Slashdot Mirror
Universal Basic Income Programs Arrive (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Y Combinator will give 100 randomly-selected families in Oakland between $1,000 and $2,000 each month as a test, continuing the payments for between six months and a year. And The Guardian reports that Finland and The Netherlands also are preparing pilot programs to test Universal Basic Income, while Switzerland will vote on a similar program this week. One Australian site is now also asking whether the program could work in Australia, noting that currently the country spends around $3 billion on their Centrelink welfare system, "so simplification can offer huge potential savings."
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
The Guardian sums up the case for a Universal Basic Income as a reaction to improving technology. "In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income unconditional of needs or requirements... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
Did anyone else misread the subject at first?
Dey hatz uz so much dey wantz to make uz work
I think that universal basic income is inevitable, and probably sooner rather than later.
Simple fact of the matter is, that you're not going to be training an average 45-year-old factory worker in how to write the AI for the robot that took his job. And even if you did, after the AI's in place, he might not have much work. While some people have cited that every technological revolution has ended up producing jobs to replace the ones lost to the automation, they are increasingly other jobs, for other people, and "other people" will often include people who are not in a position to acquire the necessary skills.
I'm pretty certain that there would be very negative consequences for society overall if the population is left to starve because of increasing automation. As such, basic income will be required just to keep the country stable and productive.
NOTE: I am generally conservative in my views on a lot of things. and I am definitely not a socialist. But this is how I see things playing out, and I can see that there may be some very negative consequences that accompany it. But still, at this point it seems inevitable.
The need for microtaxation schemes goes down significantly if you have a basic income. Free Software suffers hard from the problem of foregoing the ubiquitous microtaxation on every content. Add a basic income, and you don't need to choose between treating users responsibly and in a dignified manner and committing economical suicide.
So yes: for grassroots-produced culture, this could be a large game changer. Which is probably one of the more important reasons this will get nipped in the bud: collides with the interests of the incumbent powerful media companies.
(...) I'm pretty certain that there would be very negative consequences for society overall if the population is left to starve because of increasing automation.
I'm definitly not accurate on History things, but at some point in the past there was an event in Britain's history called the Luddite's revolution, featuring a (finally failed) anti-machinism attempt...
Maybe we could gain something by looking at what happened at the time, although I fear the relative dimension of the event was different from now (a much smaller population among others)
Herve S.
I wonder how this is supposed to work. A lot of the prices people pay are set by the market. Let's assume the rent in a city is at a specific level. Now suddenly everyone in in this city gets +$1000, so people can 'afford' more. As a consequence, landlords will be able to ask for more and prices will rise and the benefit of the pay rise will disappear.
In the end the benefits from the basic income will disappear through inflation and in the process the existing incomes and savings lose in value.
As a former academic (i.e., from a system where money was handed out based on `membership in a club', at least theoretically), I find it highly doubtful that this is going to happen on a large scale. I do think that it would be a great experiment-- the benefits of being able to eliminate toxic elements of the workforce without having to worry about their livelihoods alone might more than pay for this, from the perspective of improving the world we live in, and I also believe that we need a new economic model to deal with a world in which either technological progress outpaces the learning abilities of the average human, or otherwise the capabilities of `artificial intelligence', divided by cost, exceed those of the intelligence of a substantial subset of humans in economically important areas.
However, my impression is that the majority of people in power do not model the world in this fashion, but instead on ideas of power dynamics: who can decide what for whom. The prestige that comes with power is important to many members of that class, and (abstractly speaking) it needs to be reflected somewhere to satisfy their needs.
Universal basic income now has the problem that it substantially reduces the power inherent in today's real-life hierarchies. For technology people and artists, this sounds great, but for managers, politicians, and other "power people", this is worrisome, if not downright terrifying, as it reduces their leverage and prestige. Thus, I rather expect that anti-universal basic income propaganda will start reasonably soon if the idea is ever adopted on a larger scale (Finland and the Netherlands seemingly being the most likely candidates for that, at present, since the Swiss proposal seems a bit too ambitious to pass the voters' filter).
FTFY
Y combinator is a bunch of unshaved idiots
There is an old Soviet joke, "We pretended to work, and They pretended to pay us". These days the UBI drops even the pretense of work. This is the wet-dream of Collectivist 'elites', the guys with massive salaries and power who 'look after' the 'common man' (who these elites look down on as unable to run their own lives).
This same 'UBI' system is just a rebranding of what didn't work for the Soviet Union, didn't work for China and North Korea and is now causing oil-rich Venezuela to starve.
The promise of "something for nothing" is not only unsustainable, it is deeply immoral and State force must be used to extract resources from the productive and give to the politically favored indolent in return for power. Yes, it can work very temporarily as the stored wealth of previous generations is consumed, but then the Second Law of Thermodynamics takes over and everyone lives in equal misery.
Of course, many of the rich and smart have already foreseen the triumph of Collectivism (achieved through Fabian Socialism and propagated via Cultural Marxism) in both Europe and the USA. The Cold War was won by Collectivists over the Individualists. Thus, many of the rich are fleeing places like Chicago for places like Texas, and the mega-rich have been quietly building bolt-holes in Free Market Chile and my own New Zealand.
The UBI is really about power. People adapted to the end of agrarian society to industrial society by changing skills - but the elites believe you are not competent to prepare for the future in a Free Society based on voluntary exchange and charitable works for your fellow citizens. Their contempt for you shows in their lack of confidence in your abilities, all of which justifies their increased power and massive gouging of the taxpayer (in the EU, over 10 thousand bureaucrats are paid more than the British Prime Minister, for example). The UBI is simply another way to turn Free Citizens into slaves subsisting on the breadcrumbs handed down by the State when the bureaucrats have had their fill.
The UBI is merely a rebranding of Marxism, and inevitably leads to the increasingly powerful State oppressing citizens to try and sustain an unsustainable economic model that fails to understand two things:
1) people can never be equal as they are UNIQUE, with unique goals and desires and tolerance for deferred gratification.
2) wealth is created. It is created through innovation and perspiration, and in the Internet Age someone can get rich without someone else being poor by creating value through ideas (software). The old industrial era idea of Marxist inequality only arising through exploitation is as antiquated as the steam engine in the Internet Age.
10 PRINT "Hello world!"
20 GOTO 10
I thought that already worked anywhere.
then come back here and tell us if basic income works. (hint: there are unintended side effects that usually get ignored, people usually assume ceteris paribus which of course is unrealistic)
Basic human needs should not be controlled by the market, I think that is the point of guaranteed income.
A lot of Basic Income schemes also propose a flat tax and/or a VAT (for simplicity, the UBI itself isn't taxed as income). The regressiveness of those taxes is offset by the UBI.
The UBI offers a good way of managing the money supply. You're putting money directly into the economy, then adjusting the tax rate to control the inflation/deflation rate.
At least in the short term. The landlords will get the money.
To work, this needs to be big, not just some people. Otherwise I don't think it's really a safety net.
I've heard one of the justifications for a Universal Basic Income as: if there is a huge welfare state paying out entitlements, there may be such a huge overhead cost for administrating the programs that it may more efficient to eliminate the administration and use the money instead to simply pay out the Universal Basic Income. Everyone will get $X each month for rent/food/medicine. What happens if someone spends their money poorly, such as blowing it on drugs or gambling, and then they have nothing left at the end of the month to eat or pay their rent. As a society what do we do then? Do we just shrug and let them die in the street? Or do we restart the bureaucracy and have a UBI plus an extra welfare program for irresponsible spenders?
and how is that different from now?
We ultimately still live in a for profit world, so in a scenario where human jobs are all replaced with robots wouldn't it make sense to make the services and products cheap if not almost free instead of just giving the people money to go spend on still expensive products?
That's the idea.
The UBI is a response to a feared future where there just aren't enough jobs to go around due to increasing automation. Fast food places are already introducing automated ordering systems so they don't need to hire cashiers, and just think how many drivers will be put out of work once self-driving vehicles are introduced on a large scale. If there aren't enough jobs, then some people by necessity will have to sit around doing fuck-all. The options are either to shame them with welfare payments and demands that they go apply for some jobs along with the thousand other candidates, or not pay them and see them forced into crime to keep food on the table, or try some sort of universal basic income scheme.
So UBI is just a new name for money redistribution. You take it away from people who have it (tax) and give it to people who don't (assuming that the number of tax payers is lower than the number of UBI receivers, the tax payers will lose money even after accounting for UBI).
My bet would still be on inflation. Let's stay with the rent example. Today, there are some rich people who could afford to pay more for rent but as they are few this does not increase rent prices for everyone. If everyone has more money there is no reason why rents should not increase overall.
That's the universal argument against ever paying people more, and for the last hundred years it hasn't been born out once. Hell minimum wage used to be over $10 an hour in today's money and a middle class life was vastly more affordable than today. It's time that tired old corporate socialist myth was put to bed, it's little more than a scare tactic to convince people to continue socializing corporations' losses and low wages while allowing them to privatize profits.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Except that only happens in a very small portion of cases. Basic income is just that. Basic. Just because I can "live" without working, doesn't mean I want such an incredibly shit-house "life".
Appeal to authority: I'm actually already in that position. I could quit my job tomorrow and be just fine from various investment income, but just fine doesn't get me to Vienna to visit my sister in July, or to the tip of Norway for a hiking trip like I'm doing in September. Fine doesn't let me go out to a wonderful Brazilian steakhouse for dinner. Fine won't upgrade my shitty video card which is struggling under the weight of Fallout 4, assuming that fine even pays for Fallout 4.
Yes there are bottomfeeding leeches in the world content with poverty and blowing all their welfare on booze while watching their shitty all TVs on a couch that smells of beer, sweat and vomit. But they are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Now a question for you: Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
I make about half that right now
so yes
The Y Combinator experiment is stupid and useless. Only the most stupid of idiots would change their employment situation in response to a temporary monthly stipend. The smartest will take every penny and save/invest it. The stupid will spend it all on crap. The average will save some and spend some. The outcome of the experiment is so obvious that Y Combinator is literally wasting its money. I guess they will probably finagle a tax deduction out of it, so there's that.
We tried it and it just didn't work! Look at all the studies we did! It was all done with integrity!
Now get back to work
One of the bigger problems with a UBI that I've seen mentioned is: if you're giving money to unemployed people with the assumption that they'll use it on food and housing, what do you do about people who squander their money on drugs or gambling? What about the people who can't manage money, and get evicted because they spend money immediately and can't save up for rent? Other people will have their money taken from them by parasitic 'friends' and family members who hound them for money, or outright stolen due to fraud/burglary etc.
A large portion of society's members who currently fall through the cracks, will continue to, even with a UBI, due to these reasons.
The superior solution is foodstamps combined with nationalized housing. I would say "government paying rent" but then wheee let's all move to the Bay Area and watch private landowners charge the government as many digits of money as they can think to ask for. Therefore, the govt. owning and distributing land (think of it as a limited resource, like the airwaves the FCC regulates). Want to build a farm? Apply for a permit, and the govt. will grant you as much as you need. Have a plan for a more efficient farm that uses the land more efficiently? You're more likely to get a plot, or replace an existing one. It's different from feudalism in that there is no inherited rule over other households, or taxes on land, or govt. service or social class required to obtain land. One could say "but you need social class in order to get a permit", but this is akin to obtaining a bank loan today. Yes, Cuba does this (or did, last I heard), but the red tape was the primary problem, it can be made more efficient. But wait, the govt. has to pay for all of the buildings, who's going to build and maintain them? Well, the govt. will. You'll be required to work for a bit helping build houses (if you can). Doesn't have to be all at once, or very many hours per week. As home production gets more automated, the requisite amount goes down. It'll be seen as comparable to compulsory military service.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Money doesn't just appear from nowhere in Basic Income. It's not like God comes down and showers gold coins on everyone. It comes from a 1) reduction (and eventual elimination) of the vast patchwork of other government benefits, 2) the loss of overhead costs of said benefits, 3) new taxes on corporations, with the pain reduced (and sometimes reversed) by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of government-required corporate benefits like minimum wages. Any net benefits or costs to corporations in #3 ultimately pass on to the economy as a whole.
Overall, you do have a bit more real-value in the system. Labour that previously would have gone towards employing people for meaningless overhead positions in welfare programs, as well as labour that people previously spent trying to qualify / stay qualified for welfare programs, etc can instead be allocated toward more economically-useful endeavours. And anti-work disincentives often created by existing welfare programs go away. But in general, it's not like you're magically creating a new $1k per person per month or whatnot. You're just making a simpler, seamless system to replace what you currently have.
Also, your stated scenario doesn't work regardless. If a dollar in your scenario still buys the same thing outside the city that it bought previously, then there really has been an improvement in individual buying power within the town. If there's insufficient housing leading to a housing bubble, more construction will set off. They have more money to spend on building materials. If there's insufficient labour, they'll pay for lower-cost out-of-town labour to do tasks that can be done remotely or to come in and do things for them. It's not theoretical, this is exactly what we see in the real world at the national level when a country's wealth rises relative to that of others. But to reiterate: this is not the scenario at hand when discussing universal basic income.
Maybe, but I can barely make out what you're saying because your horse is too high.
The benefits are reduced costs to administer support services, eliminating negative incentives to work (UBI doesn't decrease when you work), increased mobility, improved economy. People can take more risks starting businesses or going to school or trying something new.
Maybe rents go down because people can move to less crowded places, which increases building and new business elsewhere.
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It has a long history, you might try reading about its conservative roots.
Financing UBI with VAT is still regressive and a flat tax would have to exclude UBI or it would simply be idiotic. A more rational approach would impose new taxes on capital itself, not income. The long-term trend is that labor will have ever decreasing importance in the creation of wealth as robotics and AI become more productive and widespread. The creation of wealth will largely be a function of capital alone, directed by a tiny minority of the world's population. While UBI may offer some short-term efficiencies compared to current disjointed redistribution programs, its main advantage is that it addresses the long-term problem.
Basic human needs should not be controlled by the market, I think that is the point of guaranteed income.
But then you miss the point, because those apartments and the food and all that is market based (more or less, with a few exceptions).
Unless you're suggesting we go all Soviet and have government run housing?
... then a lot of other things will have to run smoothly as well. Someone's gotta pay for all this --it's income redistribution; someone gets money, someone else gets to be taxed-- so what you don't want is everyone ending up lurking on the free monies teat.
So the basic income will have to be low enough that you'd rather be working and earning a honest wage. But we don't want people to starve on it, either, so basic living needs to be low-cost enough to enable a low basic income that doesn't result in starving. And for that you'd need things like housing to be cheap enough, and basic medical insurance needs to be cheap-ish or better yet, simply paid for already wholesale through the state. If basic income is to work it needs to be a safety net that both you want to and you can climb out of relatively easily.
In at least the Netherlands, the housing market is completely fscked up*, and the population has effectively been sold out to a clique of medical insurance companies that have been given a captive market. You can pick which one of them to pay, but you have to pay, for an undifferentiated and overpriced "product". There is more, but two points ought to serve as illustration.
Basic income as currently envisioned will not solve the existing problem of too much subsidies; it doesn't aim to solve that, it instead aims to reduce red tape by throwing more subsidies at the paupers. Basic income then devolves into yet more too much free monies for paupers that will probably wreck the economy even more.
In other words, the current proposals are run-of-the-mill socialist wishful thinking disaster vehicles. They needn't be, but they are.
* Through subsidies! The poor can't afford council housing, built with subsidies, without getting more subsidies. Go figure. This also raises the rent floor on non-council housing. Non-rent housing has similar-but-different problems through mortgage shenanigans.
While people could potentially spend more, perception might be that many people will quit the workforce and live off their BI, leading to a LOWER average income, causing landlords to believe that they can't actually do that (if it's a lower-scale neighborhood); other people will believe that salaries will drop by the same amount as the UBI, so that total income will remain the same. I'm talking about BELIEF, not necessarily reality, and belief affects how people set pricing. Furthermore, due to competition, it would take collusion (or a monopoly) to successfully raise rent prices in an area.
The regional cost of rent is for the most part due to the cost of the land plus what regional builders demand. If the builders live nearby, that means nearby rent costs... which comes back to the cost of nearby land. Add in a little for expected return on investment over a given time period (opportunity cost). This is the price floor; with insufficient competition, or lack of supply (overcrowding) then the price goes up.
Inflation only comes into play if the extra money in circulation causes people to move into a more upscale neighborhood, or into a poor neighborhood when they otherwise would've lived homeless/in their car/with friends, straining supply in the area for that price range. In other words, only if alot of people move up a social class. Considering about 10% of all homes in the US are vacant, constrained supply will likely have a smaller effect than real-estate speculation.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
With this people would not have more money... Peoples wages would go down by the same amount, or taxes would go up...
Ie for someone that is working it should be fairly minimal change in income, but some there will always be..
One big side-affect of this is what will happen to minimum-wage jobs.. If the UBI is on the same level as minimum-wage you would see many people quitting..
And about minimum-wage... UBI would have to be at a level of minimum-wage minus cost of transport to work minus the extra cost of food while at work minus the possibly extra cost of living close to where there is work..
Ie UBI would have to be quite low, or minimum-wage will have to go up by a lot.
That's the universal argument against ever paying people more, and for the last hundred years it hasn't been born out once. Hell minimum wage used to be over $10 an hour in today's money and a middle class life was vastly more affordable than today. It's time that tired old corporate socialist myth was put to bed, it's little more than a scare tactic to convince people to continue socializing corporations' losses and low wages while allowing them to privatize profits.
No, you don't understand, but that's ok. I'll explain.
