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The Case Against a Universal Basic Income (vox.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
A prominent think tank founder argues that a Universal Basic Income is more likely to increase poverty than decrease it. Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, estimates just in the U.S. the cost would reach $3 trillion a year, "close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects... A UBI that's financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history..."
In a long interview with Vox, he warns that "If you have big, very expensive, and therefore highly politically unrealistic proposals, then I worry that people will look at them and say, 'Okay, we can do one or two pieces,' and too often the pieces that get selected out are pieces where a lot of the money goes to the middle or upper middle class... even UBI's staunchest supporters say we can get there in 15 to 20 years. I am totally not comfortable with any policy prescription that says we wait 15 to 20 years to deal with very deep poverty." He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable.
In a long interview with Vox, he warns that "If you have big, very expensive, and therefore highly politically unrealistic proposals, then I worry that people will look at them and say, 'Okay, we can do one or two pieces,' and too often the pieces that get selected out are pieces where a lot of the money goes to the middle or upper middle class... even UBI's staunchest supporters say we can get there in 15 to 20 years. I am totally not comfortable with any policy prescription that says we wait 15 to 20 years to deal with very deep poverty." He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable.
Follow the money. Soros is a big contributor with CBPP. Should raise some eyebrows already.
In today's world of increasing automation, how many of those jobs are essentially going to be makework? Or part of marketing efforts that try to convince people they need something frivolous that they don't have? Is the current economic system so inevitable or desirable that those things are preferable to just letting people stay home?
We're already spending an awful lot of money on social services that won't be needed if people had a guaranteed basic income. It's rather duplicitous of this think tank to pretend that it would be an entirely new cost, rather than a replacement for other programs as it is intended.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Ok... aside form the possible tax implications we may or may not have to deal with...
We've de-funded NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts, education in general, and the state university system.
All we'd have to do is fund those items fully- and ten years later we *might* be able to consider some form of UBI. But not before the infrastructure needed to support it is in place. And it's probably a bad overall idea.
This seems a better investment to me: Make education easier, fund creativeness (a singular American strength), fund science, and fund space exploration.
That's a winning combination for any economy.
UBI is a nice idea for countries who have their economy in order with the goal of long term prosperity. The USA does not manage it's economy for long term goals. It simply tries to survive....
(As a note I do support social security and disability benefits for those who qualify for it.)
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
So what if the UBI reaches 100% of the federal tax? It will replace Social Security (25% of the budget), safety net programs like unemployment insurance (10%) and partially Medicare/Medicaid (25%). That's 60% of the budget that will be replaced by the UBI.
The rest is military (24%) and "everything else". Military should be curtailed, but we probably want to keep the "everything else" stuff since it includes funding for NASA, NIH and education and other stuff.
So yeah, UBI is definitely doable but it will require significant adjustments in multiple programs.
There'd be much more jobs if they just cut the work week from 40 hours to 20.
But they won't because then we'd all have time to think instead of work.
Right now the non thinkers don't work.
they have more money than god, at this point in time. what they stock pile, many of us could live on for the rest of our lives, in the thousands and 10's of thousands. the disparity is disgusting.
take money from the churches, too. they should work for the people but they hoard and don't do SHIT with it, for the most part. sell their land and their assets and give it to the people. we need it. what does god need with a starsh^Hall that money?
stop spending on military. defund 90% of it. its bullshit and its not needed in the way it once was.
truly remove about half of the government offices and jobs. they suck up funds and don't give much back for it.
tax those who are leeches the most; like the wall street motherfuckers. they don't create anything (nothing built, nothing written, nothing really created in any sense other than virtual) and they take so much. tax those who do nothing and collect so much for doing nothing.
we could easily READJUST ourselves so that its more fair.
but we won't unless we fight. and oh boy, I see a fight coming on in the next 50 or less years if we don't fix things soon.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Running more money through the government is a rotten idea. It has friction. Taxpayers give 100 but only 50 goes out the government chews up the rest. Stop paying stupid girls to have unprotected sex. If you cannot provide more value than a robot why should you be breeding?
The leading cause of "racism" is contact with blacks. Until they wise up, father their own kids, and stop this moronic thug-gangsta shit, that will remain the case.
Did you really think it's all just an aversion to melanin? Hardly. Black males are about 6.5% and commit just over 50% of all US murders. There is good reason to avoid them.
If they change then my view of them will change too. It's just that simple. How is that unfair? Do tell. Make your case. Don't be a pussy and just mod it down. Talk to me. Explain the superiority of your view. With blacks we've tried everything - except holding them responsible for their values and choices. It's been a disaster. So tell me why they should not be evaluated on what they have achieved.
