for the companies but that money goes to the owner class, not the general population. So how are people going to survive.
There are two possibilities and only two. A luddite revolution reverses automation so that we return to the economy of the 20th Century.. or... a socialist revolution redistributes the wealth so that the majority of people have a way to have a meaningful life. The either of those revolutions can be peaceful but probably won't be. And this does not mean just Europe. It's the trajectory of the human race. Coming to a continent near you.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
We're already seeing the system buckle and fail. Greece crashed, Germany, France, Sweden, etc are cracking under the migrant issue to say nothing for a turning economy. Germany for example depends very very very heavily on exports... and the export economy is facing a cyclical downturn.
And amongst all this... you want to dramatically expand government expenses and raise taxes?
This like suggesting Europe stick a shotgun in its mouth and pull the trigger with its toe.
Do whatever makes you happy. Just don't ask me to clean the brain matter off the ceiling.
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It's a noble goal that all our citizens would have the means by which to live well regardless of their situation. However, this seems like a path to our financial ruin. The best way to raise the standard of living is to grow the economy, which will result in higher earnings for all. Raising taxes is contrary to this, but will be necessary to pay for universal basic income. Furthermore, it removes the incentive to work hard and to better one's skills if they're guaranteed a comfortable standard of living. That actually leads to decreased economic output and tax revenue while expenses are higher. As a result, deficits rise, debt increases, and default becomes a real possibility. Even if this is implemented by requiring businesses to pay higher wages, that results in both increased unemployment and inflation. At best, it's a zero sum game, but in reality it actually hurts laborers and the economy as a whole. History shows that countries attempting universal basic income have quickly faced economic ruin. Let's not go down that path.
You will pay for them nonetheless. Either you pay them directly, or your pay burglar alarms, private guards, the police, courts and prisons necessary to keep them away from plundering you. As it seems, especially the court and prison system can get quite expensive, much more expensive than just handing out a basic income to everyone. What you save in welfare, you have to spent several times in protection.
Bullets are cheaper than universal income, although people in gun-grabby states might not realize that.
Before we give any serious consideration to their predictions for 2016 we need to look at how their predictions for 2015, and previous, turned out. If they have a history of making outrageous predictions which come to fruition, than we need to pay attention to this prediction. If, on the other hand, they have a history of making outrageous predictions which don't pan out, we should ignore this one. If their history of predictions is something else, we need to take that into account as well.
One of the things that bothers me is when news articles make a big deal out of predictions made by a group without giving you any idea of how well that groups previous predictions turned out.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Basicly gun ownership is a protection system with a 90% false positive rate.
More than 60% of all gun inflicted deaths in the U.S. are gun owners killing themselves
Nice dressing on the suicide statistic. This fucker is being disingenuous.
"His name was James Damore."
Bullets are cheaper than universal income
They are, but they're also cheap enough that someone who was trying to steal some food might decide to use a few preemptively to make sure you don't get a chance to use yours.
Personally, I'd rather live in a place where people have access to the basic necessities of life and aren't gunning each other down over whatever scraps are left after the 1% have hoarded everything else for themselves.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, the fantasy of being able to just redistribute the 'wealth' of the top 100 doubling the standard of living of everybody else is rooted in the mathematical fiction of 'wealth' (as we model it today).
Wealth is an assessed value of their assets and their money. Assets including cars, land, bulidings, stocks, etc. If Steve Balmer one day said 'I want to trade in my 15 billion dollars of microsoft stock for some cash', he wouldn't get 15 billion dollars of cash because the share price would tank. If you took the resources that go into building a 400,000 exotic car, you could not take those same and just build 20 family sedans, though the 'math' says you could.
On the flip side, a lot of homeless folk are technically more 'wealthy' than some pretty comfortable folks. In the early part of his vice presidency, Joe Biden had negative net worth. By the same standards that establish the top 100 as being able to elevate the rest of the world, Joe Biden was a more pitiable man than people in cardboard boxes (he had plenty of assets, but more debt than assets). Incidentally this scenario applies to most young families with a house and a car or two, but they wouldn't trade that in for a cardboard box to get wealthier.
In general don't look too hard at the ostensible numbers of wealth, because in aggregate it's a situation with many hacks to workaround this nonsense. A lot of the high-dollar things are more like 'high scores' than some indicator of meaningful value that is accurate relative to the experience of most. One would hope there's a better way than just increasingly playing make believe with numbers, but we haven't really come up with something that works in the way modern life goes (no, a return to gold standard or something in the same spirit wouldn't help, it would just limit the ability to do the 'workarounds' to fix things when the behavior of the participants in the economy goes nuts).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Guns are a deterrent.
If a criminal trespassing on your property leaves because you're pointing a gun at them, then your gun has successfully done its job.
This is what occurs 99.99% of the time. Shooting someone (or yourself) with a bullet is really the exception, not the rule.
Guns are a deterrent.
If a criminal trespassing on your property leaves because you're pointing a gun at them, then your gun has successfully done its job.
This happen if the trespasser didn't expect to meet someone pointing a gun.
If this behavior is normalized the trespasser will bring a gun of his own. Then it is just a matter of who shoots first.
Most gun uses in the US do not result in deaths. Why do you suggest they do? Even the lowest estimates (usually promulgated by gun-control advocates) are 50% to 100% higher than the firearm death rate, many more suggest they occur 15 times as often as firearm deaths, and some estimates put defensive gun uses at about 150 times the firearm death rate.
*sigh*
Great, except you fail to take into account the number of people who will now just live off the 'basic' income since they no longer have any incentive what so ever to stop being lazy douche bags.
Taking care of all those people, is not cheaper than sending some smaller amount to prison.
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This argument is based on the faulty equation of "willingness to commit a specific, non-violent crime" with "willingness to murder all of the occupants of a house".
I'm sure that there are some burglars who would be ok with committing several counts of cold blooded murder for your TV and jewelry, but don't pretend that most people are ok with that. Most burglars leave a house once they discover that anyone is home.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.