First, the reason why min wage raises didn't cause these problems is because the money supply is slowly being increased. If you raise wages to match the new money the government puts into the system, then no problem. Right now we clearly could handle a $10-$12/hr min wage, it has been so long since it has gone up. This does NOT mean they could just raise it to $30/hr and call it a day.
Second, wages rising due to people working are based on output for pay. You go to work, you produce something useful, you get paid. This plan involves giving away money. That will have an outsided effect on the economy in ways that you might not expect. If you give me $1,000 a month, I now have $1,000 more to spend. But I didn't PRODUCE anything for that money. So now demand is $1,000 higher, but supply is not. Result, prices rise.
If you double everyone's pay, you'd just raise prices by a similar amount, give or take. It should be less than double, given that wages aren't a company's only expense, but you also have to factor in taxes, overhead, profit margins (as a percentage, not in terms of whole dollars), and you'll find it doesn't accomplish anything.
Yes, I said you wouldn't tax the UBI (though if you did, you'd just increase the UBI to offset the tax - that's why I said it's simpler to just not tax it).
Whether a VAT is regressive depends on how big the UBI is. Set it to the right level and it's not.
If all production becomes automated, then all taxation shifts to capital anyway, no?
They ran an experiment many years ago in Canada, called Mincome. Some of the results:
"Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school."
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
Yes, a slight decrease in people in the workforce, but that were the young generation that attended school longer and mothers that stayed home longer to take better care of the children.
If those are be the results on a largest scale we've tried it so far then I don't see the problem (yet).
New things are always on the horizon
Not only inflation, but without curbs on predatory lending, payday loan shops are going to clean this out of disadvantaged people really fast.
I'm in favor of universal basic services - can we agree that nobody should starve when robots do most of the work better than we do? Then let there be staple food and a shelter, however humble. Utah has found out that this is way cheaper than criminalizing poverty and homelessness and jamming up the court system with people who couldn't find a decent place to sleep.
We still have six homes standing empty for every homeless person in the USA, because banks made a mess of the market and even the record of ownership. The banks get to borrow money from the US government at lower interest rates than they get loaning it to the government. They get a protected cartel in the form of a Federal Reserve that moves trillions. We can afford basic services, and in fact, we can't afford to keep our population scrambling in survival mode instead of getting educated enough to do something actually meaningful. Entrepreneurship shouldn't be just for yuppie kids who can bum their starting funds off of mom and dad.
I predict failure of UBI. So long as there is no link between effort to remain involved in society through what we have, until this point, called work, the program will result in ghettoization and a generation of people learning, just as welfare recipients have learned for a generation, that they are "owed" a basic living.
Universal basic income leads to social breakdown because it ignores a basic tenet of human nature - we are social and need to interact with others by providing or working.
What would work better than UBI would be a system that provides a basic income in response for demonstration of employment OR PUBLIC SERVICE. (And who would certify the public service? This way lies a brand new opportunity for fraud and misrepresentation, but I digress...)
Rather than eliminate the relationship between effort and reward, we could retain the relationship and break the PROPORTIONALITY of effort expended and income-received, so long as there is a genuine effort to improve society made by the recipient. [I suspect, however, that this idea will be modded-down by our millennial socialist overlords, or the millennial libertarian overlords, because youth knows better thansomeone who lived through the 20th century and saw collectivism (socialism, communism, universal health care, all UBI by any other name) fail spectacularly.]
Boise - AC
Good, there will be a need for people who don't want a job, as there won't be enough of them for everyone.
Most people I know always want more, nicer stuff, nicer experiences, better food, nice clothes. If they can do some work to get that, they'll do it, even if their basic needs are met.
continuing the payments for between six months and a year
How is that an experiment on basic income? Nobody is going to really change anything in their lives for getting $1000 for six months. You would have to provide a lifetime commitment for it to be comparable to the basic income situation. Even then, you would need to make it a couple of generations, to see the effect in children that grow up with the knowledge that they won't really need to work, ever.
There was, if I remember correctly, a coffee company that offered a lifetime "salary" to the winners of a raffle. That was a long time ago. Surely there are more people in this situations, with some kind of unalienable lifetime stipends of one kind or another. Finding these people and asking them about the changes in their lives would be easier and more productive, in my opinion.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You're a slave to that toxic meme "Protestant Work Ethic".
People like to be social, and people like to be involved, and people like to accomplish things. That has nothing to do with "having a job". In many cases, "having a job" interferes with all of that. It's only this increasingly outdated idea that unless you suffer and work hard, you don't deserve anything, that perpetuates the system we have.
It's also a response to reduce the cost of all the different welfare programs... Instead of having to have loads of employees to manage all of these programs you just pay this out to everyone independent of if they have a job or not..
I think the basic idea is cool, but i can see quite a few issues with it too that would need to be resolved... But will be interesting to see what the initial test-programs will say..
- Low-paying jobs will disappear unless UBI is set really low... cost will increase for companies.. prices will go up... .. If someone has a "free" income... what would the required salary be for the person before he starts working?
- People will probably stay unemployed for a longer time between jobs while trying to find the best one out there.
- Wages
$0.5/h -- or $80 extra per month
$1/h -- or $160 extra per month
or even higher $2/h $4/h $8/h?
- Who would ever want a low-paying and boring/repetitive or nasty job?
No, as UBI is phased in, minimum wage is phased out.
One way is to reduce minimum wage by $0.60 for each $100/month of UBI until it's at zero.
Minimum wage is to prevent people from being exploited because they need a job or they and their family die. If they no longer have to worry about survival, then you can have a much more fair free market setting wages.
If many people quit minimum wage jobs, those jobs will start to pay more.
Some (maybe all?) of the countries trying it also have rent controls in place too. Landlords can't just jack up rents, because people need somewhere to live and it's too important to let the market handle it. Like healthcare, education, infrastructure etc.
Also, the basic income usually replaces other benefits. In some cases, e.g. disabled people with expensive needs, they can actually lose quite a lot of money.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It isn't about "fair", it is about "will this solve the problem you're trying to solve".
If you give everyone $1,000 a month, but average rents go to $2,000 a month, what have you solved?
If you then raise the monthly payment to $2,000 a month and then rents rise to $3,000 a month, again, what have you solved?
People won't get +1000, except those not earning. Expect your wages to go down by the exact same value as the UBI. There will be some inflation but I doubt it'll be enough to make a difference.
The plan isn't for people to sit around doing nothing though, it's to give the the opportunity to do unprofitable but still useful or valuable things. Sure, not everyone is going to become Mozart once a robot takes over their job, but think of all the cool open source coding projects you could work on if you only had to do a day or two of paid work a week, or even none. Maybe you could work on that novel, or just volunteer your services maintaining the local public gardens. Sure, a robot could do it, but people enjoy that sort of thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
True, just giving money won't solve; we assume a post-scarcity environment. That is there is abundance. A few landlords owning all apartments and keeping supply artificially low must be made illegal. And the items must have price controls. In countries like India, the price of petrol (gasoline) is fixed by the state - not controlled by market -- of course it tracks global oil market adjusting price every 15 days or so. Without such controls, what you say will happen. The money will be siphoned off by the rich (1% or 0.1%).
In south India, there is a state run PDS, public distribution system, which directly delivers food items like grains to families. It is near free. So instead of govt giving cash, it gives grains, fuel, even low cost housing. This way the vast majority of the poor is taken care of. Free market still runs for those who can afford. This way a stable society is maintained and there is not many without basic needs [again basic need is subjective. For someone having food and shelter is enough..for others they need running water, vehicle, electricty, internet, etc]
What do you mean by skimming? Everyone gets the same amount. The only fraud would be people who aren't supposed to get it (non-citizens or whatever) or people collecting on non-existent or dead people. Much easier than the current systems.
There's much less incentive to commit crimes. Your basic income is cut off while you're incarcerated.
new taxes on corporations
What, you mean like the current taxes on corporations that they don't pay?
The US has a 35% corporate tax rate. Remind me how many companies pay that rate?
You'll end up with no companies if you raise it, you actually need to lower it. Corporations don't pay taxes, people do. 100% of the tax that a company pays has to be collected from its customers. If it isn't, the company goes out of business.
The governments of most countries are already "crying poor" while trying to maintain unemployment in the 5-10% range. Where do you think the money is going to come from to pay a UBI to everyone in the population? What's likely going to happen is that personal income tax is going to go above 50%, government corruption will increase as they try to pad out the administration with more government jobs, and infrastructure and other government services will start to fail as they cannot maintain funding.
When you have UBI, every hour you then work - and get paid for - will increase the money you have available to spend, thus providing ample incentive to work, and work flexibly. One hour here, another there, still provides a net gain to your disposable incoming, increasing the number of people available to work very flexibly indeed - something a modern economy sorely needs.
The tax will initially be zero (or negative, depending on what viewpoint you prefer - see below), then climb gradually, but never in a way which would discourage working more.
This is quite the opposite to many welfare and other social security systems in place around the world today, where even a small amount of work will result in a net negative for the individual and thus act as a DIS-incentive to work, thereby acting as a force keeping people not working.
The UBI programs are all constructed so that there are always incentives TO work, because you will never ever be worse off if you do, quite the opposite.
Perhaps the easier way to look upon UBI is to simply view it as a negative tax when your income is below a certain level.
That the protestant work-ethic forces are screaming left and right is no surprise. It is sad and short-sighted, but no surprise.
Eventually, some kind of UBI will be inevitable, simply due to the way our world is evolving over time.
Discussing the topic constructively rather than dismissing it due to knee-jerk reactions would be a good start.
A few landlords owning all apartments and keeping supply artificially low must be made illegal. And the items must have price controls.
Price controls just mean I'm not going to bother building new apartments.
Sure, you have them in New York City, where all the land is built on, but you won't get anything new built with those rules.
Apartments in Texas are much cheaper, and we have no price controls. If the price of rent starts rising compared to costs, more quickly get built. However, a UBI distorts this because now everyone has more money, increasing demand. Sure, people will build apartments to meet that demand, to a point, until the builders discover their costs went up due to higher taxes, higher wages (why work if you get free money, builders will have to pay far more to get people to work)
Thus rents will go up. If you put price controls in place, then builders will just not bother building.
In south India, there is a state run PDS, public distribution system, which directly delivers food items like grains to families. It is near free.
Yes, and they are all poor people. I don't think India is a great example for free crap, 500 million people there still poo outside.
Keep in mind all that "free food" distorts the market and prevents real solutions from being created.
Slashdot is really pushing the Basic Income very hard - you see quite regular articles about it.
The problem though - and nobody has challenged me on this yet, even though I bring it up every time: The Basic Income is a trap.
All it takes to convert the Basic Income, into a business subsidy, is for businesses to gradually slash wages over time - this policy serves the elite/wealthy classes, it does not serve the population.
Add to that, that people are calling for Welfare to be 'simplified' and consolidating into the Basic Income - this then makes it very easy to destroy welfare altogether, by either slashing out outright destroying the Basic Income as 'unsustainable', the next time a big enough economic crisis hits.
The Basic Income is also a trojan-horse for massively regressive tax policies, which exclusively benefit the wealthy, by the Flat Tax being a policy that is pushed in-tandem with the Basic Income - except that when the Basic Income can be gutted afterwards relatively easily, this instead leads to just the introduction of extremely regressive taxation...
The Basic Income, is a trojan horse, for subsidising businesses, introducing regressive taxation, and for destroying the Welfare system entirely. It is the single most deceptive and outright dangerous policy out there, as it can be hijacked and used against the population, for benefiting elite/wealthy classes, so easily.
A real alternative is the 'employer of last resort' Job Guarantee policy - where people are given actual jobs instead (and no, there will never be a lack of useful work to be done - fields like scientific research, for just one example, are infinite in the amount of work needing to be done).
What will happen is these people who don't work will breed, unless you include population controls in the plan.
The flip side is... do we still need those former fast food workers? Do we need another generation of them in 20 years?
There are many solutions to this problem, and the reality is if you just hand out money, you both make the problem worse over time due to population (look at poor people's birth rates vs rich people), and you cause inflation.
It doesn't work long term, unless you have population controls.
Universal income could be one building block of this change.
Per-worker productivity has increased ridiculously since 1850s or so. The pace has been accelerating since then. In 20 years, jobs that barely exist now will be obsoleted.
And no, don't think that new jobs "magically appear". The net result has always been less -- otherwise the jobs wouldn't be substituted, because it wouldn't be rentabe.
If we introduced basic income in society as-is, housing prices would soar, because the house market would try to absorb much of that income. Same would happen to anything scarce (be it naturally scarce or artificlally).
So we'd have to introduce that carefully, step by step. But we gotta change!
Kudos to the pioneers.
Australia has about 23 million people. If you pay each of them $2000/month that is $552 billion a year.The $3 billion currently spent on welfare is a drop in the bucket compared too that.
Why would rent go up $1000? Do you think competition suddenly disappears?
People aren't going to be spending their entire monthly amount on rent. Rent may go up a little in response to increased demand, but it would only be the really cheap places that currently homeless people could now afford. In response, there would be an increase in construction, leading to increases in construction jobs.
> Low-paying jobs will disappear unless UBI is set really low... cost will increase for companies.. prices will go up...
Not necessarily. If you wanted something for around $50 (e.g. a new game) and you can't get a high-paying job and there wasn't all that paperwork and effort and risk of getting stuck at that job, why wouldn't people work a week at with something that pays only $2/hour?
Especially if they can feel good about it, for example picking up trash along the road. I've seen old people do that around here without being paid at all, just because they hated how ugly it is.
> Who would ever want a low-paying and boring/repetitive or nasty job?
The low-paying: because they are rewarding in other ways, or because they are easy to get
The boring/nasty: because they pay well, or are easy to get or because you want to experience something new (and know you can quit any time). Plus, there is the assumption that these will be automated. Also almost nothing is boring when you doing it for example just 1 hour per day. Or if you can do it slowly enough so you can talk to people while doing it.
Why would rent go up $1000? Do you think competition suddenly disappears?
Because it would, that is how supply and demand work. There would be a MASSIVE new supply of money, along with increased costs of doing business in the form of taxes, higher wages, etc.
So building apartments would become more expensive.
Consider this: If you think it wouldn't hurt, why not just give everyone $1 million, wouldn't that solve everything? Think that through a bit and you'll see why it doesn't work.
In response, there would be an increase in construction, leading to increases in construction jobs.
Only if the price of rent can go way up. Builders would pay a lot more to build, so they would have to charge a lot more.
In the UK we had a Cradle to grave welfare state which covered the state having a hand in most peoples lives including the majority had subsidised social housing. While we still have a welfare still and at the moment free healthcare in the shape of the NHS, it has been cut back by successive governments and the pursual home ownership with subsided social housing being transferred from local government to private ownership.
You could go back to that welfare state setup as well as bringing back housing stock into public hands and allowing people living in it for free and give people food-stamps that can only be used by them. On top of that you give them a small UBI in order to pay for 'things' in order to keep the economy going.
Of course, there is the question of how this is going to be paid for and as mentioned by another poster, the wealthy elite will have the means to create a robotic force to overcome and contain any social unrest.
I have done some fairly extensive work on this and you are partially correct. Approx $800/mo would work as a stable UBI. Beyond that there would be increasing incentive to not join the workforce. Fortunately, even if regulators screw it up with some unrealistic figure like $2,000/mo the market will self-adjust to make $2,000 worth about $800. (FYI the $800 figure basically comes from "half the work for half the pay" of average income.)
:T:R:A:N:S:
Why not a $5000/month basic income, or $10000? If being in the middle class is so good, why not just put everyone in the middle class?
The answer is because these charlatans know exactly what happens when people have more money to spend. They start spending it and prices go up. The net effect of a basic income will be that prices increase across the board to absorb it.
Rent will always inflate because nearly everywhere has net population growth. There's nothing that ties that to UBI. UBI won't change rents significantly. If you don't have a job because you can live on UBI, then when your rent goes from $1000 to $2000, you move to a cheaper suburb/city. Also, rent is only one factor in inflation, and the other parts have been dropping (pretty much everything except rent and power, with food going up with power, as that's a cost in producing food). So net inflation would be going up anyway, and will still with a UBI, but not because the UBI is the primary cause.
Learn to love Alaska
Nothing, but that's not how it works. Rent won't go up that high or that fast.
Learn to love Alaska
Raise the income from corporations, not the tax rate. Nobody pays the tax rate anyway. They do, on adjusted income, so adjusted that the tax rate is closer to 0%. A corporation could make billions in profit and never pay a penny in tax. That's easy. So don't increase the tax rate nobody is paying anyway, and instead change how it's calculated. 2% of gross income would be a better tax. Not some calculated "profit" number that hides everything where the movie companies sell profit to subsidiaries at a loss, and hide that income off-shore havens.
Learn to love Alaska
In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income
Nations, i.e. governments only get their "wealth" from 2 sources: taxation or selling government bonds.
Any nation that doesn't want to get into hyper-inflation would never fund a day-to-day cost by borrowing, so this UBI would have to be paid for from the tax take.
However, the amount of tax: income, corporate, sales, that a government extracts from its citizens depends to a very large extent on them earning salaries and then spending their pay on the non-essential items that attract sales taxes. Also, corporation taxes are levied on the profits that companies make, generally from selling their goods and services. Once you have a population that chooses not to work, not to produce stuff and doesn't have the discretionary income from UBI to buy "luxuries", your corporate tax income takes a dive, too.
I doubt that a 1-year study is long enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. Certainly it wouldn't attract a representative enough group of subjects to be able to say how an entire country's populace would react. I'm just glad that this experiment is being tried somewhere else. Personally, I think that the money would be better used to ensure everyone had a job - that way they'd also feel like they had some worth to society, rather than just accepting handouts.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What happens when you run out of other people's money to fund this utopian dream?
