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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.
I can't see why it's an "outrageous prediction".
They are referring to the illustrations and the general colour scheme, I think.
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.
Let the socialism flow through you!
Like which countries?
Only I can think of right now is that Switzerland is still planning it and the Dutch city of Utrecht is experimenting with it.
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Many Americans and not only see that as unfair approach (also applies to systems such as universal healthcare), since people who work are paying for those who don't.
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with this POV.
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
The conditionless basic income is quite different. It's a fixed amount of money everyone gets, without any questions asked. Billionaires are entitled the same way as people too lazy to look for a job. It's not a tax credit, because you also get it if you don't pay any taxes. It doesn't get reduced if you get another source of income.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
I can't see why it's an "outrageous prediction".
Maybe because the title of the publication says:
Saxo Bank presents: Outrageous Predictions for 2016
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.
What we have in Europe is a warranty that your income will not drop below a certain level, because then your income will be subsidized by the state, if and only if you have no other means left. It means that you have to sell your house and your car and all your other assets, before you are entitled to Welfare.
In Finland it's being experimented in a way that it's equal to the minimum amount of social benefits anyone living here is eligible to get. It combines the functions of three separate government offices granting benefits, but it does it without the long waiting times and bureaucracy. You would still pretty much have to sell everything you got before you benefit anything from the basic income model.
Fun trivia, btw: students in Finland are the poorest. Students in Finland are forced to take a loan (2800EUR/year) before they're granted any additional benefits on top of combined monthly 470EUR benefits.
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."
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.
Wrong.
For at least to reasons:
Right now, lots of people move within the eurozone (taking advantage of the freedom to move inside the EU privilege) *because* they expect better income somewhere else. If all get the same default CBI (Conditionless Basic Income), then there is no reason for a spanish guy to move to cold Germany, where he has no social connections just to get a Job. Meanwhile, a German citizen who receives a default european CBI whereever he goes has no reason to stay in rural Germany and do the silly unemployment-support form-filling and burocracy dance every quarter (costing German taxpayers billons for the paperwork alone) if he can't get a job there - he can just more somewhere else where its warmer and he has a better chance of trying his luck.
The fundamental problem with the Eurozone is not that we've got to much of it, the problem is that it is implemented wrong. You know, like managers designing software (*shudder*). We've got a forced currency union without the correct unified fiscal mechanisms and social reforms to match. That's a recipe for failure (Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece ... anyone?). That's why the Greece problem was/is such a mess. Arm-thick extra contracts that no one reads let alone follows and a eurozone straining at the seams. This will need to be fixed ASAP, one way or the other. Or else Eurozone with burst appart.
Fixing this involves a unified social policy and the easyest way doing that is flattening all wealth transfer into a single CBI across the Eurozone. That's exactly what Saxo Bank expects to happen. ... It would be the best solution and solve quite a few problems in one move, including the tough ones like the Greek people hurting badly after nearly 4 decades of socialist miss-management and defacto national bankruptcy. ... But if you ask me right now I think they're being really optimistic. I'm cautiously hopeful that Eurozone does the turn-around and am totally with the Saxobank analysts on this one, but I'm not holding my breath just yet. Politicians can be quite stupid and right now nationalists and far-right are popping up all over the place left, right and center. I hope it's just a fad, but who knows. The dimwits might just take over again.
As for asylum seekers and imigrants:
What does that have to do with CBI??? They don't get that. It would only be for EU citizens. The fugitive crisis has just about zilch to do with the CBI issue.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Which seems to me why it would be eminently doable - it can be implemented as a far more streamlined replacement for benefits, rather than something set in place on top of benefits. Welfare, government pension plans, subsidized housing, and on and on - there's no need for it with a basic income system. If so desired it can even replace minimum wage... with the benefit to companies being offset by new corporate taxes to help hike the basic income further, and removing the distorting market influence of minimum wages. Your basic income *is* your minimum wage.
We've basically as a society already decided that we don't want people just starving in the streets. But this patchwork of programs we've built as a consequence, with their huge overheads, hurdles everyone has to jump through and gaps to fall between** is not the solution. Basic income is. And once you've got it then all of the debates between the left and right get much simpler - the left tries to raise the basic income at the cost of higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, while the right tries to do the opposite.
**In my experience, the gaps in current systems are the most likely to hit the vulnerable. For example, a guy I know has long had trouble working because of some serious psychological issues, huge social anxiety problems among others. To get on benefits he has to be certified by a doctor. But because of his anxiety he's terrified of doctors; even when he can get himself to go he usually says as little as possible and plays everything down to get out of there as soon as possible and not have to answer questions. And doctors visits cost money (even where everyone is insured), which people who have trouble working generally lack. Which gives him even more excuse to give into his fear and not go. It's sad, I've seen him at times go hungry so that he could feed his kids, and at one point was living in a tent until it got crushed in a storm (with him in it).
We don't need this mess. Just give everyone a basic income. Sure, you'll need to have some variations, such as a credit for those with children, maybe something extra for those who get certified for long-term disability, etc. But *something* for everyone. We're not talking about ensuring everyone a life of luxury. We're just talking about enough to:
1) Pay for basic groceries (not going out to eat, nothing fancy)
2) Cover basic transportation (bus fare or operation of the cheapest junker on the market)
3) Keep a roof over one's head - either a single rented room for a single person, or a small shared apartment for two.
4) Pay for medical copays, basic clothing, and the other random expenses of life
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?
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.
In theory, UBI payments are set at a level where you can meet your basic needs of food, housing and shelter without working at all. So employers who reduce pay to account for UBI basically won't get any employees at all, as they will choose to not work.
The other idea is that UBI is retained even if you get a low paying job -- it just becomes a net increase in income, so it serves as something of an incentive to work because even flipping burgers is financially beneficial.
As I've read about, most theorize that the UBI would be reduced as earned income increased to a point where UBI was zero at a certain level of income which would make it harder for employers to cut wages.
If anything, employers wishing to hire traditionally low wage workers would be required to make their work more appealing, and probably more than just financially but in terms of working conditions.as well or they won't have any workers.
My take away is that UBI does a lot to rebalance the power differential between employers and employees so the choice is better than work at poverty wages or actual poverty.
If you had a family like mine, you'd understand.
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.
Economies, on a macro level, are AC coupled. If you apply a DC bias, it will cause current to flow for a short time, but the circuit eventually arrives at a new quiescent point and the DC bias no longer has an effect.
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.
