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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.
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.
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.
All of these basic income articles always get these "free moneys" comments, while the actual plan is not about giving unemployed people more money than what they now receive. The idea is to make taking any work always beneficial compared to unemployment. The current system - where you have to demonstrate that you have no work - has the problem that taking a short gig may you may end up losing money before you can again show that you are unemployed.
Also hopefully we will get less bureaucrazy etc.
Even now, every refugee that is granted refugee status will start receiving unemployment 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
The basic income would replace a lot of benefits, so the tax bill wouldn't go up, or would only go up for people on high incomes by as much as the basic income (so net zero).
The situation isn't nearly as bad as you make out.
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> 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.
Random bullshit assertion without argumentation. None of them "crack" under the migrant issue, specially not in term of economy. The only migrant concern people have is about integration and potential security issues.
> And amongst all this... you want to dramatically expand government expenses and raise taxes?
If you would have read a bit about basic income, you would know it does not increase government incomes. It just tend to simplify the administrative nightmares associatied with the 50x different social help that any modern country has.
> This like suggesting Europe stick a shotgun in its mouth and pull the trigger with its toe.
Very American metaphor. But we don't have shotgun, contrary to USA. Like this they are not used to kill 30 kids in a random school every 2 Month.
But the conditionless basic income is quite different from welfare. Everyone is entitled to it, from the billionaire down to the welfare queen, from the hard working middle class family to the guy to lazy to get a job. A system like this has never attempted before.
Basicly gun ownership is a protection system with a 90% false positive rate.
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?
Whenever the subject of a basic income comes up, this same argument is made. But it's simply not true:
There's already scores of people who -for whatever reasons- aren't part of the work force. Usually they do have an income. Be it a retirement allowance (65+), some disability provision, some temporary allowance between jobs, etc, etc. Replace that with a basic income, and the net financial result is the same. Minus the overhead.
People who do have a job, often get various allowances too: low-income rent subsidies, health care benefits, child support, the list goes on. Replace that with a basic income, adjust tax levels such that [previous net income + allowances] = [basic income + new net income], and again net result is the same. Minus the overhead.
As a poster in a previous discussion remarked: this can be done gradually by giving a basic income to select group(s) of people, and then one-by-one, roll various other groups into the same regime. Reducing the governments' administrative overhead at each step along the way.
Bottom line: yes, western countries can afford this, period. Because in one way or another, they already do. Plus the overhead, that is. What's missing is the political will (or balls ;-) to turn it into reality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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 ]
In the short term a jobs guarantee and decent minimum wage are better solutions.
However, in a few generations we will have a world in which 1/2 to 3/4 of people are literally unemployable because there is nothing they can do a robot can't do faster, better and more efficiently. At which point the choices are going to be a "UBI" set at a level high enough to approximate a solid working-to-middle-class lifestyle (single income being enough to support a family, buy a house, take a holiday once a year, etc), or - the neoliberalists' preference - a return to a feudalism-esque system of serfs reliant on their UBI to barely survive overseen by a handful of incomprehensibly wealthy elites. Or a honkin' great big war.
Also, taxes don't fund expenses. Taxes are there to control inflation, address income and wealth inequalities and incentivise behaviour. Thirty years of mismanaged taxation (ie: always reducing it) is why inflation and wealth/income inequalities are through the roof. Money inevitably flows upwards.
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.
A universal basic income also discourages marginal workers from working, though. The marginal benefit of (low) wages gets balanced against time and money spent finding a job, looking presentable, getting to work, and actually working, and often the rational choice is to do things besides work. There's also a good economic argument for scrapping minimum wage laws when UBI is implemented, because they both function to put a floor on an individual's income, but few advocates would accept that exchange.
Perhaps a better scheme would be a progressive income tax that starts negative (e.g. government doubles your first $10,000 of annual income). Making it revenue-neutral while still clear enough for people to understand and accept is hard. ("What do you mean, I have to pay 30% income tax? That's for rich people! Oh, my effective rate is 8%? That's different...")
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.
Apparently, you are unaware the US discussed having a National Minimum income system over 40 years ago. Both the President and the Congress of the time thought it was a great idea...that President being that filthy pinko socialist/commie....Richard Nixon.