"Unless you're suggesting we go all Soviet and have government run housing?"
Except it is not Soviet the only ones that had government running housing: it was also Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Finland... just as they used to run telcos, healthcare, education, basic industries... and it didn't end up so bad as that was how they went out of the WW2 disaster in just two/three decades.
Moreover, people working the minimal wage jobs often ARE the most hard-working employees. Yet somehow conservative are against minimal wage increases...
Nothing, but that's not how it works. Rent won't go up that high or that fast.
Well, since YOU say it won't, I guess it is all roses and peaches...
You might consider thinking and learning for a change, you might discover that what you think you know is wrong.
Of course, you won't do that, because most people prefer to have their opinions define them rather than be separate from them.
You'll likely cling to your beliefs regardless of any evidence proving otherwise, just to avoid being "wrong".
While some people have cited that every technological revolution has ended up producing jobs to replace the ones lost to the automation, ....
Yeah, that's completely wrong.
When folks were displaced by automation they were SOL. They couldn't get another job that paid as well regardless of their abilities.
The Luddites were pissed because after spending years of training that started when they were 12 or younger, they were booted out of their tradesmen jobs and maybe offered an unskilled labor position at unskilled labor pay at the factory with the new machines.
The factory owners had child apprentices learn the new machines and ONE operator would operate up to 3 machines at once and each machine produced 7 times as much as an experienced weaver.
Retraining? Not available. And to start off all over again as an apprentice as an adult was just impossible.
Supervisors? You only needs a couple of them and the weavers were never hired for that anyway.
There's this delusional idea that for every job removed by automation, just as many or more pop to compensate.
That never has happened. Automation is ALWAYS a net job destroyer. And what folks keep missing is that you only need so many programmers and repair people. One repair person can handle a whole line. Also, many modern machines don't even need programmers anymore.
What people don't realize is that BACK THEN new industries eventually came about DECADES later that was also labor intensive. Such as automotive manufacturing. And the reason the middle class came to be was because of Fordism and later the unions.
So, in a nutshell, automation is causing and will cause quite a bit of economic and social upheaval and relying on false and ignorant history just makes things all the more difficult.
IF I refuse the draft will I still get the UBI?
It seems to me the inflation argument assumes goods will continue to be made in the same way and at the same cost, when we're having this argument because we assume they'll be made in a different way (by AI and robots) and at a lower cost. I would argue that, as long as immigration is strictly controlled or outright eliminated, prices should drop. The only thing we can't make more of is land, but one thing the first world is not making more of is people. Germany and Japan in particular have catastrophicly low birth rates and are looking at severe population decline, barring mass immigration. I would argue on top of that, with radical life extension, the remaining native population will wait even longer to have children. Why have a child at 40 when you can have it at 80, or 120, or 200? The value of land and housing will fall as the population falls. The value of everything should fall as the cost to produce it approaches zero. How much are the rich going to be able to siphon off when you can print your 3D widget in your home from an open source design a bunch of unemployed engineers created for personal fulfillment? How much are the rich going to be able to charge for food when you have the time to grow it in your own garden, and a robot assistant does most of the work?
Universal Basic Income may not even be a permanent thing, but a bridge to full self-sufficiency and total independence. Eventually technology will proliferate to the point where one can provide ones own food/shelter/entertainment needs trivially.
If there are 150M American adults eligible for this, and you pay them each $2000/month, that's $300B per month. Over a year, that's $3.6T.
The US GDP in 2014 was $17.4T.
So a UBI would eat up ~20% of the US GDP, assuming that implementing it doesn't itself institutes changes (many people would likely drop out of the economy all-together, reducing the GDP part).
Just don't see it without a massive (and arguable) philosophical change.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Or maybe people will stop looking at rental and investment properties as a foolproof road to riches scheme because it is easier to get a basic income. The housing sector adds nothing to the economy except a cycle of ruin. Society will benefit economically just because people can start working on things that really matter instead of cashing in on economic suffering.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Raise the income from corporations, not the tax rate.
Again, that isn't the corporations paying tax, that is the people.
2% of gross income would be a better tax.
Turn that around and suggest a national 2% sales tax, it would be largely the same thing and likely easier to collect.
"Price controls just mean I'm not going to bother building new apartments."
Depends on how it is done. You don't even need to guess, as that already has happened in the past, so you just need to go and look: public housing was common throughout all Europe at least till the seventies.
On one hand, you can provide basic goods and services either out of government owned companies or private owned companies payed with public money. In the first case, yes, you probably won't build this kind of basic shelter because government owned companies will outcompete you: I won't give a damn, since I still will get basic shelter. In the other, provided there's money to be done, you'll compete to build the houses for the government. I very much prefer the first option since the second one opens a big door for corruption.
And in any case, there still will be people with money that will want a better home than the government's that will go to the free market to get it.
Yup, automated trucking / self checkout is going to be absolutely huge. Forget factory robots, they've been around for a century or more!
If rent increases, people would move to areas, where rent is low. Even if there is no work, since they have a guaranteed income. This will create demand in areas that are now underdeveloped, which leads to more economic activity.
It will also get rid of exploitation by employers, since if employers mistreat their employees, they can now quit. This means that employers actually need to start their workers better if they want to retain them. This also means that labour laws can be relaxed, which in turn means less (tax) money spent in courts.
Rental prices are more aligned with supply and demand than cost of production. Additional factors include availability of easy money for home purchase, affordability of housing market and of course wages.
A lot of Basic Income schemes also propose a flat tax and/or a VAT (for simplicity, the UBI itself isn't taxed as income). The regressiveness of those taxes is offset by the UBI.
No, it doesn't. Nothing solves the regressiveness of flat taxes. A progressive tax is the only fair means of avoiding that, and it's not like it's difficult to administer. Tax tables are simple and cheap and work just fine.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If there's insufficient housing leading to a housing bubble, more construction will set off. They have more money to spend on building materials.
You'd think so, but it's not necessarily true. Where I live it costs more in permits to build a 1 bedroom home than it does to build the fucking home, just in materials. This isn't even counting labor and insurance costs. Only about 5-10% of homes destroyed in the recent fires are being rebuilt...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In 2016 dollars, it needs to be over $100K/yr
In 2020 dollars my guess is it would be in the ballpark of $200-250k/yr
Also, the basic income usually replaces other benefits. In some cases, e.g. disabled people with expensive needs, they can actually lose quite a lot of money.
There's obviously no reason why we can't maintain disability payments, and just reduce them by the amount we increase UBI.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"100% of the tax that a company pays has to be collected from its customers. If it isn't, the company goes out of business."
That's only true on systems that reached free market equilibrium. The fact that societal economic inequalities are growing and, at the same time, corporate profits are also growing clearly demonstrates the we are not at such equilibrium and that corporations could certainly absorb more taxes (well, cost increases for whatever reason) without flushing them down to their customers.
Paying a Basic Income close to what it actually costs people to live right now wouldn't increase prices by much, if any.
Paying a Basic Income of $1 million would increase what it actually costs people to live to around $1 million.
That's why you calibrate it to what prices are right now, and you phase it in so that disruption can be controlled.
Why would people demand more money to do construction work? It already pays pretty well, and the people doing it are now going to need less, so they might even accept a lower rate. People aren't going to spend their entire UBI on rent, and at the level where demand will actually increase (cheap housing), rent going above where it is now will simply not be competitive.
Now a question for you: Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
I could live pretty well on that if it weren't taxed. I'd stay busy, have stuff, enjoy myself. I mean, with the two of us, and after taxes and whatnot, I don't make much more anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It is can be very pro small business. If we implement UBI and universal healthcare, we change the landscape for employers dramatically:
No more minimum wage (UBI provides the minimum, labor becomes market driven)
No more unemployment/FICA
No more employer provided health insurance (premium insurance might still be provided as a benefit)
No more workman's comp (keeping this might be a good idea to manage high risk workplaces anyway)
No more social security
With a simple, flat tax the hassle and cost of having employees would be dramatically reduced and there would be little incentive to play the current part-time employee games.
If we do UBI, we need to legislate that UBI cannot be attached or leans placed on it for any reason.
I am coming to believe that we are headed for a time when structural unemployment will be >50% and we have to start thinking about and discussing how economies will operate under those conditions.
I don't see why any form of taxes would be needed anymore..? We can always print more money, anyways.
$50,000/year with flat tax of 50%.
You have no income, net $50,000.
You have income of $100,000, net $100,000, tax rate 0%
You have income of $200,000, net $150,000, tax rate 25%
You have income of $500,000, net $300,000, tax rate 40%
How is that regressive?
No but I presume that everyone would get the same $24,000/yr income, not just those without jobs.
"... In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
Well, I can see what the hell the mission statement is. Naturally the priority appears to be to ensure that those receiving a basic income have enough to remain addicted to capitalism, as if they'll be able to afford it. The term "disposable income" will become an ancient artifact in society, so enjoy your pipe dreams of selling apps and gadgets to the masses.
They'll treat basic income rates like minimum wage, as if a family can live off that. An individual can't even live off that, and on top of that it's not like basic income is going to supplement another job. The jobs are being TAKEN, not supplemented.
Governments, you want to find a way afford this crap? Then knock it off with the greased-palm politics, close your fucking offshore tax loopholes that are starving you, and make the damn billionaires pay for it.
"Low-paying jobs will disappear unless UBI is set really low..."
If it's very low, then UBI it is not. But then, compare to the current situation where one can not stand a basic living standard out of a full time minimal wages job.
"People will probably stay unemployed for a longer time between jobs while trying to find the best one out there."
Probably yes. Given Maslow's pyramid, once I have basic needs covered I won't go looking for shitty jobs to cover my basic needs, right?
"Wages .. If someone has a "free" income... what would the required salary be for the person before he starts working?"
Look around you: people already do a lot of things not only for very low wages but even for free -given that they like what they do: social services, open source code, hobbies... What will need to rise salaries will be shitty jobs. In fact, that's a very capitalist way to look at it: it is not free market if one of the parties is not free to engage the deal. Currently, shitty jobs can stay at very low wages basically because the employee is not free to engage the deal (as in basic survivancy is not something you cannot freely engage or disengage into). Once the employee is free to engage these kinds of jobs, just as the employer is free to offer them, their wages will rise to their true free market price.
"Who would ever want a low-paying and boring/repetitive or nasty job?"
Machines. That's the whole point of it: machines gladly take low paying, boring, repetitive and nasty jobs, no only uncomplaining, but doing it better and cheaper than humans.
No, that isn't how it works...
Capital flows freely to where it obtains the best return... you assume that companies will just accept a lower level of profit.
Verizon is making of money on FIOS, but they are getting out of that business because it doesn't make ENOUGH money... it has a net profit margin of only 5.5%, which isn't very interesting to investors.
The Unions are bitching saying that Verizon as a whole makes tens of billions of dollars, thus they can afford to pay them a good wage.
It was not an accident that Verizon is selling off FIOS to Frontier.
---
Companies expect a given rate of return and if they aren't getting it, investment money goes somewhere else. Companies won't just earn 2% less and eat the cost, they'll find some other place to move the money to.
From where the money will come from after these pilot programs?
Or maybe people will stop looking at rental and investment properties as a foolproof road to riches scheme because it is easier to get a basic income.
Ok, sure...
Where will you live with that basic income of yours? Build a house out of the dollar bills?
The housing sector adds nothing to the economy except a cycle of ruin.
If you actually believe that, well, that explains the shit government we have because morons are allowed to vote.
You're simply wrong. Full stop.
If you're putting $300 billion dollars into the economy every month (or whatever level it would be), you have to take almost that much out or you have uncontrolled inflation.
VAT is still regressive
A regressive tax is one in which the poor pay more than the rich. With a VAT, everyone pays a fixed percentage of their consumption; the rich consume more than the poor, so they pay more. A VAT is a progressive tax; not as much so as a luxury tax, but still progressive.
As of 2016, if one earns $27k/yr, they are in the top 50% highest paid. If the basic income is $27k/person/year, then $27k basically becomes somewhat of a new poverty line.
The issue is we live in a world of limited resources. Sure we will have a nearly limitless robot workforce, but there just isn't enough product to go around.
I predict prices will rise across the board, along the lines of the same percentage of today's people being able to afford to buy the item.
Given that, I think what will ultimately happen is something like 99.9% will have a pretty boring existence in life, aka "useless eaters/welfare recipients," while the remaining .1% will be enjoying the good life.
Paying a Basic Income close to what it actually costs people to live right now wouldn't increase prices by much, if any.
I don't agree with you, so frankly the whole thing probably begins and ends there.
Because you think your statement is correct, there isn't likely much I can type on Slashdot to point out why you're wrong.
Why would people demand more money to do construction work?
If you honestly don't understand why that is the case, then you have NO business discussing this subject at all.
But then again, what else is new. That recent news story about flying and uber-type service is a perfect example of how most people have no fucking idea what they are talking about. Every 2 out of 3 posts in that thread were simply completely factually wrong.
The same is true in this thread, most people posting here have no idea what they are talking about.
Paying people not to work...so we get more people not working....sitting around idle. Now, do they use their new found freedom to educate themselves, by essential things they haven't been, or start new businesses? Or do they sit at home and watch TV, buy toys they do not need, or start new drug habits?
If it is the latter, with 5 years of that lifestyle, they are unemployable. So if you are wrong about human nature, you have just signed on for their keep for the rest of their lives.
So could you please register yourself with the IRS for this program. If it turns out as I think it will, then the IRS can make sure your and your like-minded buddies will be the ones paying the bill. You shouldn't mind, because you are correct, yes?
Some people like to accomplish things, but very few people are artisans just waiting to be free from financial obligations. Have you seen the stuff people do in internet videos? I think your assumptions are dangerous and lacking in real world experience.
Keep it simple. Any company using increased mechanisation/robots/overseas-outsourcing and creating redundancies pays a percentage of savings (?50%?) each and every year towards a universal wage fund. Any person made redundant is entitled to claim from that fund. It should not require any government funding.
Giving money to tiny fraction of randomly selected people would represent nothing compared to the inflationary event when substantial part of population would receive unearned.
Yes, nice argument. However, let's look at higher education. Some 30-40 years ago, government started footing the bill for more higher education. What happened? It created an inflation in higher education. Those darling keepers of the gates of knowledge decided to chase each other with rising salaries. Eventually, in the last 10 years or so, state governments got tired of the constant increases in funding and pulled back. Then the Great Recession happened, and they pulled back a lot more.
The result is that higher education prices didn't come down, but the funding did. And now young bunnies who think a free education is something the rest of country owes them are being priced out of higher education. And their expectations will not be abated by explaining they merely grew up in a higher education bubble. This what gives people like Foghorn Sanders his gas supply.
The boy wants to spend another $1 trillion on higher education. Nope, that won't cause an inflation that will suck up all that glorious new money will it? Higher educators will be happy with what they have, won't they?
price control is a stop-gap solution. In fact if any anti-competitive behavior is taken out of the system, it will automatically do the right thing. When a cartel takes over all the supply, we see all kind of distortions. Why a landlord was able to jack up rents with UBI? because as a group, they control the supply; do collusion. They will let a lot of empty apartments sit vacant in market but won't drop price. And they will use all sorts of tactics to prevent new supply (construction -- I heard in NYC they want to stop sky-scrapers because they cast shadow into the central park! :) so you just need some excuse to stop new supply into your market).
If govt can ensure laws like anti-trust work to ensure anti-competitive practices are in check, science and technology will ensure everyone gets a higher standard of living.
and as others pointed out, with no need to work/commute, people can live in remote towns/villages; no need to be in metros where rents are sky high. "free" stuff may distort.. but if you think there is a real free market. you live in illusion. The ones already in the top, ensure how the market is played. You know how MS prevented linux like systems to take off until the arrival of Internet/servers. Of course the rich lobby n buy enough laws to ensure the anti-trust laws are just paper tigers.
Virtually all countries employ some kind of differential taxation and/or benefits ostensibly meant to help those who have less.
Universal income is just a simpler way and more efficient to implement them. Get rid of all those complex systems. Also gets rid of any incentives for people to be intentionally miserable.
This is assuming, of course, those other systems are dismantled. Many people are employed by those systems or make a living optimizing and gaming those systems. They will will all end up having to look for new jobs. This is the hard part.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The idealist sees this kind of future as obvious: the Star Trek economy, where there's no money and people 'work' to better themselves (lol). This sounds great but does not account for human nature, namely greed and to a lesser extent, cruelty.
The pessimist (realist?) sees the future as it was depicted in the 2013 movie 'Elysium', where the ultra-rich have just about everything, are completely corrupt & nearly completely useless, and walled off from the majority of the population. Meanwhile, 99.999% of the population lives in squalor. Sound familiar?
It's possible we'll have both realities, but unfortunately we'll need to get through the 'Elysium' economy before arriving at the 'Star Trek' economy. TBH, I don't think anything resembling a Star Trek economy is possible because of human nature... As bad as this sounds, I'd put my money on 'Elysium'...
"you assume that companies will just accept a lower level of profit."
Freely? Of course not freely. Of course they fight nail and teeth for that not to happen. What I say is that they *can* absorb it, so they can't do it is not an argument. And they certainly do, or else you'd see corporations closing doors instead of corporations reporting increased profits quarter after quarter.
"a net profit margin of only 5.5%, which isn't very interesting to investors."
Given that bonds are below 5.5%, such a profit margin is still a decent one. Of course I'd move my money wherever I can get a 6.5% instead, but that's beyond the point since the point is that you can take out 1% all across the board (i.e. by taxing) and money would still be invested because it still would make sense.