'In some way or another' probably refers to the various general social security systems that are in place. Technically it pretty much should be hard to starve in many European countries. In practice, many 'normal' will probably kill themselves rather than go through the hoops necessary to ensure payout, while exploiters can make a very decent living off abusing the systems.
Personally I'm in favour of universial basic income, provided all other benefits are removed at the same time. You get what you get, and no, that won't let you live in a decent area of a major city, there won't be any extra payout for special needs, etc.
I think the reason it won't end up done in Europe for a long time is simply that the welfare dependents, their organisations and the welfare administration workers will oppose it. Far too many special interest groups who'd stand to lose a lot.
If I use my guns to warn someone off, or somesuch thing, without having to perforate them, wouldn't that be a "true positive" as far as "gun ownership protection" goes? I think it does, but maybe you don't? And if you are just counting bullets fired, surely lots are fired at gun ranges, so I doubt you are...
(I know your first line was about bullets - but the last is about gun ownership, which is slightly changing the subject.)
I have no idea if this sort of (IMO) effective use is common, but I guess neither do you? But wouldn't that possibly reduce the 90%? I guess someone would have to do some kind of survey, and I doubt the responses would necessarily be reliable, involving such a politically sensitive thing.
Personally I'm in favour of universial basic income, provided all other benefits are removed at the same time. You get what you get, and no, that won't let you live in a decent area of a major city, there won't be any extra payout for special needs, etc.
So once you're in that "basic income" system of yours, I guess you're stuck living in some ghetto and would have no way of getting out of it.
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.
You can still better yourself and get a better paying job, just no free cable TV, smartphone, etc. You buy what you can afford on your income rather than living above you means.
You want a better lifestyle?
Do what the rest of do and EARN it.
So what your're saying is... it's statistical dressing. Got it.
They also predicted that the US would lease Florida to China (much as Hong Kong was leased to Britain) for 50 years, to repay debt. ... I don't think all of these predictions were made with the same level of sobriety.
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universal health care also needed as there are a lot of other issues with health care (at least in the USA the EU is much better)
Stop reading Marx... please!
Benefits cliffs penalize work there are cases where people are better off not working then just getting any job. Also most mc jobs don't want people who will just quit as soon as a better job opens up.
So once you're in that "basic income" system of yours, I guess you're stuck living in some ghetto and would have no way of getting out of it.
1. It's European countries you're speaking of. Here around, what you call "some ghetto" are way nicer place than any of you ghettos on your side of the altrantic pond.
2. They idea is: "this buys you minimal living accomodation in the more modern parts of a big cite / or in a really small village lost in the back country, now it's up to you to earn anything more you would need to be able to access anything more that you would want"
Deciding to get a paying job is basically *THE* way of getting out of it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'll believe we should "sacrifice" 100 people for the general good as soon as you sign up to be first.
In reality, 1% of the world's population holds approximately half of the world's net wealth. But how will moving a doctor from a hospital or successful practice into the poorhouse help anyone? Are you going to tell the 60-year-old couple who spent decades paying their mortgage with paychecks from classroom and office jobs that they have to start from zero because a kid is starving in Bangalore, or because a welfare mom in the big city doesn't want to work?
You can still better yourself and get a better paying job, just no free cable TV, smartphone, etc.
I think "smartphone" is a poor example on your list, as it is slowly becoming a critical piece of technology to be able to do anything.
Just like "a computer and a working internet conection" has been in recent times.
It's not just a piece of entertainment (like a TV), but a critical piece of technology to get access to maps, tools of communication (both voice and text messages), reading mail while on the go, getting information, etc.
There are lots of jobs where you basically need a smartphone to be able to work (random example: Uber driver*).
*: Though it's a bad exemple for this discussion, as we're currently speaking of Europe and to work as a driver there, you need a professional driver license, special profressional insurance, etc. these aren't cheap and thus working as an Uber driver isn't an entry job that cou can do when a smartphone and a car are your only pessessions in this world.
You buy what you can afford on your income rather than living above you means.
You want a better lifestyle? Do what the rest of do and EARN it.
The problem is : what happens with people who have always worked to be able to earn the lifestyle. But suddenly aren't able to work for reasons external to their will (e.g.: sickness/accident)
They are willing to work. The have worked up until now. They just suddenly can't anymore.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
All in all, this is one of the most dangerous policies out there, due to how people only seem able to see the upsides of this policy, and not the potential dangers.
Indeed. A UBI is basically a public subsidy for business. It goes straight into profits and hence promotes more upwards wealth transfer. A jobs guarantee is a better and more equitable solution.
That said, in a few generations some sort of UBI (/"Citizens dividend") will be necessary simply because 50-75% of the population will be literally unemployable - and this is not a situation that will happen overnight.
But if we don't get away from current attitudes towards welfare and the unemployed first, a UBI is basically just going to be a return to serfdom (ie: a subsistence income rather than a comfortable one).
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.
If bullets are cheap, that means poor people can get them too.
Didn't think of that, did you?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Many Americans and not only see that as unfair approach (also applies to systems such as universal healthcare), since people who work are paying for those who don't.
Giving free money to the poor is good thing in so many ways. It takes power away from the corporations, since you aren't so dependant from the work you do. It is also believed that low differences in income is the reason behind peaceful society. It also may be that one day you face so many problems that you spiral to the bottom and are in need for help.
If I had to choose between US and European way of doing things, I take European way 99/100 times.
True, but money is just a social contract. "Wealth" doesn't imply resources, it's a standing in social hierarchy; and the benefits the rank provides. For example, does a Hollywood actor produce a tangible benefit to society over say, a construction worker or engineer? Hell no! But they become wealthy because we assign value to them in the form of attention and the money we throw their way to gain access to their attention.
An economist undestands math. Math doesn't lie. But applying meaning to those numbers, that's where everyone (including myself) eventually gets it wrong. People are complicated.
Life is not for the lazy.
*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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Switzerland is not planning it at all. This is just a popular initiative that will maybe be voted by the citizens in the future, and the response is actually granted to be no.
Popular initiative is a normal political process in Switzerland. There can propose surprising changes to the constitution, even if the government don't like it. Most of them are in fact a way to group together the peoples that have a new idea on how the law should be and stay only a this stage. This allow to have political discussion in a higher level for everyone. That said, the statistic show that this is mostly a way to let's some groups face the reality of what the country think. This is still a useful process, because it allow more peoples to understand the reality and then reduce the unrealistic dreams. Some initiatives are also to force the government to produce a contre-initiative; usually the former is retired and citizens only vote of the second. This last process have proved to be efficient to let's the citizens steering the government on a balanced compromise. Some details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Citizens here are commonly requested to vote on a dozen of law changes per year. There can be initiatives from the government, or initiatives from citizens, or referendum from citizens. I hope that more countries will get this kind of political system.
