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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.
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
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.
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
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.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, the fantasy of being able to just redistribute the 'wealth' of the top 100 doubling the standard of living of everybody else is rooted in the mathematical fiction of 'wealth' (as we model it today).
Wealth is an assessed value of their assets and their money. Assets including cars, land, bulidings, stocks, etc. If Steve Balmer one day said 'I want to trade in my 15 billion dollars of microsoft stock for some cash', he wouldn't get 15 billion dollars of cash because the share price would tank. If you took the resources that go into building a 400,000 exotic car, you could not take those same and just build 20 family sedans, though the 'math' says you could.
On the flip side, a lot of homeless folk are technically more 'wealthy' than some pretty comfortable folks. In the early part of his vice presidency, Joe Biden had negative net worth. By the same standards that establish the top 100 as being able to elevate the rest of the world, Joe Biden was a more pitiable man than people in cardboard boxes (he had plenty of assets, but more debt than assets). Incidentally this scenario applies to most young families with a house and a car or two, but they wouldn't trade that in for a cardboard box to get wealthier.
In general don't look too hard at the ostensible numbers of wealth, because in aggregate it's a situation with many hacks to workaround this nonsense. A lot of the high-dollar things are more like 'high scores' than some indicator of meaningful value that is accurate relative to the experience of most. One would hope there's a better way than just increasingly playing make believe with numbers, but we haven't really come up with something that works in the way modern life goes (no, a return to gold standard or something in the same spirit wouldn't help, it would just limit the ability to do the 'workarounds' to fix things when the behavior of the participants in the economy goes nuts).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Guns are a deterrent.
If a criminal trespassing on your property leaves because you're pointing a gun at them, then your gun has successfully done its job.
This is what occurs 99.99% of the time. Shooting someone (or yourself) with a bullet is really the exception, not the rule.
Guns are a deterrent.
If a criminal trespassing on your property leaves because you're pointing a gun at them, then your gun has successfully done its job.
This happen if the trespasser didn't expect to meet someone pointing a gun.
If this behavior is normalized the trespasser will bring a gun of his own. Then it is just a matter of who shoots first.
Most gun uses in the US do not result in deaths. Why do you suggest they do? Even the lowest estimates (usually promulgated by gun-control advocates) are 50% to 100% higher than the firearm death rate, many more suggest they occur 15 times as often as firearm deaths, and some estimates put defensive gun uses at about 150 times the firearm death rate.
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.