Why a landlord was able to jack up rents with UBI? because as a group, they control the supply; do collusion.
There are too many players in real estate to have collusion...
I can build an apartment complex if I want to, it isn't that hard...
They will let a lot of empty apartments sit vacant in market but won't drop price.
There are some weird accounting rules that cause some properties to sit empty, it isn't evil landlords being stupid. It is the stupid Congress that doesn't fix the tax and investment laws.
I heard in NYC they want to stop sky-scrapers because they cast shadow into the central park! :)
NYC is not a good example of real estate, that whole place is so jacked up with rules and counter rules, it is what you'll get nationally if you mess with it. The Bay Area is another example.
Rent controls in NYC are a disaster, but most people living there don't know it. Had rents been allowed to rise naturally, people would not be able to afford to live there. Result, they would leave, and would have left long ago. Fewer tall buildings would have been built, and the whole place would not have become such a mess.
---
"free" stuff may distort..
Not "free" stuff, free money... what do you plan to buy with your free money when the stores are empty?
Why should the makers "make", if the takers just want to take?
The protestant work ethic is responsible for the current wealth of our nation. Don't knock it too casually.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Not more in absolute terms, but more as a percentage of income. Most of the rich do not spend all of their income; all of the poor do. So if the VAT is, say, 10%, the poor are paying a 10% tax on their income, while most of the rich are paying less (in VAT). That's why I claim it's a regressive tax.
It's way too soon for this. We're just not there yet. Consider the example in the original post; Australia spends $3 billion on its "CentreLink welfare system" (which I assume is what they spend on welfare). That works out to $130 per person per year, if everything was just distributed out as basic income. If we try it before when we're _obviously_ not ready for it, it'll just fail and it might even discredit the idea. (I wonder if that's a contributing factor to the really rather sudden appearance of these trials.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
I did exactly this and by going mostly off grid and reducing my debt to zero was able to reduce my yearly expenses to less than $4k/year not counting insurance. That leaves $20k/year of free money to play with/on and you know, that's actually quite a bit. Over $50/day. It doesn't sound like much, but when you have no other expenses, it is.
I could live pretty well on that if it weren't taxed.
You could. Yet even if it were tax free that wouldn't cover the rent for many people living in many cities. $20000 / yr is close to break even point for me. The problem with any arguments on a fixed basic income is that some people may even be better off (the poverty line is something like $12000 in the USA and 10-20% of Americans live below it), while others that kind of money wouldn't even cover their yearly rent.
Providing people with a basic income is simply a good idea, period. But calling it 'universal' is a bit of a misnomer unless anyone in the universe, or at least on Earth, gets it.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Freely? Of course not freely. Of course they fight nail and teeth for that not to happen. What I say is that they *can* absorb it, so they can't do it is not an argument. And they certainly do, or else you'd see corporations closing doors instead of corporations reporting increased profits quarter after quarter.
If the United States was an island and had no outside contact with the world, you'd be correct.
The money doesn't have to stay in the United States, that is where your point falls apart.
This is not the middle ages, we live in a very mobile world. Those with money can go anywhere.
Of course I'd move my money wherever I can get a 6.5% instead
Now you're starting to understand.
but that's beyond the point since the point is that you can take out 1% all across the board (i.e. by taxing) and money would still be invested because it still would make sense.
Well, you started to get it, then lost it there... There are other nations besides the United States. If you actually raised taxes in the US by the amounts required, you'd have massive capital flight to other nations.
Now suddenly everyone in in this city gets +$1000, so people can 'afford' more. As a consequence, landlords will be able to ask for more and prices will rise and the benefit of the pay rise will disappear.
No. Some people can afford more, some people can afford less as UBI offsets other forms of welfare. If everyone in the city suddenly put their houses up by $1000 there'd be a lot of very very empty houses, especially in the low end of the market where progressive systems direct their money. The supply and demand won't actually move as much as you think it will.
Polls show the Swiss will overwhelmingly reject the idea.
UBI isn't about efficiency, it's redistribution of wealth. As others have already pointed out - it can only last until the wealth has been drained from those carrying the burden.
The other way to pay for it to begin with is by eliminating the tax threshold before you pay any income tax. This is replaced by a payment equivalent to the value of the tax threshold - so if the threshold is £12,000 and the tax rate is 20%, it's cost free to implement a basic income of £2,400. A bonus of this is that tax calculations are simplified for companies - almost everyone pays 20% of their income. This replaces the basic 'Job Seekers' Allowance' in the UK system, though claimants would still be eligible for housing benefit - to pay rent.
This is not the same scale of basic income as those being proposed, but would start to demonstrate the features of it. Note that a residency requirement to claiming it would allow the targetting of migrants who remain very unpopular in the UK...
Quite correct. That's a problem in nearly every big urban area. Terrible here in London.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
This is because it encourages corruption - the food is diverted away from the poor to be sold instead, and many ghost recipients emerge. As a result India is moving away from this model of poverty relief to one based on cash distribution to individuals on the basis of a unique identity.
http://www.economist.com/node/...
Every citizen becomes a slave of the state. Take what the state gives you and be happy with it. If you try to earn more the state will take it away because you don't need it.
I'm guessing some foreign country.
If we lived in a post-scarcity environment, we wouldn't have this discussion. Right now, we live in an environment where scarcity exists, and introducing a basic income in such an environment makes no sense.
Your premise is wrong there. The reason housing prices in places like San Francisco are so astronomically high is because the voters have adopted policies that make this happen; these voters are primarily single family home owners and renters. The single family home owners like to see government policies drive up the values for their properties, and the renters want to keep their rents low via rent control.
The money will be "siphoned off" by people who make investments: institutional and individual investments. If you stop them from making a profit, it will massively hurt the economy because they will stop investing.
India has massive social problems and poverty, so it hardly seems like a good example. And in the US, we have an extensive welfare system that gives people a lot more than this if they need it.
"Maintaining a stable society [where] there is not many without basic needs" is easy: a communist agrarian society will do that for you. Of course, forget having high-tech gadgets or complex medical care or being able to travel a lot.
Would you quit your job and live your life with a $24000 /yr income?
No, but I'd probably work a bit less.
Niger is the poorest country in the world, does not have enough food, and is rapidly losing land to desertification. They also have the highest birthrate in the world.
Birth rate !== growth rate... just saying, can't be bothered to see if it straw mans your argument but countries with high birth rate tend to have a correspondingly high death rate, this is true other species in nature too. I'm guessing Niger still has a higher population growth but the relative difference to other countries will be less substantial than birth rate.
"In an increasingly digital economy, it would also provide a necessary injection of cash so people can afford to buy the apps and gadgets produced by the new robot workforce."
Drugs, Booze, and foodswill still be the top 3 things people spend their money on.
they would demand more money as incentive to work. If I get enough money to live by doing nothing why would I work? especially hard work. The incentive would have to be pretty big to get most people off the couch.
You can have those benefits already, by replacing our complex welfare system with a single source, means tested system. That's what welfare systems in places like Germany look like.
It's illusory that anything like that could be implemented in the US: there are too many lobbyists and special interests to keep both the welfare side and the tax side of the system complicated and riddled with exceptions.
I'm making less than $24/yr working full time. So yes, I would be happy to get payed that to not work.
Ding Ding. Oh no, rent seeking capitalists can no longer make 20 to 30% of returns off disadvantaged people who can't cobble the credit, stable employment, or few 10K's for a down payment to not pay the rent tax on housing. LOL, how will the economy recover?!
Fiat money doesn't just come from nowhere?
Anything government run will fail. There has been basic income for decades in the form of endowments, charity and pensions apart from government. That is the solution. The same monies used to endow a retired couple could roll over to their most incident children or grandchildren upon death. Invested money is fungible. Taxation is not.
JJ
This is funny. I am in a similar position as you (FI). I have no debt, a home, and conservative investment income of probably around ~30K a year. I feel like I live a pretty extravagant lifestyle. I travel internationally at least every other year, take several vacations per year. Eat overpriced food and drink silly hipster beer. My gross expenses are on the order of 25-30K... So I could check out on UBI, just like I could now. I probably would check out with my investment income and UBI. ~24K x2 + 30K = 54k/year? I don't even know how I would spend all that money. My basic expenses are 12k/year. Blowing the remaining ~$1200/week seems uh kind of difficult.
I don't know what would happen to the economy if 33year old savers like me could just drop out so easily.
Rent would only go up $1000 if the market could support it, which in the face of massive unemployment is unlikely. Builders might build better houses, but the cost of builder labor would still be set by competition with the other two million contractors capable of building a house. Having more money in the system doesn't automatically rule out competition.
I'm undecided on the premise of a "basic income", I can see the positives and negatives..
However, the study/pilot is flawed, since the participants know that the program will stop within 6 months to a year. That means if they quit their jobs they will just have to find a new one in a year (which likely will be difficult for many families), or at the very least they would spend/save their money differently. Few people will live off the basic income itself and stop working due to "laziness", simply because it is unclear of when the money would stop.
For the study to be representative of what would happen in reality, it would need to be for a longer period of time (so participants get comfortable thinking it won't go away), and there couldn't be an "end date" (or the end date would be hidden from the participants.) Lots of ethical issues with a study conducted that way, but, doing the study in the way they are is worse than otherwise as it will be misleading.
Further, I seriously doubt that the "randomly selected families" will be representative of the population as a whole. Most people would think that "basic income" is a scam if approached out of the blue, and the ones that are likely to take part (either by responding to something out of the blue, or by volunteering to take part without being contacted first) are going to skew the study.
Well if there isn't work for them to do then they are unemployable regardless. You will likely be out of work as well, so at that time you will decline the basic income and die on the streets, correct?
...the next generations are going to be reading textbooks 50 or 100 years from now, learning about the era in which we genuinely thought jobs were going to disappear forever and not be replaced, and they're going to laugh at our naivety.
hi
I have been reading a lot of thoughtful posts about this issue, but I fear the reality is that it will turn out to be like our attempt to reform the mental health problem.
Remember when we were going to eliminate the horrors of the mental health warehouses by shutting them down and opening up smaller, local homes for the mentally ill? We shut down the hospitals, then never opened the local homes. Those who needed help ended up on the streets with the homeless population.
Now we propose to taper off our hodgepodge of social safety nets and eventually replace them with a basic universal income. What I forsee happening is the taper, as that is politically viable, but then they never get fully replaced with an equivalent cash income, as that is politically too easy to oppose.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Problems - too many workers, workforce needs better education or retraining, population living longer is increasing healthcare costs while making it harder for younger generations to move up the ladder of career success, population and politicians are incentivized to raid future savings for spending today
Solution - Not UBI, it doesnt really solve problems and it has side effects that might make it a net negative.
Instead:
- Encourage older workers to mentor younger ones and leave the workforce earlier while encouraging younger workers to spend more time getting a rigorous and real education before working- How? not free public colleges (government already has history of destroying education), find a way for older folks to have a direct investment over long term in younger employee performance - students pay portion of future earnings for 20yrs as soc security type payments rather than take college loans?)
- reduce social programs for those in their prime working years and not disabled, while increasing incentives for older workers to retire earlier, e.g we take care of you if your under 25 or over 55, but not for more than short term emergencies with those in between
- The only ubi type payments would be in the form of some kind of national profit sharing plan. As long as government has a deficit, no one gets a dime. payments also reduced while government has debt. Automatic refund if income greater than expenses and no debts. Simplified flat tax or vat type tax system while keeping some incentives for kids and home, building communities.
- Somehow citizenship needs to be more important with greater benefits and also be harder to get. Maybe everyone really shouldn't have an equal vote. More national and state incentives to limit population growth, especially illegal immigration.
I'm switching from programmer to drug dealer! Demand will soar with people walking around with $2k/mo burning a hole in their pocket. And, I promise not to replace human labor with robot labor. My business will be all about the people.
Yes sir, no more programming for me! No more late night debugging. No more code reviews where I hear my code sucks. No more retrospectives. No more stakeholder whining about features.
So, please [see, I care] Mr and Ms. programmer keep writing AI and making those robots. The more AI/robots you create, the better business is for me.
Only if the price of rent can go way up. Builders would pay a lot more to build, so they would have to charge a lot more.
Why? What would drive those costs up? I'm genuinely asking, because I can't find a point where to start to arrive at your conclusion. I'm truly stumped on that one.
If anything I can imagine people doing the same work they do now for a little less money, if they consider they have the basic needs otherwise covered. I also don't see why an influx of money would result in a serious increase in prices for basic stuff like food, energy and such.
As for rent prices, why would people price their properties outside the market that has clearly just been opened up to a lot of new customers? Those that do without good reason would seem to deserve not to be patronized.
The Swiss just rejected the universal basic income. French source: http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2016/06/05/les-suisses-appeles-a-se-prononcer-sur-le-revenu-de-base-inconditionnel_4936537_3214.html
The corporations should not exist. There is no room for a protected legal fiction of a person which attracts rights not afforded to natural persons, and there is no reason that it should be more tax-efficient for a corporation to invest in plant than it should be for me to do so as an individual whether or not my actions relate to work or leisure.
And you seem to ignore that anything given without cost has no value.
You are like a lot of people foolish in thinking that people in general freed from having to work will become beacons of imagination and knowledge. the real world proves this is not the case every single time.
Giving everyone $1000 will only debase the value of money by that amount. It is the fact that money is hard to earn for most that it has value. In your wealth redistributed world everyone gets a piece of pie .... and is happy...in reality.....it never works like that. one cannot be rish if there are not poor. One cannot be a winner if there are not losers.
Watch the damn video....its pretty clear on the point....you are the Horse 120 years ago and you are about to become a pet and pretty much nothing else.
The Swiss just rejected the idea big time.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You have a very good point; however, this effect exists already in the US as a result of numerous government policies. For example, the home mortgage deduction results in housing price inflation of several percent.
The Butlerian Jihad is an event in the back-story of Frank Herbert's fictional Dune universe. Occurring over 10,000 years before the events chronicled in his 1965 novel Dune, this jihad leads to the outlawing of certain technologies, primarily "thinking machines," a collective term for computers and artificial intelligence of any kind. This prohibition is a key influence on the nature of Herbert's fictional setting.[1]
Perhaps coincidentally, 19th-century author Samuel Butler introduced the idea of evolved machines supplanting mankind as the dominant species in his 1863 article "Darwin among the Machines" and later works. Butler goes on to suggest that all machines be immediately destroyed to avoid this outcome.
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When steam-shovels, bulldozers, and backhoes freed people from back-breaking ditch-digging jobs it was good for everyone. Eventually even for the men put out of work by the heavy machines. But somehow the coming replacement of barely literate fast-food workers with self-ordering kiosks, etc. is going to be some sort of tragedy requiring us to provide a no-questions asked survival stipend is a common meme.
Proponents of UBI want to evoke Utopian outcome where the people living off their UBI will all engage in useful production of art, poems, and high philosophy because they no longer have to work to eat.
One wonders: if they could barely operate the picture-based ordering computer from behind the counter, will they be able to use the self-service kiosks to order food with their UBI free money or will they starve?
Social Security, despite being sold as "saving for your retirement", is and always was a tax. It was a "Payroll Tax". As your Social Security taxes were collected, they were used to provide Government self-funded insurance programs: Old Age and Survivors Insurance (and later Disability). Your taxes paid premiums into that program. The premiums collected were used to pay out to people who were collecting benefits meant to keep them from living in abject poverty in their (very few!) remaining years -- just like foodstamps today. They were always "Welfare benefits" (see the SSA Website https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html).
The insurance was a hedge against living too long, thereby outliving your own savings! Consider that when Social Security was instituted, 1935, the benefits age was 65, but the average life expectancy for men was 59.9 and for women was 63.9. No one was expected to live to collect!
There was no "investment". There never was. It was always taxes. You have no "account" with your money in it, and never did. There was never a guarantee. In fact, a Supreme Court ruling said so.
Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act. In this Section, Congress reserved to itself the power to amend and revise the schedule of benefits. Ephram Nestor challenged Section 1104 after he was denied Social Security payments as a deported member of the Communist Party. He argued that a contract existed between himself and the United States government, since he had paid into the system for 19 years. Nestor, an alien, became eligible for Social Security payments in 1955. In July 1956 he was deported for having been a member of the Communist Party from 1933 to 1939. Section 202(n) of the Social Security Act provided for the termination of Social Security payments when an alien is deported for being a member of the Communist Party. The Court ruled that no such contract exists, and that there is no contractual right to receive Social Security payments. Payments due under Social Security are not “property” rights and are not protected by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. [wikipedia]
Congress can cancel Social Security in its entirety at any time and there'd be no "Getting your money back". It became not your money the second it was collected as taxes.
That people lived their whole lives believing that Social Security was a retirement plan of any sort means that they bought "THE BIG LIE".
" Numbers and math don't lie."
Yes, yes they do. You have to trust the source of the numbers or they are useless.
I'm not saying your vid is wrong or lying, and I agree with you. It's just that numbers in and of themselves are easily abused.
"There are other nations besides the United States. If you actually raised taxes in the US by the amounts required, you'd have massive capital flight to other nations."
Truly so. But there's also other means to acomplish an strategy beyond a single action (i.e. taxing). If what you say were an objective truth all and by itself, how can you explain that having a marginal top tax of a whoopy 94% back after WW2 didn't make fortunes flee away to other countries? Companies still want to sell their shiny high profit margin products in the USA and the fact is that they still would want to do it at a lower profit margin because it still would be higher than elsewhere, so there you have your opportunity window to work upon.