Well ... the way the GP states it, pretty much. Unless you manage to create extra income on top of the universal basic income of course. And nowhere does the GP say that having a universal basic income prevents you from generating extra income. Extra income can be had from a lot of resources:
-You're healthy/motivated enough to generate it yourself by working (the traditional way) and someone else is (still) willing to pay you for it.
-You're healthy/motivated enough to generate it yourself by working (the traditional way) and you use your work resources to improve your neighbourhood and/or your living conditions directly.
-You find an alternative source of income by finding customers and selling them a product which results from you doing something creative in your spare time you don't consider working but other people think is worth paying money for.
-You have extra income from some sort of insurance, for example because you became disabled while working or you've recently lost your job*
-You have extra income because you have (some) capital that generates a certain amount dividend/interest/profit.
and probably many more. Remember, that universal basic income may be a crappy amount to live off of, but you may have up to 40 hours of extra spare time on your hands, enabling you to improve your living situation dramatically if you find ways to utilise it. And for those that really want to be lazy or find it a sport to survive on a very low income; let them. They won't be motivated employees anyway. Are you sure you WANT them working and take the risk of them doing all kinds of unsavoury things because they are totally unmotivated? The only people I do have a pity for, are those that have to live off of a basic income, are at heart motivated/willing to go beyond but can't due to severe disabilities
Of course the options you have to generate extra income also depend on how the nation you live in, is going to tax various things. How will labour be taxed? If it's going to be taxed too much, no one will work or employ anyone. Will capital be taxed heavily or only above a certain amount? What does that mean for companies? Won't the 'traditional' company be taxed into the ground then? Maybe it would become beneficial to create individual capital holding corporations that won't pay capital tax because it has less total capital than the total capital tax-exempted shares of its individuals... those kinds of currently 'alien' constructions...
*) In most welfare situations in Europe, benefits are higher when you become disabled due to working conditions or if you've been recently laid off. However, you pay a premium for the insurances that pay out in those situations, while working, and depending on your wage. Currently paying those premiums is mandatory in many European countries and they are lawfully withheld from your income by your employer (who in turn pays those premiums to the state insurance fund) or you pay for them as the first 'part' of your income taxes.
When universal basic income is implemented, a valid question is of course of these kinds of insurances will stay relevant because one of the 'pro' arguments is that universal basic income will simplify the welfare system a lot and will replace a whole range of welfare constructions for many different situations we currently give people benefits for.
How many robbers will actually break into a house if they expect to meet armed resistance? Starving ones, sure. I'd rather make sure people have the bare necessities too. Once that is covered, I suspect any robbers are looking for minimal resistance.
My gun has less to do with wanting to shoot anyone who tries to break into my house, though. I have a gun so my wife has a chance if someone tries to break in when she is home. The only time it will ever get used is if someone breaks in through a window or breaks down my door which is ALWAYS locked.
Nothing like distorting the facts.
For those who want to know the truth: http://usconservatives.about.com/od/capitalpunishment/a/Putting-Gun-Death-Statistics-In-Perspective.htm
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.
I just witnessed that first hand in Africa. Everyone has electrified fences on their houses and an armed response security system. Well, everyone but the people living in the shanty towns. There are areas on the motorways through town with big electronic signs telling you not to stop for accidents, flats, etc. You just keep driving until you can stop at a gas station or somewhere else away from the shanties.
some kind of minimum wage like laws are needed maybe with UBI but still to stop the docking of pay, unpaid OT, high cost uniforms / tools needed to do the job.
But what percentage of crime would universal income solve? At least in the US most petty crime is done to support a drug habit and I'm not convinced that drug users won't blow their income on the first day and then go out and keep committing crimes until their next government paycheck. I like the idea of the minimum universal income for many reasons, but reducing crime doesn't seem to be one of the real benefits.
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).
When you convince the wealthiest 1% with this then I'll buy into it.
In the meantime I'd rather be part of that 1% and suffer the indignities associated with being super rich.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Bullets are unlikely to be cheaper. Sure the bullet itself is. But then you have to pay for the police investigation and running the courts and the lawyers. And if you shoot the wrong person by accident, the cost can be millions. Suddenly some bags of rice and cheese look appealing.
This is an interesting argument, but I'm not sure that it holds water. Most breakins occur when a structure is unoccupied. Nobody wants to be in a game of who shoots first. There are occasionally home invasion robberies but these are often targeted. Most burglars will leave once they know somebody is home. Rapists may be another story but they are already ready for a violent confrontation.
also a cut in what is full time is needed as well as more and more robots take over jobs we need to start cutting down the full time hours to 32-30 (over the next few years) to down to about 20 (longer term). Right now we have to many others are pulling 60-80 hour weeks. Now lets say about 20-25 years from the now most jobs are just looking over robot systems and being there to fix something / unjam something it will be better to have 2 people covering an 40 hour week vs just 1.
Bullets as such are. But there is no way to make sure they hit the right people.
Gun owners have a mechanism to do this. It's called sights.
I'm not saying the top 1% is not privileged beyond reason. I'm not saying there is no real problem.. I'm saying the situation is not so extreme that they could unilaterally meaningfully elevate the rest of the world's quality of life to the degree the numbers suggest. People who think we could just Robin Hood them and the world's quality of life problems would go away are too optimistically faithful in the numbers.
Economy is as much about psychology as anything else. The value of a 'dollar' is a matter of perception and context (in both time and what sort of good or whatever it is being used on, or the value being different for a dollar being spent versus a dollar hoarded into some account for some indefinite period of time). It's all a confusing mess.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Dudes who are there to take and kill your stuff are generally lazy. They Don't bother with the care and feeding of their guns.
As an example, look at VonDerrit Meyers. Shot and killed by a cop despite the fact that he fired first. Why? Because his gun jammed after the third shot, because he was too lazy to make sure it was in good working order.
You nailed it on the head. Even if the US decides to bother with and go back to the Gilded Age, it takes a lot of troops, training, housing to keep all the "enforcers" happy and usable. Plus, as history has been made aware, a hostile power occupying a city gets hit hard by attrition, which means more money for troops to replace them. Maintaining a standing army against a hostile populace is expensive, even if the troops can be obtained from overseas. Even mercs, if they find that they are not being paid handsomely for a gig, will go elsewhere for greener pastures.