The pilot program for it is still in place...we call it "EIC"
The reason why we DON"T have the full version of it, or single payer Universal Health care (which Nixon was also in favor of)....is Watergate.
The thing is, NMI saves money and time because you reduce the paperwork because it also replaces all other forms of assistance. No more Section 8 housing vouchers, no more "food-only benefit cards" There's no forms that need to be filled out or documentation on expenses or income...EVERYONE gets it. And because it puts money at the bottom of the economic ladder, said money circulates more times through the economy Wage stagnation is a killer, and this is the cure.
However since NMI wasn't enacted, Wall Street invented it's own fix to keep people spending like they were still middle class (even if they weren't)...they're called credit cards. Bank credit cards are basically Wall Street's/Fortune 500's way of keeping people spending while STILL keeping wages low.
That is not a good thing.
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.
In experiments, what actually happens is the only people who stop working are those with very good reasons not to - for example, mothers with new children, or people wanting to take care of a dying relative, or people who want to pursue higher degrees, and such; people willing to live a poorer life in order to do something that's very important to them. And probably very important to society as a whole. As a general rule, though, it does not affect the percentage of people who continue to work. Because the reality is that very few people actually want to live a bare subsistence living.
Companies indeed will have to pay a sufficient salary for workers to think the compensation justfies their time and effort. But that's a description of work in general - at all levels. This very second, somewhere in the world there's a middle aged ex-CEO receiving a job offer and thinking to himself, "Only 3 million dollars a year, to spend time away from my family - are they bloody kidding me?"
What the hells goin on in the engine room? Were there monkeys? Some terrifying space monkeys maybe got loose?
It's not the political will that is missing. The problem is that a basic income has opponents on both the left and the right.
The left would hate it because it would mean an end to many many state jobs. The kind of jobs such as assessing whether people ought to be on benefit or not. They would also hate the idea that rich people would also get this income, and would demand that it be means tested, thereby negating a large proportion of its benefits. (This is not just theoretical - here in the UK, there is always a consistent demand that certain benefits that are universal (such as the winter fuel allowance and the concessionary bus passes) be restricted so that those who have means do not get them. Never mind that a billionaire such Bernie Ecclestone likely wouldn't use a bus pas anyway, let alone notice the winter fuel allowance they receive).
The right hate it because they have to play to a base that hates the idea of people getting money for nothing. Can you imagine the collective frothing at the mouths if a government implemented a policy to give the work-shy money for doing absolute FA?
The crazy things is, a universal benefit should be something that unites the right and the left for their own reasons. The right tend to want smaller government. Universal income solves that by just crediting the account of every citizen who is alive with the amount, without requiring whole departments to do this. This could even be outsourced to banks. Additionally, such a system should almost certainly remove disincentive to work with some benefit systems.
The left should love it because it guarantees that no one is without, while leaving them free to partake of any activity that please, and as their creativity allows. This would also put pressure on companies to pay their workers well as workers would realistically be able to tell them to go to hell if they don't provide decent salaries and benefits.
Liberals should love this because it restores people's dignity. No one needs to beg for their food in this day and age, and no one needs to be a serf to either private companies or the government.
The problem if that the left hates the rich and the right distrusts the poor. So won't happen. Even though it absolutely makes sense.
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 ;)
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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.
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.
I don't know why you bothered with examples from Communism (in particular, the central planned economy), I never suggested it. You still seem stuck in the strange part of the 20th century where people forgot that an economy is a social construct to serve the people, never the other way around.
As for welfare, Rowling was on the dole when she wrote Harry Potter. Since then, she has brought BILLIONS into the economy. Produced nothing, huh? Your ideas would have kept a potentially successful author too busy being a mediocre floor mopper to produce anything of note. The great irony is that I see no sign in you that you will ever have the vast wealth you believe will be yours one day. It will all go to the very people you advocate for while you scavenge their table scraps. That is, they no doubt find you to be a useful idiot.
But it seems to me that you are projecting some sort of thin strawman in front of me and pretending to debate your own alter ego. So I'll save my time and suggest you register a second account and ague with that.