As a companion, maybe things like TTIP should be more about making sure corporations don't find tax heavens nor slavery-level workforces no matter where they dig their den and less about making sure they can suck the most out of globalization.
Who will lobby against UBI? Accountants, tax lawyers and consultants, benefits distribution government employees...
Having thought a lot about this, I can see it working out if we increase the Income earned tax credit for men, but just gave women a universal income, with some bumps for up to two kids. It would be nice for UBI to eliminate welfare programs, due to a reduction in complexity, but we know that's not how politicians work. They wouldn't be able to help themselves and would constantly twiddle with it, giving more money to the more 'deserving' etc.
By overwhelmingly rejected that insane idea the Swiss have shown themselves to be much smarter than the Swedes
I simply can't imagine why anyone can even think of giving money to people for doing nothing --- and those who first came up with that idea were economists ! [facepalm]
CEOs want unlimited income. Shareholders want growth charts that are asymptotic.
When I was working at Mobil corporation, I asked a coworker what our company sold.
She said, "petrochemicals."
I said, "Wrong. We sell stocks."
That commodity was responsible for every decision made in the oil patch and matters of safety, for example, became an issue only when litigation impacted growth chart.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You might consider thinking and learning for a change, you might discover that what you think you know is wrong.
Of course, you won't do that, because most people prefer to have their opinions define them rather than be separate from them.
You'll likely cling to your beliefs regardless of any evidence proving otherwise, just to avoid being "wrong".
Ah-hah-hah.
Methinks you need to look in the mirror, and see how your own words might apply to you. Across all of your posts on this subject.
Or maybe you don't get how you're coming across as somebody hysterically screaming how the sky is falling, the dikes are breaking, and the wolf is blowing the house down?
Maybe you think you're doing a public service, that you're having to stand against all the crazy people, but no, you're not being persuasive or convincing, rather you are giving into hyperbole and sophistry yourself. You pontificate and claim to be all-wise and all-knowing, and act just like you chastised another for doing.
You're basically expressing your own frustration and irritation, while probably thinking you're saying something productive if only other people would listen. If only.
Try backing down a bit, and acting a bit more reasonably.
Otherwise, you are just going to sound like a know-nothing know-it-all complaining about others being know-nothings while thinking they know-it-all
The protestant work ethic is responsible for the current wealth of our nation. Don't knock it too casually.
to what do you attribute the wealth of japan? china?
Economies are not static. This will cause shortages, which drive up prices. There will be inevitable, and endless, arguments as to how much basic income is enough. The value will slowly, inevitably be ratcheted up, and country-wide economic failure will occur in one of three ways: 1. Basic income increases exceed the government's ability to pay. Borrowing ensues, followed by printing money. Imported goods become scarce. Rate of increase speeds up, or system is dismantled. If rate of increase speeds up, economic collapse, hyperinflation. See Venezuela. 2. Basic income does not exceed government's ability to pay, but value continues to increase. The opportunity cost of work continues to increase, and work force participation drops. Drop in workforce participation cause demand to drop in the market, driving deflation, as newly funemployed people accept their safe, but poorer and easier lifestyle. Deflation further increases the opportunity cost of working. Positive feedback loop; government is restricted to either printing money (pump priming) or cutting basic income (riots! Fury!). Pump priming causes stagflation; this is the best case scenario. Deflationary cycle drives collapse of business, great depression 2. 3. Basic income causes massive immigration spike, especially in countries with land borders. Unplanned increases in basic income budget drive #1 in both directions; a) massive increases in gross budget, and b) shortages in goods as production struggles to keep up. The common answer to these arguments is, "But we will be in the singularity! Supply will be unlimited for all goods! Labor is irrelevant to productivity!" Forgetting how ridiculous that sounds on face, consider the economic consequences. If the food, or energy supply is truly unlimited, or nearly so, then they can be made virtually free (see gas subsidies in GCC countries dropping the rates to $0.05/ liter). When the essentials are available in unlimited supply, there isn't a need for a basic income. A few hours of work a month, or charity, or family will be sufficient to purchase all you need. So, in any scenario, singularity or no, immigration or no, deflation or inflation, a basic income is doomed to failure. Really, a basic income is just a reboot of socialism (academic socialism, not welfare capitalism) in clothing of modern economics, with the spin that upcoming productivity enhancements shall make "to each according to his need" work now, this time, finally.
Here's my thought, when landlords jack up prices just 'cuz they can, there would be a mass exodus of tenants to a cheaper area, maybe somewhere really cheap out in the boonies. And then businesses would spring up to support this hot new town with a low cost of living. And the greedy landlords would be left to lord over their ghost town.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Meanwhile the basic income initiative is rejected by about 75% and by all cantons. 25% yes is still notable:
http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/sc...
The Fair Tax already includes a "prebate" for all individuals to cover what they would have paid in taxes on the basics (like food), e.g. a married couple with no children receives $417/mo. and a married couple with 4 children receives $710 per month. The minimum for a one-person household is $209/mo.. And by removing so many other taxes you have more take-home pay.
Go study it for a while and I think you'll come to the conclusion that it's what is best for the country.
If UBI is a solution to technological growth, meaning surplus growth, and this growth is faster than population growth, then those $800 become able, over time, to purchase more and more due to the deflation inherent to technological advances. The alternative is to practice inflation adjustment so that prices stay stable, and you increase the value paid over time. In the end both things work for the same: increased robotic productivity = everyone becoming able to live better.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Inflation depends on the size of the money supply. In this case, the money supply isn't growing, it's still the same size, it's just redistributed differently. So there will be some price fluctuation, both up and down, as demand shifts slightly and production shifts to compensate on a slight lag, but nothing major.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Will there be an adjustment based on location? $2,000 in New York City is not the same as $2,000 in Indianopolis.
If there will be an adjustment it is no longer universal income.
If there will not be adjustment, people in New York City will need supplemental income, in the form of subsidies, food stamps, lower taxes. Plus free healthare insurance.
It cannot work. It only works in the minds of low IQ, low energy, liberal leaning Marxists. Even the true Marxists in Soviet Union, the leading elite which was supposed to lead by example, never bothered to even pretend that everyone should have an equal income.
We are the only place that does not have basic Health Care for all.
The ER must take any one even if they can't pay but that costs a lot / does not cover all stuff and the people who wait till they get very sick and need to go could of been taken care long before that.
Now some people even trun to the jail / prison system for there Health Care needs at an even higher cost then the ER.
I have a different take on the coming tide of deep-learning robots taking over human jobs.
For centuries the tradition in several Asian countries has been to raise boys until they become independent earning members of the family. At that point in time, the parents become the son's responsibility. The parents may choose to work until retirement or not and just sit back, relax and enjoy life but no matter what their primary job is considered done: they have successfully raised a working independent member who will provide for all their needs and take care of them - a UBI, if you will. Naturally in such a culture, the more sons parents have the better. Sons also take over major decision making to run the family. Father-son conflicts may be there but usually respect-your-elders is the norm where sons consult elders for their experience and mix it with their modern knowledge to better the life for everyone.
Deep learning robots are like sons that whole humanity has fathered.
While in the short term the companies making robots may stake claim over the fruits of this labor and so cause job losses etc, in the long term we will all be able to sit back, relax and have a better retirement. This includes future human generations as well. UBI is natural in this way of thinking.
Rejoice, our primary job is done: humanity has successfully raised many sons who are independent working members of the family. That they are robots is immaterial. The model for grokking such a society where humans and their brainchildren coexist has already existed in Asian cultures for centuries.
Not this again. Accept it, millennials: yes. You are going to have to work and contribute to something bigger than you and your own vapid, tiny world in your lifetime. Yes, trying can be hard. This has got to be the most spineless and weak generation the world has ever seen. Pathetic.
A huge number of us will end up without jobs the moment robots take over our jobs.
Fast food jobs? Robots can do it better.
Package delivery? Robots can do it better.
Jobs that involve driving? Robots can do it better.
Assembly line? Robots can do it better (and already almost gone in first world countries)
Sorting jobs? Robots can do it better.
Secretarial jobs? Robots can do it better.
Phone tech support? Robots can do it better.
Police? Robots can do it better.
Firefighting? Robots can do it better.
and many, MANY more.
Even the jobs that fix those robots will be gone the moment robots can take over that too, which won't be long.
When you're unemployed you get some form of welfare. Then when you get a job, and get income from it, the amount of welfare decreases.
In the UK the amount of welfare decrease is equivalent to an 80% tax rate on people earning $0 - $10,000. (in terms of how much their net take-home money increases for every additional $ they earn).
Now I know that super-rich folks are disincentivized by having to pay tax above 40%. But I wonder if super-poor folks are also likewise disincentivized? [sarcasm]
Why is it that you people always cite the positive side of the study but leave out the details like the test subjects being aware that this experiment wasn't going to last forever and most of them kept their jobs knowing they'd need them again sooner or later? While there is some value in what the study found it's hardly a model for what a long term UBI system would work like.
I've seen plenty where the people in real estate are very close to people in politics or even directly in politics themselves.
Your reply is evidence of your educated, roses and rainbows view of the world. Take a stroll down West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, or any other run-down urban area, and you'll get an accurate view of what uneducated, unemployed, paid population actually looks like and what they actually do with their time. Novels? Volunteering? Gardening? You need a hard dose of reality, son.
That $800 is quite close to SSI payments. SSI is already supposed to be just enough to live on, so we might as well use the same number.
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The Swiss vote 'No'
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-vote-idUSKCN0YR0CW/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/referendum-offered-money-for-nothing-and-the-swiss-say-no/2016/06/05/2c09f1d8-2b24-11e6-b9d5-3c3063f8332c_story.html
In what universe do you think government management of UBI would be more efficient than government management of welfare or SSI? The programs still need management oversight either way. Except with UBI you will effectively double the salaries of the bureaucrats in order to make up for the higher taxes, plus they now collect UBI.
How about we start off by not rewarding poor incompetent people with more money for every kid they have despite not being able to afford them?
If only there was some way to get apartments built other than relying on people like you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The poverty threshold, poverty limit or poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed adequate to cover total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. In the US, this is presented as an income level based on household size (number of dependents). For a single person household, the poverty line is $11,770 (2015).
Perhaps worth noting is that a single person household working a full-time minimum-wage job exceeds the poverty line (50 weeks time 40 hours times $7.25 is $14,500), so by definition a full-time minimum wage worker is not living in poverty. But if that same person has a child, then both are living in poverty, as the poverty line for a two-person household is $15,930. In a very real albeit statistical sense, children cause poverty.
A baseline assumption of a UBI is that it provides sufficient income to survive on. So let's use the poverty line as the basis for the UBI. That is, a single person household would receive a UBI of $11,770; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $15,930; and so on. It is worth noting that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $11,770 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,610 in UBI), so at least some will avoid living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their UBI total.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,010. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.242 trillion.
Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the amount of money we currently spend on all social welfare benefits programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, foodstamps, etc. A reasonable idea--indeed, this was put forward just this week in a WSJ essay by Charles Murray--would be to eliminate all those programs in favor of the UBI. Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Exploring the notion of replacing the most basic welfare programs, e.g. foodstamps, section 8 housing, while not disrupting the SS and Medicare that the elderly view as an earned right. After all, the UBI based on poverty level should by definition cover those sorts of expenses. There will still be screams from people concerned about drug addicts not buying food for their kids and that sort of thing. So it seems unlikely that the overhead of those programs, let alone the programs, would be completely done away with.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.242T to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.715T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in and either-or situation reduces this a bit.
A worst-case cost would be adding UBI on top of all the exisiting programs, for a total cost of about $5T. Or perhaps the UBI in lieu of all other programs can actually be rammed through so that the cost remains a minimum of $2.242T.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.021T.
And chicks for free.
Moreover, people working the minimal wage jobs often ARE the most hard-working employees. Yet somehow leftists are against allowing them to freely contract with an employer to have a job at a mutually beneficial hourly rate of their choice, preferring to make it illegal instead and requiring them not to be allowed to have a job if they can't convince someone to pay them at least $X for their current job experience/skill-level.
Ever notice that sometimes your perception of why someone is for or against something doesn't always fit the narrative their opponents publish? It helps to listen to people's own claims about their own beliefs, rather than just their opponent's claims.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Seriously.. If you give money, that means you have to take money from somebody else. That's how our current welfare system works. But if you give money to everyone, then where does the money come from?
I'll agree that you don't need a job to accomplish things and make life fulfilling, yes, but if having a job is what stands in the way of people leading lives that are fulfilling and productive lives how do you explain the high crime rate and low life expectancy rates among those on public assistance? Where is the outflow of art and culture from these areas?
I think the number of people who will produce art and culture works will remain the same given UBI. I don't really have a basis for that but I simply do not see a mechanism in play that will increase people's creativity simply because they don't have to put themselves through a 9-5 life.
Taxing capital instead of income is just another way of saying you want everyone to be less wealthy in the long run. You tax things you want less of, not things you want more of. We want more capital in use, more income created, more wealth created. What most people actually object to is what they see as excessive consumption.
Try listening to some economists and consider taxing consumption rather than capital, wealth or income.
That way you can get rid of most of the privacy destroying/controlling regulations/laws, tax the "black market" in illegal goods (because they still pay tax when they spend the money they make from illegal items) and simplify tax reporting to something businesses already have to do in 45 states, reducing the accounting pain/drain on the economy.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I would agree as long as the plan is paid for only by a tax on companies which use off shoring, H1B employees and Robotic Employees (maybe include companies where it is impossible to get a person on the phone). This would remove the cost benefit over actual (your national entity) laborers. I don't mind jobs going to foreigners as long as there are no one willing to work it. Too often we hear of people having to train their foreign replacements.
Skimming? What the fuck? Stop commenting on things you don't even begin to understand.
I foresee the opposite of what paiute foresees.
I foresee some form of UBI being enacted, promising to eliminate the other programs. The existing programs would be promised to be phased out as the UBI is phased in, but before the existing programs can be eliminated someone finds a reason why *this* program needs to be preserved, then *that* program...
So we end up with both and now way to pay for them.
Do you want to go back to digging ditches with shovels and pick-axe?
Not to mention chain saws, jack hammers, hydraulics of every form, personal computers, email...
History is replete with technology replacing human labor.
Replaced dozens of men using axes and two-man saws. A small crew of 4-5 loggers and one man running a yarder can harvest acres per day.
But somehow putting self-service kiosks at McDonald's represents the collapse of society.
That's not enough to change anyone's behavior. I know it sounds huge, but any serious pilot study would have to make it permanent.
Some folks would rather work for Non-Currency Payment so if you unlink Work and Wage some folks would be very very happy.
UBI would be useful to allow for the stuff that Currency MUST BE USED FOR.
Raise your hands if you would work for a Florida based resort for just your UBI payment if you were given basic needs as part of your job.
The thing is, there's nothing we (scientists, engineers and technologists in the field) can imagine at this point that would stand in the way.
The only useful discussion about UBI is one where the path to, and the actuality of, zero employment is considered.
It's early to be throwing basic income out there right now, but I don't know that's it's too early. The problem right now is that a lot of people are unaware of the magnitude of the change that will be on us fairly soon, and so they are thinking in terms of "jobs = self-respect" and "jobs = survival" and "jobs = upward mobility."
While all of that is true at least to some extent now, none of it is likely to be of any significant importance once LDNLS and sparsely-stacked-LDNLS, the two facets of non-conscious AI, are joined by conscious AI.
Why? Because while we are biologically limited in intelligence and presently don't have any significant way to change that, there's no barrier expected or anticipated with regard to expansion and increase of artificial intelligence.
Can more memory be added to an AI? Sure. More capacity for newly established neural networks? Sure. More senses? Sure. Etc.
There's every reason to think this is the path, and that the guidance of the path itself will be largely or completely taken out of our hands by conscious AIs once they reach, and then exceed, our general level of intelligence. Once that happens, AI capacity will rise in a self-improving curve until it either reaches some fundamental limit we have yet to anticipate, or it runs out of resources. There are no solid reasons at all to think this is not the path.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well, we'll have to think how to cope with the change in the future, as robots/machines will get better and more intelligent, they will replace humans in most places completely. With the current system there is no possibility it will survive, and if we don't do anything soon, it will turn into chaos..
Change that to "income from capital" rather than "capital itself" and you have the real solution. Tax rent and interest income increasingly until it is impossible to actually profit just from owning things, and watch those worthless investment properties be sold off for cheap to whoever actually needs them for their intrinsic usefulness, and bam, you have a society of all owners.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Nothing, but that's not how it works. Rent won't go up that high or that fast.
Well, since YOU say it won't, I guess it is all roses and peaches... You might consider thinking and learning for a change, you might discover that what you think you know is wrong. Of course, you won't do that, because most people prefer to have their opinions define them rather than be separate from them. You'll likely cling to your beliefs regardless of any evidence proving otherwise, just to avoid being "wrong".
It seems that everything you just ranted about could also be applied to you - unless you actually *do* know everything. Not trying to pick a fight, just sayin'.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What you described is Marxism.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the
populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
production, &c, &c.
Could be worse. They could anally rape with rebar any that don't want to work.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The tests were supposed to run much longer, but a change of government changed all that.
But I agree, these kinds of tests have limited ability to show us what full scale UBI in real life would do.
New things are always on the horizon
I am NOT from Alaska and I am just remembering stuff that is probably out of date.
There was a time when the state of Alaska collected so much oil tax revenue that every resident of Alaska got a check from the state government.
fivethirtyeight did an interesting article on this a while back. http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
As a fiscal conservative, my knee jerk reaction to the idea was that people would just be lazy, wanting something for nothing. But the article is thought provoking, and I'd love to see some country or state be the virtual laboratory for some serious experimentation.