A guaranteed income is -far- cheaper, all things considered, especially these days, where foreign aid can come in to any revolutionary group at any time. Plus, it addresses a major threat, and allows the government to focus on other things.
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.
Then we have to tax the 1% at 100% to afford it all.
The current system is NOT sustainable and neither is a perpetual welfare state.
I think this whole scheme is insane, but it's nevertheless revealing. If a government can eliminate its current welfare expenditures and then provide every poor person with a basic income while reducing overall spending, what does it say about the current system? Doesn't that mean that government is doing a terrible job in administering all of its current welfare programs?
Think about the USA. What would happen if governments eliminated Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, EITC and all of the other welfare programs and simply used the funds to boost poor people's incomes? As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, assume those programs cost ~$1.8T per year. Then, suppose that money is instead transferred directly to every household with income below the median, which is ~60M households. That would mean $30,000 per household! Why do we still have people living in abject poverty with that amount of government expenditure? This certainly doesn't paint a flattering picture of the existing welfare state.
So you're saying, suicide is cheaper than basic income, too?
bickerdyke
If a criminal trespassing on your property leaves because you're pointing a gun at them, then your gun has successfully done its job.
But if a criminal determined to trespass on your property brings a bigger gun and shoots first to avoid your gun, you've lost that gamble bigtime.
bickerdyke
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.
Yes, as long as there are easier targets where TV and jewelery can be stolen without bloodshed. More burglers would take that risk if they had to.
bickerdyke
The US will also see a basic income system for all people soon enough. There simply is no choice. Human employment is about to become rare. Entire trades and industries will be eliminated by technological progress. In order for the system to continue to exist there will simply be no choice other than providing solid paychecks to all people. So many businesses depend upon the public having disposable income, in addition to a get by type of income, the only way to keep the system alive is a decent paycheck for each person and without employment, there is only one source that can do the job. The government will cut the checks and business and the wealthy will provide the funds. Oddly only socialism can work as an operating system in a high technology world.
I'm not saying the top 1% is not privileged beyond reason. I'm not saying there is no real problem.. I'm saying the situation is not so extreme that they could unilaterally meaningfully elevate the rest of the world's quality of life to the degree the numbers suggest. People who think we could just Robin Hood them and the world's quality of life problems would go away are too optimistically faithful in the numbers.
Economy is as much about psychology as anything else. The value of a 'dollar' is a matter of perception and context (in both time and what sort of good or whatever it is being used on, or the value being different for a dollar being spent versus a dollar hoarded into some account for some indefinite period of time). It's all a confusing mess.
Of course it can't be solved 'only' with money but it can't be solved without money either - and these people have so much that they'll never need that should be redistributed to bring society as a whole forward.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Note that I was replying to someone saying that all we need to do is sacrifice the top 100 to double wealth for everyone else. That was about wealth, not income. A slight bit offtopic from the article, but still.
Clearly if all our efforts pay off as we would hope, we need to figure out some way to reasonably deal with the fact that we don't *need* so many people doing so much to subsist, which our current economic strategies don't cope with.
We must also think about how to maximize the fairness of getting the work done that still needs manual labor. If the mindset continues to be mostly '40 hours or more, or nothing', but now with a guaranteed basic income, getting people to do full-time employment at thankless, but still needed jobs could be trickier. It *might* also end up working out better than I would guess, but it's hard to know. I ideally would like to see everyone working fewer hours before I'd want to see a lot of people not needing to work at all (over a sustained period of time).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My concern is that if you redistribute the 'wealth' that they'll never need, it will have zero real impact on the actual problems indicated by them managing to have so much in the first place. Like you say it can't be solved 'only' with money, but then say doing just the money would do something. I think it would border on utterly meaningless. After all, how many of these folks have gone bankrupt and never missed out on a second of living like a rich guy before the transient 'bankruptcy' state went away?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
paying someone for doing nothing more than processing oxygen after being born.
1. If there's nothing more available as far as employment, what are they to do? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps and create their own job?
2. One could look at it as paying them not to riot, burn down your gated community and gnaw the flesh from your blackened, broken bones.
3. flip this around, someone that inherits enough that they don't have to work... exactly what did THEY do to earn not having to do anything more than process oxygen? That's just a matter of lucky birth.
We're just expanding this to everybody since society as a whole is wealthy enough (given proper automation) to afford it.
4. With robots & automation, society can afford to reasonably feed & house everyone comfortably. It's a scientifically proven fact that once we reache a certain level of wealth, the birth rate goes down. It's not too much additional expense to broadcast sports (- the profit motive for bloated owners), Ancient Aliens & American Idol.
There's no need for anyone anywhere to starve these days. We choose to let them starve.
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.
Sure, this is what may happen if they're robbing a bank, or a drug dealer, or an armored truck. That being said, if your house is like everybody else's, the criminal can just target a different house where the occupants are less likely to be armed (or simply try a different crime which is less likely to involve a gun, like identity theft for example).
In the end, many things are a gamble. I actually live in California, where owning a swimming pool is actually much riskier for your own family than owning a gun. And yet, people are still get swimming pools if they can afford them. For many people, the positive benefits of owning a swimming pool actually outweighs the potential worst case scenario of it. It's the same story with guns. And although I don't own a gun, if I had a stalker, or if I lived in a bad area of town, or if I lived in the country side at least 30 minutes away from any kind of civilization, I definitely would consider owning one.
Note that I was replying to someone saying that all we need to do is sacrifice the top 100 to double wealth for everyone else. That was about wealth, not income. A slight bit offtopic from the article, but still.
This is like a tip-off of clueless people: if someone doesn't distinguish the difference between wealth and income in their conversation, then they haven't thought very deeply about the topic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In reality, 1% of the world's population holds approximately half of the world's net wealth.
People who argue with you about that on the internet are probably already in the global 1%
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Thus freeing jobs for those wanting more. I think I'd prefer losing the portion of the population that wants to vegetate through life. Where you worked would actually mean something finally, instead of "this is the place that pays me enough to stay"
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
My concern is that if you redistribute the 'wealth' that they'll never need, it will have zero real impact on the actual problems indicated by them managing to have so much in the first place. Like you say it can't be solved 'only' with money, but then say doing just the money would do something. I think it would border on utterly meaningless. After all, how many of these folks have gone bankrupt and never missed out on a second of living like a rich guy before the transient 'bankruptcy' state went away?
Sure but I'm not saying that poor people need to live like rich people. I'm saying that if we took that wealth and used it to provide social services for the poor (and not just in our own rich countries but everywhere) that it could make a difference.
Of course it's a pipe dream that has about as much chance of coming to fruition as the proverbial snowball.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
True, but letting less thoughtful commentary go doesn't get the commentary ignored, it just let's that commentary echo to sometimes dangerous levels without critical thought.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think you misunderstand when you say "vegetate" through life. I can see a whole culture forming around living in minimalist style. I know I would sign up for it. I can see the surfer, skier, mountain biker, camper, etc... cultures exploding. If I knew that no matter what, I could put food on the table and a roof over my head, and knowing I already have decent nest-egg, I'd likely quit the day after my first check. Or quit before, if that's what it takes to get it started. The question is whether we hit the tipping point where those still working can sustain those not working.
.True, but letting less thoughtful commentary go doesn't get the commentary ignored
I usually just make it a "teaching moment," and stop arguing their main point (which is going to be a silly point if they don't understand the fundamentals) and help them learn the basics of the situation. That usually deflates some of the air from their argument.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From a Dane...
No surprise that this bank likes to predict it.
Saxo Bank is so closely tied to the political party "Liberal Alliance" that they are practically one. They are quite ideological laissez-faire liberalists, and not at all left-wing in the american sense of "liberal".
Some liberalists here in Europe like the idea of universal basic income. Not because it is very liberalistic at all, but because it can replace a bunch of other basic welfare state grants. And since everyone is entitled, everything is much simpler, so it does away with a bunch of "evil" welfare state bureaucracy.
There really aren't too many other benefits. If both paid for via inflation rather than taxation universal healthcare (including dental and vision, eyes and teeth are part of the body) combined with a tax free basic income that would put you at the middle class (so no, not enough to live in a decent area of the largest major cities but enough to live without stress in a less central suburb or anywhere else in the country) and we drop everything else it might amount to at most 1/4% standing inflation while reducing taxes. If we drop all industry subsidies except renewable energy and agriculture (we need to eat, renewable makes the most sense and is dwarf'd by fossil subsidies) we might actually have to increase that income a bit more yet.
Of course this is not charity, there would be special qualifiers except being a natural born citizen and would not be offset by income. I'm not sure what abusing would be, you are a natural born citizen, you are entitled to this income. This would be a fundamental right earned by the first world by developing the technology that is the foundation for all automation and the development of the rest of the world. Others might be doing more of the remaining labor but they have that opportunity and better quality of life because of the technology we built while only a small portion who didn't contribute much in terms of engineering and innovation have been the primary benefactors.
Of course we might need a slight adjustment to citizenship with the children of naturalized citizens also being naturalized citizens and the children of natural born citizens being considered natural born and qualifying for this income.
A basic income shouldn't allow someone to live in a well furnished house and to eat expensive meals every night. A basic income should be just about at subsistence level such that you can afford to eat and have a place to live, but it might require you to get a roommate or two to share the space.
It turns out that people always want more, so I would imagine that a lot of the lazy gadabouts will probably get a part time job for 10 - 20 hours a week to make enough supplemental income to pay for their xbox, get a few drinks at a bar from time to time, or to engage in other activities. The people too lazy to do even that much are more than likely already living on the government's dime, probably at a greater cost than a basic income.
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
Wealth does imply resources. Money is a fungible (and thus convenient and objective) stand-in for control over resources. Social standing is derived from that, not vice versa.
The entire point is that there are rapidly becoming no jobs to get due to the work efforts being performed today. Historically we automated low paying unskilled jobs and so that drove new more advanced jobs to replace them. Now we are automating complex and skilled jobs and there are no new jobs to replace them.
For instance, diagnostic systems are being tested in hospitals that are already more accurate and provide better outcomes than doctors as those systems expand they only become smarter. You might need one doctor supervising an entire hospital full of these systems at first to provide a sanity check, later to provide liability protection. But what will remain are nurses (you can have 10 for the cost of one doctor) and the machines and likely 50 doctors who earned $250k/yr out of the job. The last doctor may not even need to actually go, doctor level hands on being replaced by a couple PAs.
You might have seen a cocktail mixing robot on the internet, there are a few out there. Similarly you can build a system connecting IV's up to a central system and have that system automatically dispensing medication, a screen and loud beep prompting patients for feedback such as pain level or urine volume. That will get rid of most of the nurses as well, allowing maybe one per floor to run the hospital.
Next you expand the diagnostic system, making it available as a secure app with cloud access. Now you don't even go to the doctor, instead the app issues prescriptions for medications (pharmacy) and tests (labs/hospital/critical care clinics) and they just scan a QR code to log it at the facility. If the machine determines a hospital is needed it will provide a QR code and offer to dispatch an ambulance. Eventually you'll also have no only the critical alert bracelet the elderly currently have but a voice interactive system like the amazon echo will be patched in as well. None of this will be much cheaper of course, just more profitable for those offering the services. Which amounts to the elderly with a great deal in retirement accounts and extremely wealthy who live off investment interest. Even if a law is bought to still require a human doctor to sign off it won't help for long, soon enough those humans will be outsourced.
Of course for now we'll still need doctors for research. So between supervising doctors we've mandated for liability reasons (much like the doc who presses the button on the Lasik system and knee replacement robot) and research we'll need what, 10% of the doctors we have now and maybe a 10% increase in current much lower paid nursing staff? And that is achievable within 5 years but won't happen that fast due to inertia and liability risks. There will also be a market for doctors because some people don't trust the machines or have low probability edge cases that need someone who is willing to make a human override and the statistically wrong or risky choice like prescribing off label or prescribing a high dose of narcotic pain medicine to someone with a high tolerance because they had a different accident a couple years ago or a past addiction problem. The benefits are too high though so by and large the elimination of doctors as a source of regular care and diagnostics most definitely will happen.
Sorry, but pointing your gun at someone on your back porch at 3AM is really rather stupid, and a good way to go to jail if you shoot them, even in gun-happy states.
It's simple: if someone shady is outside your house, you stay *inside*. Get your gun, but stay inside; otherwise, you're losing the defensive advantage. Only an idiot would go outside to confront a possible intruder/criminal.
Legal gun ownership requires some personal responsibility and common sense - something you libtards
Apparently it's something you lack too, if you advocate going outside to confront possibly-armed people at 3AM. Do you even have any security or combat training at all? If not, you really have no business owning a gun. There's lots of places that offer training for dealing with home intruders; maybe you should sign up for a course.
(I'll grant an exception if you just happened to already be outside on your back porch at 3AM for some odd reason, but that's unlikely in your scenario.)