Just another day in Paradise
The protestant work ethic is responsible for the current wealth of our nation. Don't knock it too casually.
Two world wars decimating everyone that isn't us, and slavery and untapped natural resources for a jumpstart had more influence on our position in the world than work ethic could possibly have.
We are wealthy for the same reason Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have described why they are wealthy: Luck in positioning.
Sweden's tried allowing people to retain up to 80% of their income for an indefinite time when unemployed or long-term sick, in reality makeing it cheaper to remain non-working, than to work. Not surprisingly, both unemployment and sick-leave dropped rapidly as the taxes were lowered on work (but not on unemployment or sick-leave benefits), hence giving a better economic incitement to find a suitable job. Basic income - without any requirements - are, to put it simply, poisonous to the welfare of the people!
Lmftfy "100 randomly selected middle eastern families. " Just what we need is to give away money to Arabs that already lie on their taxes.
And you, FlyHelicopters, only look at the future of if it will operate completely as the present. A lot would change and have to change for UBI to work.
I'm gonna cut through the crap and get right to the point. Just imagine what the brightest and the best among us could accomplish if we didn't have to work to keep a roof over our heads and food on our tables. Yes, some of the brightest and best are poor and most are working-class, nearly all of us must work to survive, thereby taking away from the good we could be doing for society as a whole.
Would many (maybe even most) members of the general populace simply choose to not work? Yes, it is quite likely they would. There would still be a net benefit, though, to letting those of us who have vision and drive to improve this world concentrate on doing just that. The change I could bring about, single-handedly, if I could pour more effort into affecting that change, rather than spending 60+hr/wk working to pay rent and buy food... multiply that by millions, or, hell, even thousands, and we're all better off for it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Opponents of basic income are worried about the cost to the rest of society, but should not be. 100 years ago food production was 20% of GDP. 200 years ago it was over half. Today it's less than 1%. It's cheap to feed everyone. Housing them less so, but with automated and rapid construction I expect that cost to fall.
In the distant future I expect it will be a vanishingly tiny portion of galactic domestic product to keep virtualized humans happy and satisfied, if that's all they want to do with their life.
At this point basic income is a foregone conclusion, we're just quibbling about what level it should start at, but the cost will just keep going down.
For instance, only paying someone to go to school won't benefit a new single mother who needs to spend some time at home.
Which raises another question: if people won't have jobs with them all being automated, what will be the point in having an education? Obv, some, in the next generation, will want to fulfill their "potential" (whatever that means). But the second generation will have grown up with mass ignorance and illiteracy so won't know what all the fuss was about.
And then, what do we base out future governments on? - If we even need them, any more?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What happens if the banks blow up the economy again with an unsustainable debt bubble? As a society should we continue to allow banks to exist? Are car companies a bad idea, because GM ignitions and Volkswagon emissions cheating? Same logic.
My wife is a member of an Indian tribe in Washington State, each tribal member gets paid $2000 a month from birth until death. This free money has made a whole generation of unemployed people, with no job skills. The check or direct deposit each month is $1600 after taxes. For minors it is around $1000, with the rest going into a trust account being paid at their 18th birthday. Plus there are several bonuses paid out each year (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Elections (sitting tribal counsel sends out checks for $500 right before election in hopes they will be re-elected). It has not worked will for many members. Many kids drop out of highschool before they turn 18 and just wait for the trust fund check. On or just after they turn 18 they get around $120,000. The kids think they can live off their trust fund money and monthly checks forever. The typical story is go buy a super expensive car (but not all cash, on payments), blow money on wheels, system, rent a house, buy bunch of tv's, new clothes, throw parties, all their New Friends and relatives borrow money. With in 1-2 years they are broke, car get repoed, loose their rental house, friends disappear, find they can't live off their monthly checks, they have no job skills since they dropped out of school. They then get depressed, get into drugs, buy a $500 beater car but don't have a license or insurance. They start having kids, and lots of kids, since each one is worth a $1000 check a month. The problem is many parents treat this kids as checks, they just want their money then dump the kids of on relatives to take care of.
I think, at least in the US, UBI will have to be different depending on the area. Our country is larger than the entire EU, one rate for everyone isn't really practical. A flat-rate would most likely cause massive population shifts from high-cost areas to low-cost areas at an insane rate and depopulate major metro areas. Not that I'm saying this is necessarily a bad thing...but here in Tulsa I can rent a 3-4 bedroom house for 2k a month.
giving handouts to handful of some people in no way tests "universal income".
There is no way we could have 90 million people in the USA being given $2K a month for a total of a 2 trillion dollars a year, while also taking the hit of them not creating wealth in economy. the country would fail.
I realize you useless people love this kind of talk, but instead you'll just have get a job, you fucking hippies. we don't need parasites.
Welcome to what Fractional Reserve Banking has done for a very long time now, except with massively more impact at a massively greater scale, and the benefits going to Wall Street rather than the people who need it.
It's already a fait accompli, little reason to argue against what's already the case. Let's focus on the beneficiaries of the action instead.
If you're working 60+ hrs/week just o pay rent and buy food, then chances are you do not possess the necessary skills, intelligence and drive to single-handedly effect any change. If you possessed those traits necessary to effect change single-handedly, you would find a way to do it.
For example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs' Volkswagen van), raised $1,300, used the money to buy materials and assembled the first Apple CPU boards in Jobs' bedroom and garage. After making their first sale, they quit their jobs and struggled through their startup phase.
Saying you have to work 60+ hours for food and rent is a convenient excuse. You either can't get a better-paying job or are living above your means, neither of which bodes well for a future world-changer.
You're a slave to that toxic meme "Protestant Work Ethic".
People like to be social, and people like to be involved, and people like to accomplish things. That has nothing to do with "having a job". In many cases, "having a job" interferes with all of that. It's only this increasingly outdated idea that unless you suffer and work hard, you don't deserve anything, that perpetuates the system we have.
The problem is not everyone is identical. From my 25 years in ~40 companies (I work as a consultant in engineering) you are describing about 30% of the work force. The other 60% would rather be sitting on a beach/surfing/gaming/'insert non-productive hobby here'... There is community and social interaction there as well, but is is not HARD like work is. Typically work is difficult, either solving difficult problems, forcing yourself to do something mind numbing and repetitive or some such (if it were too much fun/too easy, people would do it for free, see the number of male prostitutes).
There are about 30% of the population that get satisfaction out of a job well done, but the rest put in the hours to support their family, their hobby, or at a minimum, a roof over their heads and other basic needs. Human nature is to get maximum reward for minimum effort. This is the problem with social welfare programs in general, and UBI is no exception. The way to deal with the poor is the welfare to work programs that the US had from the mid 90s up until Obama took office and subverted the law. The principle of welfare to work was we don't want people to starve, so we provide basic necessities, but we want them to search for work, or if their job position is obsolete, we retrain them at a trade school or junior college so that they have some marketable skill to make a livable wage and support their family and then we help them find gainful employment, and for every $2 they make at work, they get $1 less from welfare benefits, until they are completely on their own again. This was a proven, successful strategy. Trump will definitely enforce this law, and it was Bill Clinton who signed it into law, so Hillary may enforce it as well.
That, along with eliminating Obamacare in favor of a job growing health care system is the key to creating new jobs and revitalizing the economy. The health care reform that we actually need is: regulated uniform coverage and a country wide health care market along with a single price per policy (insurers must offer one public price for a specific policy, not one rate to a mega-corp and a much higher rate to an individual) and finally annually renewing health savings accounts that pay out 100% tax free if they are full to incentiveize people not to use medical services unless they really need it and keep medical deductibles high while not impacting the bottom line of patients. The other good idea is requiring doctors to publish front and center a list of prices for various items/services, just like a restaurant, so the patient knows the cost up front. These steps would drastically reduce the overall unneeded use and overall cost to society of health care.
Unlike Obamacare which was designed to be a covert welfare program that siphons money from the middle class who actually pay for their insurance (but can least afford massive rate increases) and gives it to the working poor, who have historically used cheap, state run health care clinics only when they absolutely had to but are now racking up massive bills in private practices because they have free insurance (paid for by the working middle class). Don't believe me, check out the history of rate hikes and deductible hikes. The latest stories around Blue Cross Blue Shield in Texas, where they are losing millions of dollars year over year and are going to have to increase the rates on customers by 53% in the next year alone are just the most recent example. Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster because it was never designed to fix the problem, it was designed to create a new voter base out of the working poor...
The whole thing is a sham. The people behind this want UBI so they are rigging up a system to "prove" that it work.
This "experiment" is useless because it's only testing the easy part of the UBI, handing out money, while completely ignoring the hard part: collecting. What will happen to people if we give them free money? Their lives will improve obviously! This isn't in question. In fact it isn't even new. If they really wanted to know the answer to that question they could just research people who have won cash for life lotto prizes, those have been around for a long time and would be a much more cost effective way to study giving out free money.
If they want to test UBI they need to test the part that will actually be difficult: paying for it. Anyone who has seriously looked into UBI recognises that it's an insanely expensive proposal. The much bandied about "efficiencies" and replacing existing services won't even come close. To make UBI work there would have to be a massive tax increase, and that is the part that is the hard sell. Jacking up everyone's taxes so that people can choose to sit at home and do nothing all day.
This "experiment" has nothing to do with testing UBI. It's about putting the name UBI on an experiment that can't possibly fail so they can hold it up as proof that UBI works.
. Yet somehow leftists are against allowing them to freely contract with an employer to have a job at a mutually beneficial hourly rate of their choice
I.e. "selling themselves into slavery", because it's what it is.
The point is robots. If there is no work. How can you get money if you have to prove something you can't.
I'm one of the people that you need to see in your statistics. For $1000 a month lifetime guaranteed income (assuming it is indexed for inflation) I will quit my job. The problem is, if you can only guarantee it for 1 year, I will not. What you need to know is how many people will become leeches like me, so you can figure out if this is economically viable (I think it is not). This simply doesn't help because it won't give you valuable data. A city in Canada did the same thing years ago. The residents knew it was only for a short period. The data on how many people quit their jobs (was something like 3%) is considered invalid simply because most people have a longer term outlook than that.
I've been living in Austin, TX. Moved here from Oakland, CA cause the rent was to damn high. Of course it's get'n' to damn high here too. Soooo, I just moved into an RV "park" outside of Lockhart, TX. It is very, VERY rustic, but it is $300 per month for everything.
OK, so if I was getting the $1000 per month, that would leave me only $700 for gas, car insurance, food, health care, etcetera. I would have to work at least some job, if I were to have any hope of saving or buying any kind of extra anything, like a new A/C for the RV. However, in the future that this experiment is supposedly attempting to prepare for, those jobs won't be available for most people.
And this is in a small, Texas town.
So, this is not an experiment in UBI. It is an experiment in income subsidies, which is different. The experiment cannot give them the information they are supposedly trying to gather. All $1000 (or even $2000) can do in Oakland is keep someone with a low-end job from having to live in their car. (Which is not nothing, but it's not even a minimal living income.)
Here in Lockhart, I figure I would need $1500, minimum, to really live on. And that is if I keep living in my old RV, in the rustic RV park.
What would I do with the money, if I didn't have to work? I would save up and finish my Bachelor's so I could go on for my Master's and Ph.D. in information science. Then i could finish the system I'm working on to educate the entire world's population for free, just in time for the AI and robot workers to make that entirely unnecessary.
I bet they try a one job per family program first. That will help with the unemployment because it will takes lots of government workers to administer it. Then later they can make an ordered list for people applying for jobs. Put the white males at the bottom.
This won't work.
You introduce so many more problems with handing out money than it solves.
For example, once you fix the amount of money you hand out, WHO is going to decide at what levels or how much?
Then that opens up a whole new box of worms, since you are fixing incomes, what prices should products be priced at?
Who is going to play god in all of this?
You know, Einstein once said, The definition of insanity is continually doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
I am of course referring to Socialism and Communism, which failed spectacularly in the 1900's and 20th century, almost taking the world with it.
Now the 21st century people continually expect that getting something for free is the best way to solve peoples economic and social problems.and socialism and communism continue to be extremely cruel, and brutal methods of rules still practiced
When will it stop?
Even Christ, the prince of peace realised this when Peter and Paul and the rest of their disciples had to pay Roman taxes of the amount of two gold coins, and they had no money. Christ instructed them to go fishing, or DO WORK, and look for two gold coins out of the mouth of a fish among the many and take them and go pay taxes.
Presumably they used the rest of the catch to feed themselves, the poor as well.
The moral of the story is, it is not a good idea for human beings to not do work. Everyone needs to get up and do SOMETHING daily and contribute according to their means.
Incredibly, lastly maybe we should be asking why is it that everyone puts up with the concentration of capital and potential in the hands of 1% or less of the population? When it is a proven fact these people have broken the laws to obtain this extraordinary amount of wealth by price rigging Gold, Silver, LIBOR...it goes on and on and ON!!!!
Why is it that we allow this to continue screwing up the fair market system and making a mockey of capitalism?
Why is it that we allow these people from the 2007 banking crisis destroy the opportunity of the young people to have a life outside of their parents basement?
Why is that these people stole this money in 2007 from the American people are still walking around ALIVE AND WELL and continue to make a mockery of our laws, our constitution???
Do you think you can have a healthy economic system with all of this continual fraud?
If we would simply enforce the laws and jail or execute these people for treason that were involved in the 2007 banking crisis we wouldn't have to hand out money to millions of people to do absolutely NOTHING with their lives.
PS: Even if you are OLD and can't work anymore, WE USE TO be able to save money in a bank and get a decent interest rate based on return to fund our later years. You can't even do that anymore because they criminally destroyed the currency markets and reduced the interest rates to zero by fixing the LIBOR interest rates to cover all of the losses the banks made on criminal activities.
LIKE LAUNDERING DRUG AND ISIS MONEY.
.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
how can you explain that having a marginal top tax of a whoopy 94% back after WW2 didn't make fortunes flee away to other countries
No one paid it... that's why.
The corporate tax rate is 35% today and no one pays that either.
Apple has over $100 billion in cash overseas to avoid that 35% tax, which is why they are investing so much money somewhere else besides the US.
As a companion, maybe things like TTIP should be more about making sure corporations don't find tax heavens nor slavery-level workforces no matter where they dig their den and less about making sure they can suck the most out of globalization.
You would have to consider who wrote TTIP before you suggest such a thing...
Stop electing career politicians and you might get somewhere. This is the broad appeal of Donald Trump, he can tell big business to go pound sand if he wants to.
Now will he? I have no idea, but he COULD... Hillary Clinton will not, under any circumstances, do so. She was bought and paid for long ago.
So while Donald might be great, or he might suck, at least there is a chance.
If you give everyone $1,000 a month, but average rents go to $2,000 a month, what have you solved?
The United States has vast tracts of land, especially west of the Mississippi River, that are very sparsely populated. Many small rural towns with much remaining viable infrastructure have seen massive population declines since the 1970s because jobs and young people have been moving to major cities and urban areas in search of the higher incomes or even just the basic entry level employment necessary to launch their careers. If a Universal Basic Income (UBI) guaranteed that you weren't going to starve to death and could have a decent quality of life, especially in cheaper rural areas, many of them might move back to the places where they or their parents grew up and try their hands at farming, or sustainable local businesses or any number of other economic activities that would be very risky if not for the promise of the UBI. In short, the UBI makes rural living more viable for more Americans. So yes, the cost of housing and rents would increase in hip and popular urban areas, but many people would find new lives and much cheaper living in rural homes and communities where rents and housing would be quite cheap and built for basically the cost of materials which would likewise be cheap in the automated production of the future.
Wouldn't it be nice if the world worked that way? With people liking to accomplish things?
In the mean time, we have such nasty facts as generational unemployment: In Belgium, it is worryingly common for families to not have a single employee in three generations. And those aren't families of artists, now, but often families of alcoholics. It's an objective measurable effect: work strengthens social ties, even beyond the social ties at work.
Now an UBI could work, if it would be _slightly_ less universal. Just tie it to having a job. And with UBI, there's no need for that job to pay minimum wage anymore, which is what makes full employment possible. With full employment, people can choose a nice job, or a good paying job, so this isn't too high a burden. And it's this full employment which makes UBI affordable, while at the same time essentially ending illegal immigration. An UBI-subsidized worker does not need to fear competition on price.
It seems that everything you just ranted about could also be applied to you - unless you actually *do* know everything. Not trying to pick a fight, just sayin'.
Fair point...
I don't know everything, but I know more about money and business than a lot of people that post here. I have 20 years of experience employing people, many of them rather smart people, to know that the average person doesn't really have any idea how stuff ends up on store shelves.
I also understand why politicians seem to be such slime, they say one thing and do another, because people want to be told bullshit to decide who to vote for.
Trump is a perfect example of this. Of course he doesn't really plan to do half the things he says he will, he is just doing what it takes to run for President.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. If the average person would choose to become educated and care about facts, figures, and actual information, rather than emotions, then we'd have a different game.
Most humans (and I'm this way sometimes too) are irrational emotional creatures that make decisions then try and justify them after the fact. Many people (sometimes including me too) don't even know why we make decisions.
There are many stories on SlashDot that I do NOT comment on, because I am not an expert on the subject. Generally when I comment, it is because I know what I'm talking about. What I find is that most people don't, but comment anyway.
Take the recent aviation story with the FAA and the uber-like service. More than half the posts in that story were wrong. Not wrong in opinion, wrong in their facts.
I've owned my own business since 1996, I've made a lot of money in that time and employed hundreds of people. I've had my share of ups and downs, but if I've learned anything, it is that humans act largely in their own self-interest. This applies both to the people you give money to who sit at home and play video games, as well as those people who currently make the video games. A game like Grand Theft Auto V is not going to make itself, there are too many "boring" bits that no one wants to work on.
This is why Linux will never be the majority desktop OS. Even on cell phones, it took a for-profit company like Google to make that work, because there are too many "boring bits" that no one wants to do unless they are paid to do them.
Yes, there are games that are labors of love, but the really big stuff requires more than that. Likewise, building a project like the Hoover Dam for example, is beyond "volunteer" work, people have to get paid to do that. They do it to get money to go do other things, like play games. If they just get given money, they'll skip the work part, and thus no big stuff.
But we like having the big stuff, people will miss it when it is gone.
Taxes on capital? The one thing which makes VAT so hugely successful is the difficulty of avoiding it. Capital can be moved far more easily than sales. Robots aren't entirely easy to move, but certainly easier than workers.
Any proposal for more taxes that fails to address evasion is naive to the point of being harmful.
Here's my thought, when landlords jack up prices just 'cuz they can, there would be a mass exodus of tenants to a cheaper area, maybe somewhere really cheap out in the boonies.
And then the boonies would no longer be cheap. :)
You take all that "new money" out to the boonies and quickly supply and demand would take over.
Yes, new stuff would get built, but you need only study the history of boom towns to see what happens to prices when large numbers of people go into an area.
And the greedy landlords would be left to lord over their ghost town.
Your premise is wrong. They aren't "greedy landlords", they are charging market rates. You'd just end up with the same situation wherever everyone moves to.
Because it would, that is how supply and demand work. There would be a MASSIVE new supply of money, along with increased costs of doing business in the form of taxes, higher wages, etc....So building apartments would become more expensive.
In urban areas that would be true, but in rural areas it would have the opposite effect by making rural living in existing smaller towns, which have been shrinking since the 1970s, more viable and thus opening up new rural supply. Many people might be tempted to move back to their smaller home towns or into the vast rural tracts of land in the Western United states if a Universal Basic Income made surviving comfortably in those areas a viable alternative. The rise of the Internet and technology since those outbound waves of migration beginning in the 1970s and before actually makes rural living, provided that income is available for food, shelter, clothing and other basics, more attractive because you would no longer be isolated as much from the world at large as you might have been in the 1930s say or even in the early 1950s or 1960s.
Consider this: If you think it wouldn't hurt, why not just give everyone $1 million, wouldn't that solve everything? Think that through a bit and you'll see why it doesn't work.
Unless you want the future to resemble something out of Elysium (2013 film) or Ready Player One, you cannot allow the unwashed masses to become essentially useless in the face of automated production run by robots and AIs while the wealthy retreat behind high walls and armed guards to enjoy a technological utopia disconnected from reality. The Universal Basic Income preserves the dignity of the masses in the face of inevitable job losses because to employ a person when a more efficient robot is available is to engage in charity anyway so why not simply provide the charity and free the hapless human from the indignity of being required to perform a job that an unthinking and uncaring robot could easily do better? We don't give everybody $1 million because the individual does not require $1 million to live a decent life with basic requirements. The Universal Basic Income is for basics. If you want more, you will still have to do something that other people with more would be willing to pay you for. That may be creating artwork or maintaining the robots or entertaining the wealthy or something else entirely but it won't be menial labor that is done by robots controlled by AIs. For example, in Her (2013 film) the protagonist worked at a company where Humans created "Beautiful Handwritten Letters" for other people who needed them for various reasons.
Only if the price of rent can go way up. Builders would pay a lot more to build, so they would have to charge a lot more.
Again, only in the cities and urban areas. Building a house is actually not difficult to do, especially if the amount of time it takes to complete the job is not of prime importance. If people had land and cheap materials at hand, they could build their own houses with minimal expert assistance for some of the critical structural items, like pouring a leveled and reinforced concrete foundation, but much of the rest could be either done by diligent amateurs with reference materials at hand or hired out for not all that much. Most of the cost of building in cities and urban environments comes from getting permission to build (aka red tape, zoning and planning laws, etc.) not actually doing the building once everything is approved and all of the environmental impact lawsuits from NIMBYs have been settled.
We can't manage to stop looting the social security pot long enough to pay a decent pension to the elderly. So, somehow, we're going to get it right with a larger chunk of the population?
Not saying it's a good or a bad idea. Just observing that people have a gift for screwing up even the best of ideas.
If only there was some way to get apartments built other than relying on people like you.
Yep, you could always ask the Soviet Union to do it...
Or the Cuba government... Or Venezuela...
How are all those working out?
Extremely limited, even. As the parent post said, they were aware that it would be temporary. Originally it would be for longer, granted, but they *still* were aware of it being temporary. And whether it's 2 years, or 3, or 5: you'll be less inclined to give up your job once you know you'll need that job back later.
Also, many things will never become clear with such limited experiments. For instance, there is a very big chance that, if a general, nation-wide UBI was implemented, that you'd get an automatic adaptation in regard to wages and pricing (rent for a house for instance), etc. You'll never get this with a limited, relatively small number of people, because the BNP, productivity, and general realisation nd economic effect of such a small portion of your populace is not measurable for a country or nation. however, the same UBI introduced nation-wide obviously WILL have retribution that could not have been found with a small example. Wages corporations pay are not going to decrease because 100 people are getting welfare/UBI extra. But they will decrease if *everyone* gets it.
The same goes for financing an UBI. It's no problem and hardly noticeable at all, that the state is able to sponsor an UBI of 100 people; it hardly makes a any dent in tax-revenue and expenditure, and won't have any effect on BNP. Do the same with the totality of your population, however, and you won't cope with your normal taxes anymore.
A lot of the effects, thus, won't show up in small-scale experiments.
Then again, I prefer another country to make a large-scale experiment. ;-) After all, chances are it will go drastically wrong, and you could really fuck up a country/society for years to come, that way.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Well, since YOU say it won't, I guess it is all roses and peaches...
And we should hold you to a lower standard. If you say it, it's true, until someone else gives proof, but if someone else disagrees, it's their responsibility to present proof to prove you wrong. Why a worthless hypocrite you are.
You might consider thinking and learning for a change, you might discover that what you think you know is wrong.
You might consider taking your own advice. The truth doesn't change to match your opinion, no matter how much you want it to.
Learn to love Alaska
For all you claim, I have as much or more, yet you give nobody else any respect, and demand more from everyone else. It just makes you a hypocrite.
Learn to love Alaska
The UBI is to delay the time when somebody thinks of a solution, 'cause it's usually no so good for the powers-that-be. Instead of money, they will hand out addictive drugs at some point instead, assuming there will be very few with the willpower to sell their drug allotment instead of consuming it.
I applied for a Loan of 30,000euro for my son's hospital bills on Friday with Mr.Alfred Kessinger and today the money was paid out to my account Today.. am now happy now because he got me out of debt by giving me a loan those who needs loan should contact him now via: am.invest@hotmail.com for more info.
Why would incarceration reduce your basic inalienable right to government money? And can I have my check sent to me in Mexico, or do I have to come across the border to pick it up, along with all the other illegal aliens who would like some of Uncle Sugar's Luck Bucks?
For all you claim, I have as much or more, yet you give nobody else any respect, and demand more from everyone else. It just makes you a hypocrite.
Of course I type out a long and reasoned reply with real information, and you reply with emotions and a personal attack.
You prove my point all too well...
The problem with any arguments on a fixed basic income is that some people may even be better off (the poverty line is something like $12000 in the USA and 10-20% of Americans live below it), while others that kind of money wouldn't even cover their yearly rent.
How is that an argument against? UBI shouldn't let you afford to live any place you want. There's only so much California to go around, for example. You're not entitled to it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Tax rent and interest income increasingly until it is impossible to actually profit just from owning things
There'd need to be some mechanism to discourage the owner of a particular piece of property, be it land, RF spectrum, copyright, or patent, from sitting on this property and not generating income from it. In the entertainment industry, for example, it's common for a copyright owner not to distribute certain old works because they would compete with the same publisher's newer works. I imagine that this sort of hoarding causes a deadweight loss to the economy.
And then the boonies would no longer be cheap. :)
You take all that "new money" out to the boonies and quickly supply and demand would take over.
Yes, new stuff would get built, but you need only study the history of boom towns to see what happens to prices when large numbers of people go into an area.
This only happens when too many people migrate to one place. Every boom town doesn't have to turn into SF. With a basic income, the idiotic employment-driven positive feedback loops that create hyper-expensive dystopias will be greatly diminished, and prices will stabilize around a more affordable cost of living.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The Canadian experiment was for a UBI in one small rural town with low unemployment and lots of unskilled jobs. And it wasn't studied in detail, some analysis was done of some random sampling of some records found in an archive. You would need to a do a proper trial in a modern urban service based economy to find out if they still hold up.
The Finnish and Utrecht aren't even for a UBI. They are trials of a simplified, unmeans tested welfare payment for a small number of existing welfare recipients who aren't working. It is aimed at welfare reform not necessarily a UBI.
Switzerland held a referendum on a real UBI proposal last night. 77% voted against it.
It's nice to be liked
But it's better by far to get paid
I know that most of the friends that I have don't really see it
That way
But if you could give 'em each one wish
How much do you wanna bet?
They'd wish success for themselves and their friends and
that would include lots of money
Treating users with respect, ha!
Yet even if it were tax free that wouldn't cover the rent for many people living in many cities.
If you don't need to work, you are not forced to live in an expensive location near an expensive city - move somewhere cheaper.
YC Sucks:
VCs don't take YC seriously because YC is a joke. YC has so many "schticks" but really
they know nothing of taking businesses from seed, angel, vc, public, to success. That's
why whenever anyone criticizes YC they trot out the THREE COMPANIES they've helped
that people know. Good job, losers.
This article:
And now, in an attempt to prove that they aren't entirely irrelevant other than as a vehicle for
taking private people's funds and BLOWING them on companies that could be helped by
REAL VCs... they're going to give RANDOM FAMILIES some SUBSTANDARD amount of
money on which families can't survive... and THEN.. and THEN they'll draw conclusions
from this.
Seriously, YC is like the Kardashians. They'll do anything for a media story. But it won't
help anyone but them. And there's nothing pretty about it. Also huge asses.
E
Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that âoea ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.â1 Similarly, another study reported that more than 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement.2 The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners milton friedman and friedrich hayek on the âoerightâ to their fellow Nobel laureate gunnar myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Partyâ(TM)s welfare state, on the âoeleft.â Myrdal stated, âoeRent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.â3 His fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck asserted, âoeIn many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a cityâ"except for bombing.â4
It's not universal until it applies to everyone. There's a big difference between handing a few random people an amount of money each month, and handing EVERYONE an amount of money each month. There's also a big difference between doing it for 6 months, and doing it for a lifetime. The results of this study, whatever they may be, won't tell us much about what would happen if it were applied universally.
Turn that around and suggest a national 2% sales tax, it would be largely the same thing and likely easier to collect.
Completely different. I'll leave it to you to think about. Since you don't understand, you probably wouldn't listen to someone trying to help you understand. I can explain it for you, but not understand it for you. And your comments make it sound like you'd play obtuse (or devil's advocate, or whatever you like to call it).
Learn to love Alaska
There was no reason in your long-winded reply. You repeated logic-less sound bites.
Learn to love Alaska
Then people can also suddenly afford to leave the damn expensive-as-hell city, which they CAN'T do right now, as they are one paycheck away from homelessness. So rents increase, and an exodus of people leaves, to areas where their UBI check easily covers cost of living.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
When currency becomes irrelevant because only a tiny percentage of people are required to produce all the goods and services necessary for the remaining population, we will no longer be able to sustain a consumer oriented economic system like we have today. If we do nothing, this will likely lead to civil unrest and years and perhaps decades of war and strife.
With a system such as basic income, I believe it is possible to soften the blow of the dramatic shifts in society and economics that we are likely to see in the new few generations. It may very well be possible for the current economic system to continue to function in a healthy way longer than it may have otherwise been able to. A the few remaining high producing individuals that receive pay for their work won't be able to decide how some portion of that wealth is spend, as it would be redistributed to cover universal income. Those recipients would likely make choices that would send that money back into the economy, you make think of them as artificially created consumers if socialism and wealth redistribution carries too many negative connotations for you.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
> I'd be curious to hear what Slashdot readers think about the possibility of a government-run Universal Basic Income program.
You mean aside from creating a class of "status quo" government supporters that would make our current problems with reform well-nigh unsolvable? You mean, aside from the government basically buying up votes of people on the dole, to keep them on the dole, to get yet more people on the dole, so they can pursue their more evil intentions like bending educational systems into propaganda machines and deliberately training people to be idiots so incapable of elementary arithmetic they will remain convinced that the government's printed money is somehow just as good as money supported by assets and a real economy? You mean aside from telling such people that the cost of giving them this money will be the loss of rights, loss of control of personal information, even health information, and aside from the fact that ALL your health care decisions would now be taken soly on the utility and reliability of your vote for the people in power? Aside from all that? Probably nothing.
I think it's even odds that the complete destruction of world-wide manufacturing capacity after WW2 (aside from the United States) is by far a bigger contributor. Japan has a similarly stringent (if not even more so) work ethic, and I think we've all seen what it's gotten them over the past decade or two.
Because it would, that is how supply and demand work.
Only if the demand remained in the exact same locations as now, which it wouldn't because of the financial freedom it gives people to not have to live in shitty suburbs in big cities.
Consider this: If you think it wouldn't hurt, why not just give everyone $1 million, wouldn't that solve everything? Think that through a bit and you'll see why it doesn't work.
That doesn't work for the same reason that zero dollars doesn't work. You do know that some where between black and white exist other colours?
If only there was some system between pure uncontrolled capitalism and Communism. I herd rumours that such a thing exists in parts of Europe.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If only there was some system between pure uncontrolled capitalism and Communism. I herd rumours that such a thing exists in parts of Europe.
Yep, remind me again what percentage of their national budgets that Europe pays for defense?
They can afford all that because they have the USA to defend them.
Perhaps we should leave Europe and let Russia take it over, see how well all those benefits work out for you.
"If you have a job in this country, (thereâ(TM)s a) 97 percent chance that you're not going to be in poverty."
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
And that doesn't even start to address the question of whether the "poverty" line is set unrealistically low.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
How unfortunate, wealth is not the primary goal of most people in our nation, yet we are essentially subjugated to this goal by people in charge.
All $19 trillion in debt really puts us in a good place.
So from the comments I'm hearing that communism falls apart because there is no motivation for people to work hard and thus make more money.
But then the same people are saying that UBI won't work because people are lazy, and won't be motivated to work to make more money when the opportunity is there.
Seems like the nature of humanity is that there are people who are motivated and the people who are motivated find a way to get ahead in any system (join the party, work for the KGB, flee the country, be corrupt, etc.) and people who are lazy find a way to milk any system that is put in place.
So UBI really changes nothing about human nature, but it reduces the overhead of the welfare system.
I don't understand the opposition to it.
Though this "Experiment" isn't really a legitimate UBI... it only goes on for 6 months, it's probably taxable income meaning that $1,000 is actually closer to $700 and it's in CA where $700 is chump change... This "experiment" is more like asking people "what if you won the $6k in the lottery? and were forced to take a 6 month annuity?" This is just throwing money at people to show that people with money are happier, and we have studies that show that people are happier making more money up to about $100k a year in income.
Here is one of several articles: http://www.economist.com/blogs...
I do believe in Universal Basic Income (UBI) as an inevitable concept.The robots/AIs are a-coming, which is one part and the other is the huge wealth disparity in the world.
...
I know many people disagree with the Luddite "robot/AI phobia" but nonetheless, robots take over more and more manual labour (receptionist-free hotels in Japan, Foxconn replacing workers on the assembly lines with robots and fast food eating places (I find it hard to call McD a restaurant, it sort of cannot come out) threatening, if not actually implementing, food preparer robotic replacements) and we may end up with the employee-free Automat-type restaurants where everything is automated. Literally.
Ah, but the anti-Luddite counter-argument is that workers will just move to other, non-automated jobs. Er, what jobs? It seems the AI development currently is going so fast that even creative jobs are threatened, maybe not short term, but it is on the horizon.
Currently we are just waiting for a catastrophe to unfold: Tech takes jobs, people spend less, buy less, profits fall, companies fire and automatise, more people spending less, buying less, profits fall further, companies fire more and automatise more, even more people spendings less,
Ah well, as long as there is enough for my pension.
Oh, and just a thought, UBI in countries with many illegal immigrants or fairly open borders may cause unrest if actual employment starts to fall drastically, assuming the immigrants have no right to UBI.
Time to start watching Star Trek again, folks!
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
A lot of that depends also on where you live, and how it stacks.
$2000 per person is $4k/month per household. In many places that's not too bad.
Also, what's the lower age-bound? If you have a couple kids that are 16+, are they eligible? Then it might be $6-8k per household if everyone pitches in. At that point you're doing pretty good.
2)There will be those who game the system to have even more money. Want an example? Look no further than your average person receiving food stamps or other welfare and working under the table.
Lets push your model and see how it responds. Ban income. Now nobody has any money so everything becomes free for everyone? Seems unlikely.
Your model assumes that everyone who wanted housing already had it and that nobody places any value on the extra cash they get from UBI.
The more likely scenario is that prices for 'luxury' housing goes up some and the percentage of occupation for more basic housing goes up.