Remember, this is about Europe. Some assumptions you made don't hold. For instance, in many parts of Europe living 30 minutes from any kind of civilization is only possible if you don't own a motorized vehicle. We don't have as many vast swathes of uninhabited land as the USA do. And even in bad areas of towns you're unlikely to run into people packing heat. Stuttgart isn't Detroit.
America is full of guns and there are some very good historical reasons why that is the case. Europe generally isn't, for similarly good reasons. We like to keep it that way. Sure, easy access to guns means that I can shoot someone if I decide they are a threat to me. However, it also means that they (inluding burglars, muggers etc.) can shoot me. At least the way things are now, shouting for help and/or running away is a feasible option and if more protection is desired both self defense courses and pepper spray are effective measures. I wouldn't rely on any of that if the person threatening me could put lead into my body from twenty meters away.
(For the record, I have been a witness of gun-related crime and I know perfectly well that with both the attacker and the victim running it's still perfectly possible for the attacker to shoot the victim in the leg. I also know just how much a single bullet can fuck up a person's body. Thank you, not interested.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It's a largely free market economy. The Hollywood movie start isn't becoming wealthy for purely arbitrary reasons, but because a large number of individuals value the services provided by that performer. Assuming that people stopped valuing those services, the actor would cease making as much money, which we tend to see in a lot of actors as they become older or can no longer play the parts that people wanted to see in their entertainment.
This case is more interesting because even prior to the digital age, once you had produced a movie, it was relatively inexpensive to make copies compared to actually making the original. The construction worker can't quite so easily mass produce buildings for wide distribution. A better example would be a stage actor who like our construction worker can't infinitely reproduce their work for a fraction of the cost of creating the original. As such, stage actors tend to make a lot less money than movie stars. Assuming a construction worker could pull a Hollywood and bring what's essentially stage performance to a wider audience at a lower cost, that construction worker would no doubt be more wealthy as a result.
People have decided that movie stars do provide a tangible benefit to society or at least fulfill some need of the human condition. If people didn't value seeing a movie, listening to a piece of music, etc. as much as some other good or service, then they would not purchase that movie, music, etc. Whether you think that makes any sense at all hardly matters. Some people consider what I do for entertainment to be pretty damned pointless as well.
Why all this hate against lazynes?
Lazynes is a virtue. It helps me find simple solutions.
My lazynes is so well cultivated, that sometimes when I see overcomplicated solutions I have kind of a lazy-spider-sense tingling, telling me "there has to be a more simple way"
War may be the mother of all inventions but Lazynes is its father ;)
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
The only solution then is to tax the holy hell out of the rich, since they'll be the only ones with anything...
Greece crashed mostly due to foolish banking practices by country officials and not directly from social programs.
The Great Depression of the 1930's wasn't friendly on "private" workers either. Bubbles whack both capitalists and socialists. Managing a country's finances requires discipline by both the government (including representatives) and voters.
Table-ized A.I.
living in jail / prison is ok & it covers more ER does (mainly USA only)
Indeed! Well put. But, "the right" doesn't see it this way. They see the bottleneck as lack of investment due to "regulations and fear of taxes", which is poppycock pumped into their heads by the wealthy class. Look at all the silly dot-com's (still) being invested in: too much money chasing too few investments. They also waste a lot of investment in real-estate.
There may have been times in history where lack of investment funds was a bottleneck, such as the early 1960's, but that was then. The current bottleneck is lack of consumers, NOT investment money.
The solution(s) appear to be either be printing money and giving it to regular folks ("helicopter theory"), and/or some form of socialism to redistribute the wealth. Inflation is relatively low at the moment such that some printing shouldn't risk run-away inflation. The best economies run about a 2.3% annual inflation rate. We've been around 1.8% for a while. More inflation also dissuades the wealthy from sitting on cash, pushing them to invest it.
Table-ized A.I.
"Then we have to tax the 1% at 100% to afford it all."
.001% of the population sit on almost half the wealth in the wealthiest nation in the world. If that wealth doesn't move around, not only the national but the global economy breaks down and freezes and inflation is the only reason that happens. Insurance for instance, is a losing game, it's a gamble most are forced to take to protect against the catastrophic but the odds favor the insurance company which is what makes it profitable. The ultra wealthy can self-insure because nothing is catastrophic and the money they set aside for that purpose, perhaps in insurance companies. The same principle applies elsewhere. The ultra wealthy can afford to purchase a lifetime supply of toilet paper for ten generations at an extreme bulk discount price getting the best quality product at a price lower than the rest of us pay for a generic. Even if they had to pay as much for goods and services as the rest of us a wealthy person will only spend as much as 1-6 middle class persons (depending on how high a quality of life they want) while having 100-1000000 times the wealth. Meaning that if the wealthy simply lost what they spent without investing their wealth it would take centuries if not millennia to spend it all made even more difficult by the fact they spend less while getting more than anyone else. Aside from simple greed there isn't much motivation for the wealthy to do anything with their wealth but enjoy it, after all they, and every future generation of their family they will ever meet will enjoy luxurious life without lifting a finger provided they aren't foolishly spending and they can afford the best and most obviously qualified to make those decisions so they can be fools without risk of foolish money management.
First of all that math doesn't even begin to work out. Secondly, taxation is not the right way to implement this. Inflation is. That is scary, we've all been taught to fear out of control inflation. We think of inflation as the devil. But inflation is actually an essential pillar in the global economic system.
Now add inflation. Even a small 1% inflation rate means their wealth is suddenly potentially drained away within a single long lifetime just a few generations. That means those qualified money management people must invest that wealth for them. Now rather than sitting idle in their vaults some portion of that wealth must go out into the world. That means risk. You can be sure that risk is minimized as much as possible, investments are hedged, diversified both across industry and type and across nations so that the average beats inflation. In fact, part of that minimizing is to make sure the result ends up being higher than that 1% because you must protect against times when the global economy itself is doing poorly. For the ultra wealthy, there is almost no chance of losing their wealth or even spending it away so long as they hire competent people to manage their wealth. Although there are enough newly wealthy being foolish to mask it, the most wealthy families stay that way and always will. In fact, this is so true that we don't even try to beat them, instead we align with them and those families own our global banking system and effectively control the generation of new wealth for every nation in the world including the United States.
Relative to the amount of wealth we are talking about, a basic income in the United States, say $600/week or full time at $15/hr combined with a complete universal healthcare (including dental and vision) for natural born citizens of the United States isn't actually that substantial. Almost the entire national debt is owned by these people, not only do they pay very little in taxes because all their wealth is "at risk" and very little is actually consumed living their lives but a huge chunk of the taxes we pay goes toward paying them back... including the taxes they themselves pay. Paying that basic income to every natural born citizen without qualification (so long as from here on c
Basic income is freedom.
In a society where many of your possibilities are influenced by financial aspects it guarantees a basic freedom of choices for everybody.
This could be a really great outcome of the increased automation.
Or in other words: If you hate a basic income you hate our freedom ;)
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
Medicare, Medicaid is not part of UBI needs to be on it's own.
Also in the EU the health plans are some kind of Medicare for all system. That is needed as there should not be profit in it and Medicare does cover stuff that others push lot's of paper work BS to get out of paying.
As to banking practices, false. The issue was spending more money then their economy could justify in credit or provide for in revenue.
Overspending.
And what did they over spend on?
Social issues.
So no. That's a strike against your credibility.
As to bubbles being bad for capitalists and socialists. That's like saying that famines are bad for parasites too. The socialists only suffer because the systems they feed upon have issues occasionally.
As to the great depression, that was caused by the Federal reserve screwing with interest rates followed by FDR fucking with labor markets, commodities, and effectively stopping the recovery process. For an economy to recover after a collapse you need the bad actors to suffer and the good actors to be rewarded. This is what causes a policy shift in the economy that actually leads to a recovery because the people playing it safe eat the people that were playing it risky.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
A firearm does not have to inflict a death to successfully protect the user and a majority of self defense firearm incidents result in either no death or the firearm not even being fired.
As for the difference between acquaintances or family members and strangers, most interactions are with the former rather than the later and the term acquaintance is used very very broadly in crime measurement.
They also predicted that the US would lease Florida to China (much as Hong Kong was leased to Britain) for 50 years, to repay debt. ... I don't think all of these predictions were made with the same level of sobriety.
Can I draw your attention to the illustrations again - do the suggest to you the presence of ANY sobriety?
I can only imagine you are either unable to do simple, basic sums, or unable to do web searches. How else could you get into this madness?
Take the number of people in your country (17 million, for me). Multiply by the amount of money they should receive per year (opinions vary, but something like 18,000 euro or so). That gives you about 300 billion euro.
Now for the web search. The total of all government expenditures for my country is 270 billion or so. That includes roads, education, healthcare, the army - you know, stuff that isn't social benefits.Social benefits only adds up to about 80 billion.
Notice how 80 billion is much, much less than 300 billion? Notice also how 270 billion is in fact less than 300 billion?
So if you notice these things, how could you possibly spout drivel like "The trick is that taxation is modified so that people like me - with a decent salary - will end up the same as now after taxation."? Have you never actually looked at these numbers? Do you believe the entire economy will grow by another 220 billion dollars if you pay people to stop working? Please explain how that will work...
Or, alternatively... Let's say we just spend that 80 billion on basic income. That comes down to about 400 euro per person per month. Good luck living on that, in a country where even a 6m2 student room costs more than that. Also, be prepared for violent revolution as all those people who were on benefits previously suddenly get cut to unsustainable levels.
So tell me. HOW WOULD THIS WORK?
In a real sense this is true. In the sense of 'the numbers say the top 100....', they are using those numbers for the argument. Many people think if you move the gold or paper, the problem would be helped, when the control and power portion of the equation is left a big '???'
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There are socialistic economies that did not have banking problems, and capitalistic economies that did. Gov't and markets are tools, and both can be misused and put an eye out of you don't use the tools right.
As far as the Great Depression, the worse portion of it happened BEFORE FDR (actually, just as he was getting in). Your history is off. And bubbles have been happening long before the Federal Reserve or even the USA ever existed.
Table-ized A.I.
Socialist economies don't exist in the western world. There is no such thing as a socialist economy in the western world. Look at the companies in the so called socialist countries and tell me if they have owners, investors, stocks, bonds, dividends... etc.... See? The economies you think you can point to as successes are just capitalist systems that you're parasiting off of... nothing more.
A socialist economy would be one where the socialism were producing the wealth of that society. No such society exists in the West. Outside of the west... you could point to North Korea if you wanted to claim them... I suspect you don't want to do that though.
The economy of every western country is CAPITALISTIC.
Having welfare does not mean your economy is socialist unless the country in question doesn't operate under capitalistic principles as regards its production.
There is no western country that operates other than capitalist as regards its ECONOMY.
As to banking crisis... In every case I can point to government mismanagement so you'd have a very hard time citing the collapses as being an argument for more government control.
In 2008 for example it was the Freddie Mac/Fanny Mae situation. In the EU, the EU drove the Greek collapse with cheap debt. The examples are long.
Actually the great depression did not happen before FDR. The CRASH happened before FDR. The great depression was mostly during his presidency.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/relea...
*yawn*
Too easy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The Doctor nor the 60 year old couple are in the 1%.
And that welfare mom, how to you know she doesn't want to work?
There are some that don't want to work.
There are many many more who do want to work, but cant because of infrastructural issues ( too many to list, but could include studied wrong things in school, has lisp, malformed limbs, doesnt interview well ( shy, stutters, etc ), work wont allow time for dropping off/picking up kids at school, no car, and more ).
emt 377 emt 4
The global 1% for wealth is a net worth of about $77,000. At least in the US, doctors easily cross that threshold, as do most near-retirees. It's just that near-retirees usually have that in illiquid assets like their homes or in well-regarded assets like retirement funds (even if those retirement funds are usually not at a level that retirement advisors say is wise).
Welfare moms make excuses to turn why they don't want to work into why they can't work. Most people find a way. One woman I went to college with is now a single mom, raising an autistic kid, but she still works rather than depend on welfare.
This is provably wrong. You are far more likely to suffer from a gun accident, than get to use said gun against a trespasser.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Because 80-90% of the amount is collected back in taxes, so the net expense for governament is 10-20%, or 30-60€ billion. Sounds like the amount you already use on welfare. The other 80-90% of the basic income goes to people with decent jobs and their tax rates are adjusted so that they only get about the same amount of money after taxes as they now get.
Currently an unemployed person in Finland can get about 500€/month in benefits and also aid for housing, something like 300€. If you add these together and we get a 500-800€ / month range that is the range proposed for the basic income here. The point of the experiment is to test some different amounts. Obviously, depending on the amount there may or may not be other benefits available and taxation also changes.
Like I said originally: the idea is not to give people more money, but to get rid of the inefficient and demoralising welfare bureaucracy that requires a lot of paperwork and does not allow the unemployed to take short term jobs.
got a citation for that.. Yea not a made up one from the NRA either?