The problem with welfare is that it actually enforces bad decisions and penalizes work. Save money for a car so you can get a job? Oops, now you have too much money so you lose your benefits. But it'll take longer to get them back than your savings will last you, you'd have been better off spending your savings. Get a job to start climbing out? Oops, you lose more benefits than the new job pays.
There will likely be some of that, but probably less than you might think. Firstly $1000 isn't a lot of money, particularly if other social programs disappear. Not sure what a 1 bedroom costs in your neck of the woods, but you wouldn't be able to afford much of anything else like heat, food, etc... Also I would imagine that they will all fall into the tax code. So the 12-24k (depending on 1vs2k/Month) bracket would not be taxed, as that would be stupid. While those above would. So someone who has nothing would be getting the full benefit, while someone already making money is only going to get a portion based on whatever tax bracket they are in.
The other risk is douchebags like Walmart using government subsidies to reduce their workers wages. That is we don't have to pay them that much because they have access to social programs like food stamps (which then get spent at Walmart). So this is something that already happens and exists today. Would it get worse with basic income? Perhaps. However that is easily combated by minimum wage regulation to prevent what is essentially war profiteering (war on poverty).
However one thing that I think keeps getting forgotten in this conversation is "Wealth" VS "Production". So yes some jobs are lost to robots, really more to process automation. In fact more could be said to be lost to foreign robots, i.e. outsourcing. However even Foxconn has indicated they are going to be building robots, so it really is just an unending cycle. As food for thought, Foxconn's biggest client is Apple, building iPhone and the like. Apple was announced as the largest holder of wealth (basically cash) in the world*. While interesting, the important part of that whole piece is the "*". Apple makes things, and employs people. That "*" indicates that the statement is true for all industries that are not in the financial sector. Meaning that by far the largest holders of wealth and cash in the world are financial institutions. Who mostly play with numbers to make money. They produce nothing, and employ very few, and what they use more than ever to generate more money is DEBT. Now try to align that with the whole system of poverty and lack of jobs, etc.... One could argue that the whole sick system is what got us here in the first place, and that things like universal income is treating a symptom and not the root cause.
For all you claim, I have as much or more, yet you give nobody else any respect, and demand more from everyone else. It just makes you a hypocrite.
Of course I type out a long and reasoned reply with real information, and you reply with emotions and a personal attack.
You prove my point all too well...
You seem to be confusing brevity with a hostility that is not evident, AK Marc made an observation about the tenor of your own post, your response is to further attack them.
Calling out your own behavior as hypocritical is not emotions or a personal attack, unless your behavior when you initiated the complaint yourself, was an emotional and personal attack.
In which case, you're still a hypocrite for doing it, but not letting anybody else apply it to you.
There are certainly posts that are full of belligerence and empty ranting, that exceed the limits of civil discourse, but AK Marc did not pass those boundaries, making your reaction unwarranted at best, an act of defensive hypocrisy itself.
Except, that a consolidation of wealth has lead to wealthy people paying off politicians to protect their wealth and gather more. The political payouts go to fund an ever escalating spending spree for access to the ears of voters to spread disinformation which has very little production value for society.
It was voted down by crab bucket reasoning.
Can't let someone else have a life and home unless they#re working as crappy a job as you do! That's unfair!!! Even if you get to keep everything you have and nothing changes, you and your ilk would rather someone starve on the streets than "get ahead" off the streets when you didn't have the option.
And what was with the "Oh the young won't want to work!"? Really, no old fuckers scammed the system and avoided work, right, only "those other young kids" you *imagine* exist.
Maybe rents go down because people can move to less crowded places, which increases building and new business elsewhere.
There is some truth to that, many people live in certain places because "that's where the jobs are".
They ran an experiment many years ago in Canada, called Mincome. Some of the results:
"Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school."
http://motherboard.vice.com/re...
Yes, a slight decrease in people in the workforce, but that were the young generation that attended school longer and mothers that stayed home longer to take better care of the children.
If those are be the results on a largest scale we've tried it so far then I don't see the problem (yet).
However just like with this experiment those people knew that the money would end at a certain set time, that has a significant effect on what most people do with it.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat.
Muaaahahahahaaaa!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
This is what I see about poverty. People are asked to work for minimum wage, which is not a living wage. Since these individuals need to make ends meet, they hold down two jobs. And even so, with that minimum wage, for both husband and wife, don't expect them to buy health insurance, or afford university. Furthermore, with subsistence living, cell phones and cellphone services are a luxury. These people cannot buy the goods that are making the one percent wealthy.
In all ways, the Reagan's trickle-down economics has created the poor class. It has not lifted the level of poverty to above subsistence living.
The idea of a minimum income works in Canada. Some of my peers need the government old-age security cheque, which is adjusted to the family income. If the individual has a large private pension, most of that old-age security money is clawed back. And in Quebec where I live, we have single payer healthcare system and a single payer drug plan. We can augment it with private insurances, or stay with the governement plan.
Some of what Sanders suggests is what Americans need. Herein is a brief story.
I have a friend with MS, a debilitating disease. The daily supply of syringes with medicine would have cost him around $16,000/yr. Add to that the anti-biotics for the kids, flue vaccines, etc and his medical costs would exceed $17,000/yr. if there was no "single payer system". Fortunately, his out-of-pocket medicine costs are capped at $3000/yr for drugs and healthcare.
The question to ask and answer for yourself, is "Who is better off? The insurance companies, who are still doing well with private/public policies or citizens of the country? By the way, the MS person has a job and a home with mortgage, and will not have to worry about foreclosure.
And by the way, that person is not me.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
And yet big, money-hefty institutions (and persons) still get hacked, regularly. A robot army is only loyal so long as you control it, and only useful so long as it can't be disrupted.
So long as I can still afford a new Macbook every few years, I'm all for it!
most people posting here have no idea what they are talking about.
especially you.
actual economists have torn down every argument you're making.
you have no legitimacy here.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
no that's not how it works.
that god awful argument has been debunked so many times its not even worth getting into yet again. but simply there wouldn't be some new massive supply of money; its no different than MW increases, which occur traditionally in response to inflation, not as a cause of it. inflation occurs on its own in a growing economy. and the plea of "million dollars" isn't even a legitimate question, these things are always tied to cost of living and right now that's no where near a cool million.
plus, the UBI already exists in a different form.
we call it the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
you keep describing yourself.
psychologists call that projection.
back in reality, the only one saying you are right...is you.
the ones saying we are right includes most of the most respected economists talking about these things.
I suggest getting your economics from actual economists.
you'll be wrong less often.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
They want to make us all work.
the UBI is fundamentally a redistribution.
you aren't actually adding anything and the effects on inflation would be minor at best, no different from MW increases.
inflation grows on its own, simply from the growth of the economy, far quicker than MW increases add dollars to the economy, and that pattern is very likely to continue with the UBI as well. consider that the UBI already exists, albeit weakly, and in an after tax fashion, through the EITC. the primary differences between a Negative Income Tax (like the EITC) and a UBI are mostly down to semantics and administrative concerns.
If you want to live in 9 square meters - which is what a soviet citizen got for housing - go for it.
-- The Swiss just voted down UBI
-- I for one will leave the US if UBI is enacted - I won't pay for such disincentivizing nonsense
-- The "real problems" in the US are structural and simply throwing money at it won't fix those any more than old-school welfare did
I have a concern that is similar to how some restaurants handle their wait staff... they pay less than minimum wage and rely on the tips to equal the full pay. What would be there to prevent a company from saying "well, you make 2K a month for UBI... so I can pay you 2K less". The end result would mean people work the same, for the same and the other money doesn't really make a dent in anything for them.
Conservatives are against minimum wages because they are inherently inflationary. Also, they are blatantly unfair and biased towards wealthier parts of the country. You would think that liberals who are always shouting about fairness and equality would take into consideration the plight of the poor in our country in places like Louisiana and Mississippi when they cry about raising the minimum wage in places like California. Typically, the marketplace in California has made a $15 minimum obsolete by the time it is passed, but places like Mississippi are still struggling to meet the old $7 rate.
The overlap between people who want to live on their UBI and people who would invest in rental properties is going to be pretty darn small. My guess is the null set. Also, the housing sector adds housing to the economy, which I consider fairly important.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Much of the current UBI argument is that there will not be enough sufficiently productive jobs in the economy that the below-average are qualified for (and there is evidence that we're down that road already). At that point, it's worthwhile to pay people not to work.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Step one, build lots of lots of jails.
Step two create laws that are very easy to get in trouble with. Make it so people with the least money are the ones most likely to break these laws.
Step three, Strip all rights from these 'criminals' ideally paint them as 'horrible people unworthy of redemption or rehabilitation'
Step Four, to make sure you get 'all the unwashed' impose draconian three strikes laws, so even a few small crimes of opportunity quickly turn to life sentence.
Step Five, requite them to 'work' (non economic useful jobs like the classic license plate) in Jail for trivial amounts of money, but be willing to sell them goods to decorate their jail cells and for better food. In time they may even become effective 'consumers' for a list of critical items, but in most cases these items are bought 'for' them without any input from them. (Food, Toilet paper, Clothing etc. etc)
Now with a major part of the population in jail, you can 'efficiently feed and warehouse' them and the remaining wealthy can feel good about looking down at these poor people who are so clearly not due any sympathy or political power.
Obviously, any increase in corporate tax is going to have results for some people. Increases in consumer prices would result in a loss of purchasing power overall, while reductions in profits would be less money for shareholders. This doesn't mean that corporate taxes are a bad idea.
A flat tax and a sales tax are not the same thing. People with more income don't buy proportionately the same amount of stuff. Sales taxes are therefore somewhat regressive, unlike flat taxes.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
One of the key ways we learn how to manage our lives responsibly is through the management of money, specifically, how we get it and how we spend it. These lessons tend to be redirected to bigger issues such as how to manage relations with others including significant others, friends, kids, and even voting for leaders. The more opportunities we remove from our lives to learn these lessons, the less likely we are to have those skills when they are most needed.
UBI will start off as a lump of money. Later, it will be an allocation of food, an allocation of living space based on need, and a little left over for “other”. At some point, “they” will decide that you are not eating the correct foods with your allotment, so specific foods will be allocated to you for a specific diet that is in your best interest and reduces healthcare costs. Clearly, since you are not responsible enough to pick your own diet, you are clearly not responsible enough to pick your leaders, or leave your allotted region, or associate with certain people. “They” will guide you to opportunities to optimize your life as “they” see fit.
Part of the plan is for people to be able to sit around doing nothing. If there isn't a job for someone* that will be productive enough to pay for that person's basic needs, we're going to have to cover it anyway, and just giving them the money saves a lot of administrative costs. Moreover, if a person has the ability to sit around doing nothing, they aren't going to be pressured into taking a job just because they need to survive, and this will give them bargaining power with employers. It would make things like minimum wage unnecessary.
*The below average will always be with us. On any more or less continuous scale you care to name, about half the population is below the median.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Currently, wealthier societies are not even at replacement population levels, while poorer ones show high population growth. If we take more people out of poverty, we're likely to reduce the birth rate.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
One of the most expensive places to live in the United States. $2k ought to just about cover a Big Mac. A better experiment would be to see what people do with $2k in an area where that's considered good money, like Ft. Wayne, Indiana where you can buy a nice house with a yard for about $80k.
6~12 months of basic income (BI) isn't long enough, people won't quit there jobs to pursue other objectives if they know BI is going away shortly. Or take risks/lifestyles that lifelong BI would enable. I know it's a lot of money, but if we really want to see what will happen I think they need to select households and guarantee BI for life.
IIRC there was a lottery that promised $1000/week for life to winners, taking a look at how those people's lives have gone would be a good source of data.
No inflation isn't a problem... Assume that I am given 2000 dollars by Y Combiner. This is taxable income. Various governments will easily take 1000 a month off the top. Now, lets assume that Y Combiner needs to come up with this money - they will have to apply for a government grant for 3000 dollars per person, allowing them to pay various people 1000 a month to cover overhead and "profit", 2000 to the lucky recipient. So the government looses 2000 dollars. Now the government will need to raise taxes (or increase debt spending) by 5-6 thousand a month (again to cover their overhead - you think this stuff is free). This will cause a net loss in income of 4000 dollars to give me 1000 dollars a month to spend.
Oh Wait - you thought money grows on trees?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
giving people money doesn't taken them out of poverty, you only need to look at lotto winners to see that.
What about a possibly bigger supply of construction workers?
Some people might quit their hopeless shit job (say call center), get some training and get hired to build stuff.
Without UBI, same person runs the risks of ending homeless if quitting the shit job. That's how people think in high unemployment countries. And if you're "unskilled" you won't get a minimum wage job in construction or something like that anymore.
The property sector does not add to the economy. It's literally not producing anything. It's about sitting and waiting until market forces produces a favourable price for you and then selling it off. Not only is nothing added to the economy. The inflated selling price actually takes away from the economy because real resources are used to pay for the fantasy that the property has increased in value. The regularity in which the property market bubbles and pops, damaging the economy in the process, undoes any good that adding housing to the economy does, probably more. It's easier to destroy than to create and sustain. Furthermore, adding housing is not in the interest of the property sector because they can only get inflated selling prices by limiting supply, and we see that with the lobbying to make building regulations nonsensical and expensive.
The credit crisis was precisely about people who could have lived on a UBI, but were instead sold an impossible real estate riches scheme. I don't blame them for being taken in. I blame the fantasy selling machine - they had to believe their own fairy tale.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
This is funny. Yaron Brooks answers is great youtube series on how GDP would be 70T without the welfare state, and about how hong kong went from a rock to equal to USA standard of living faster than USA itself did with proptery rights, 0 welfare, 0 regulation and 15% flat tax When are we going to get smart an allow free trade aka capitalism to run wild making us all rich with throium clean atomic power and union free private trrains, private cops n fire, and no teachers? imagine if everyone was an engineer! all 300million americans if think tanks earned thier money with real invention, and universities and public school GONE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will OPPOSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... because they fear you'll NOT be subservient to them
Casteism
Giving someone unused to handling money a one-time windfall, and that person is likely to screw it up. Give someone a halfway decent income over a lifetime and that person is likely to learn to handle it. Giving people enough money does, by definition, get them out of poverty. Given access to education, modern medicine, old-age security, and television, birth rates will go down sharply.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The property sector does add to the economy. You're referring to various forms of real estate speculation, which don't have any obvious benefit. However, we do need people to construct and maintain and rent out and sell housing, and they're going to want money to do it. We just don't want them to wreck the economy by making net loss deals and trying to make up for that with volume, or making artificial financial instruments that total to incredibly larger than the real wealth they're based on.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That's why the right approach is to tax people, not corporations. A tax on corporations, like you say, just gets passed on to its customers uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them at a disproportionate, regressive rate. If you tax people directly, you can tax them proportional to their income and make sure that those who can best bear the burden are the ones who pay.
It's also why basic income is better than minimum wage. A minimum wage increases costs for all businesses uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them (the small businesses, mom and pop shops) at a disproportionate, regressive rate.
Minimum wage and corporate tax put the burden on small business and poor people. A universal income funded by a personal tax helps small businesses and poor people.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It's also why basic income is better than minimum wage. A minimum wage increases costs for all businesses uniformly, thus impacting the poorer of them (the small businesses, mom and pop shops) at a disproportionate, regressive rate.
And that might have worked, 40 years ago...
The problem comes today in our global economy... those "taxes" have to come from income, that income has to come from jobs, and if people just ship jobs elsewhere, then what?
I think large scale experiments will start small too also with a limited effect: aka with a small amount of money.
New things are always on the horizon
But this will not help in predicting long term effects of higher amounts of money.
Let's say one starts of with 100 dollar. Nothing happens for the next year. 200 dollars. nothing happens for a year. etc. You reach 800 dollar, but then start to note negative influences which actually started around 400 dollar, but only now become apparent.
Ok... but at that point, you're 8 years into the program, and all your citizens have been made accustomed to getting money for nothing, maybe have made loans with the taught of the UBI in mind, and you're whole populace has become to see it as an acquired right (which always happens when you give a benefit long enough).
Is there any political party that would dare to revoke or starkly reduce this UBI, and still hopes to be re-elected? I don't think so.
As I said, it's a pretty damn dangerous thing to do for a country, and if it really goes awry, it could destroy your national economy. And even when using mitigating methods, like small amounts, etc., you'll never be fully sure whether you'll not end up with huge consequences if something goes wrong, but only shows up in the long run.
And with small scale experiments, you'll never get a fully valid extrapolation for a nation-wide UBI.
So, for me, I have nothing intrinsically against a nation trying out a general UBI, but I'll prefer it to be ANOTHER nation doing it first, while we wait 10 years, and see how it goes. ;-)
Even with all the theories floating around here on slashdot (everyone is an expert again, as usual), my personal estimate is, that a true UBI, country-wide implemented, and within our current neo-liberal capitalistic free-market system, has only a 20% of success. The main problem is and remains: who is going to pay for it all? Some seem to think a countries' economy is a closed loop, and you simply can re-use the money endlessly. Well, it's not. So it can't be just by 'taxpayers' (at least, not at the level of current taxes, which are huge as it is in the EU). Some say: "take it from the rich'.. but tax the rich too much, and they'll flee to another country. The same for big companies. and the most heard one is: it will pay for itself, because of reduction of administrative overhead. Which is BS, or, at least, a stupendously optimistic view on how much (cost)reduction it will bring. In the best of cases, it would be around 15-20% of the total costs, not 60%, let alone 100%.
As of yet, I didn't see a clear, concise and valid system (and certainly not something with numbers and calculations and other hard data) of who, what and how much exactly such a nation-wide UBI would be sustained long term.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---