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... ... if you're willing to trust that den of right-wing fanatics known as Wikipedia.
You didn't even read it, did you.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
So the income tax rate goes to 80-90%, meaning we all hand in pretty much all of our earnings to the government, and we then get back "basic income" which is the same for everybody. Welcome in the great communist utopia, where an evil capitalist is allowed to keep 10-20% of his earnings - where you can work 60 hours per week, and receive almost nothing for your efforts. Where your standard of living is always the same, whether you work your ass off or just sit around smoking weed all day. It will be a wonder to behold this society, and its steep decline to levels of poverty more commonly associated with the poorest shitholes of the world.
And would this fantastic scheme of yours actually help those on benefits? Let's say you get 1500/month from the government to live on as basic income (this would be for housing, 900-1200 or so, health insurance (say 120), and everything else you need to live). But you have to pay back 80-90% in taxes, so that's 1200-1350. That leaves you only 150-300 euro/month to pay for housing, 900-1200 or so, health insurance (say 120), and everything else you need to live. What's your plan for that: free cardboard boxes for everyone, and healthcare only for the rich?
Please explain how your great communist utopia would work. And while you're at it, please have a look at how many people died in the other attempts at great communist utopias, and where those countries are today...
You're lousy at arguing, aren't you?
Then you aren't sacrificing 100 people. I think it was clear that for the OP 1% meant something different, quite a bit more than 77k in assets.
( note, I'm not in favor of such a thing, i'm just pointing something out )
"Welfare moms". Are they coming off an assembly line, all made exactly the same?
Or, what is a welfare mom to you? Is it a definition? If so, then of course that is what welfare moms are.
But then, how many people actually fit that definition?
It is easy to look at someone and decide that "if they only ... all would be peachy." Not as easy to actually do, in their place, with their resources.
I find that at work all over. Work too. Everything is easy when the job is someone else's.
emt 377 emt 4
The OP was incoherent for multiple reasons: Grossly confusing the number of people who would have to be sacrificed in order to double everyone else's wealth, claiming that sacrificing them would actually double everyone's wealth, thinking that forcibly redistributing that would yield anywhere near the paper value of the underlying assets, thinking it would do much to help the people it was given to, and so on. If you say that "1%" in the context of global wealth distribution meant something very different to the OP than "$77,000 of net worth", you may be right, but that is yet another point where OP is wrong in an easy-to-discover way.
Your silly obsession over what qualifies as a "welfare mom" misses the point. Most people would not accept confiscating a doctor's house and medical practice to pay more money to people who live off welfare, or confiscating the home and retirement assets from a couple of 60-year-old middle-class people to build a new mud hut for a subsistence farmer in Elbonia (which is about how far the money would go after all the bureaucrats along the way take their cuts), but that is what the OP was proposing to "double the world's wealth". Fussing about "welfare moms" and whose sob story justifies sucking at the public teat is a refusal to address the legitimate objections to that kind of redistribution.
I'm sorry, but you are just misunderstanding (on purpose?) and I'm not going to write another explanation to you. But no, income tax rate is not 80-90%, but 80-90% of the money given as basic income is collected back as taxes. There is a difference.
If I could go live in the woods with a basic income, I'd drop this smartphone in a bucket on my way out the door. I get the feeling it will be much more Hunger Games and Judge Dredd style though, where there are massive urban "projects" because that's a continuation of what we already have.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
I meant socialist-leaning. Most economies are a mix of capitalism and socialism, with the mix varying. I thought this was obvious and known such that it didn't have to be explicitly spelled out (making for verbose reading).
That's because humans are involved, and humans screw up. If function X is taken over by private companies or something else, humans would STILL be involved and still foul up at about the same rate. Thus, the total screw-up-ness being done is relatively constant whether the gov't is involved or not. You are blaming the wrong factor.
Banks making stupid decisions are also a huge factor, perhaps the largest.
Canada's regulations appear to have prevented a mortgage bubble in their country because they kept their relatively tight housing loan requirements in place while everybody else was loosening them. THEY did gov't right.
Table-ized A.I.
Did you miss the second paragraph? If you take back 80-90% of the basic income, you leave FAR TOO LITTLE to live on. And uhh, why give it at all if you are planning on taking it back anyway?
I give you numbers, and they show your plan cannot work. You wave your hands and think some kind of miracle will surely occur because it would be so nice if it did. Good luck out there in the real world - you'll need it...
perhaps you should read it. I does not say what you think it says.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
You must be as bad at reading as you are at making a point. The numbers I gave earlier were from that article. Apparently I noticed, but you did not, that it kept citing the same academic to support the ridiculously low end of the range.
Economically there is no mix. They're purely capitalistic economically and thus referring to them as socialists does not mean anything economically. They've capitalists with welfare. That's what they are. The socialists generate ZERO revenue. They provide nothing of value to the economy. 100 percent of all revenue is provided by the capitalists. That is not a mix.
As to humans being involved, so you concede that the government is involved in the issues and you can't just pin it on the evil capitalists. What is more, citing a need for more government control when the issue was caused by government mismanagement is doubling down on stupid.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Most people ignore that fact that basic income can provide impetus to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
Unfortunately inflation is not the solution, as long as the wealthy can "park" their money in investments that bring more than the inflation. And I'm talking about "passive" investments here, not the entrepreneurial ones, which actually benefit the society (i.e.: starting a new company, digging a hole for resources, etc).
They will always find a way to get better returns than inflation. Just buying lots of real estate, for example.
There are better solutions, the "Capital in the 21st Century" for example discusses one. It is not income tax, or inflation, but wealth tax (i.e.: levy) that will actually redistribute the wealth, at least according to the author. There might be other solutions, or this particular one might not be workable, however inflation is known not to decrease the wealth of the richest people, only the lower middle class.
I was suggesting a solution to the current risk of economic ruin we face due to risk of deflation not suggesting a way to redistribute wealth. But adding inflation that is distributed directly to the people would do some of that indirectly because it would increase the amount of risk one must assume in those investments in order to bring a greater return than inflation. Investment is gambling, the ultra wealthy engage in very low risk gambling with lots of wagers spread all over the place. Higher risk means they'd lose more of those bets.
This isn't going to take all the rich people's wealth away, it might mean being a hair less successful than the general population in capturing new wealth generated. It would put more of the newly generated money into the hands of the general population. Currently the newly generated money from inflation comes out of the hands of everyone with a dollar, no matter how poor, and goes directly into the hands of the wealthy so they can lend it out.