Why not basic? Example: if you make less than $2500 per month, you receive a top-up to this 'basic' level of income. If you make an excess of $2500 per month, you don't qualify. Why Universal Basic Income? Why not simply Minimum Income?
UBI is a recipe for disaster unless... Accepting the UBI means you give up the right to vote in state and federal elections for 4 years. That is the only way it can be self regulating... without that critical detail, it would clearly ruin the country... Every politician would promise an increase in the UBI in an effort to buy votes. But if accepting the UBI means giving up your right to vote, it would be self-limiting and might actually be a good thing.
Correction...they want to make everyone who's not independently wealthy work. UBI already exists for those who can afford not to.
An honest person does not expect to be paid for doing nothing. A person who does nothing deserves nothing. Do you not believe in the action of moral law?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
How is collecting tax an act of violence, are you getting shot during an audit now?
Permanent residents and citizens only.
$500/month for 21+
$250/month for 21 and younger
The lesser of which for those on Social Security and SSI.
10% UBI tax and extra taxes on income taxes.
I figure it'd cost $1.2 trillion per year.
I think the issue is people who no longer have the option to work and earn a sustainable living. Those people need help because it's more commonly no longer their fault, they don't have the option to take responsibility for their income anymore.
Big fan of the UBI, and yet I think this guy's not entirely wrong. People talk about phase-in's like "we start with $5,000 for everybody, then ramp up year over year by x dollars. This guy is saying something more, I think, like start with a livable amount for the very poor, and work your way up the income ladder. Think it'll peter out before it gets to the rich? You don't know any rich folks, do you? Wealth trickles up, anyhow ...
Not the poster you replied to, but do you have any actual argument other than an insult and a hissy fit not worthy of a foul-mouthed toddler?
Ok... aside form the possible tax implications we may or may not have to deal with...
We've de-funded NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts, education in general, and the state university system.
All we'd have to do is fund those items fully- and ten years later we *might* be able to consider some form of UBI. But not before the infrastructure needed to support it is in place. And it's probably a bad overall idea.
This seems a better investment to me: Make education easier, fund creativeness (a singular American strength), fund science, and fund space exploration.
That's a winning combination for any economy.
UBI is a nice idea for countries who have their economy in order with the goal of long term prosperity. The USA does not manage it's economy for long term goals. It simply tries to survive....
(As a note I do support social security and disability benefits for those who qualify for it.)
Assume that a basic income is $50,000.
Deposit $1 million in an index fund and expect 7% annual return averaged over 40 years.
Discount 2% for inflation, that means the original $1 million deposit will yield $50,000 in perpetuity.
Do this incrementally.
Example: We have 10 aircraft carriers, and 2 under construction. Suppose we fix on only having 10 carriers, and at any one time one is under construction (to trade the older ones out due to obsolescence).
That's $6.5 billion savings in hardware costs, which would pay for 6,500 UBI accounts. Have a lottery, start taking people out of the workforce.
It costs $7 million per day to maintain any one carrier. Saving that money would provide for 2,500 UBI accounts annually.
Any savings in federal spending - any of it - could be funneled into the UBI lottery system. It doesn't need to give everyone a UBI right now, it only needs to go incrementally towards that goal.
Note that companies are testing autonomous tractor trailers in Nevada right now. By my estimate, autonomous vehicles will put 5 million Americans out of work almost immediately.
Note that Hillary wants to enforce Obama's executive order granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, which would put 7 million more job seekers into the market almost instantly. (And we'd have a massive influx of illegals after.)
Note that Amazon and WalMart are experimenting with automated order fulfilment and delivery. That will put a bunch more Americans out of work.
Note that fast food restaurants are automating their process right now. That will drop another 3.6 million job seekers into the market.
Fewer people starving for lack of a job means less chance for armed revolt.
Do the math.
Who's talking about abolishing capitalism? It just shouldn't be a life-and-death situation.
When all the baby boomers are retired, and retirees outnumber workers (taxpayers), Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget in 2030. Taxes will have to go way up to pay for everything else. It's better to be rich or poor, as the middle class will pay through wazoo to support all those seniors who think the whole world owes them a dime or two.
It won't replace Medicare/Medicaid at least, since people are sure as heck not going to spend their UBI on buying expensive private medical insurance.
You can't directly compare how much other countries spend on their militaries. For one thing, their soldiers make a lot less, and their benefits (such as, you know, treating them if their extremities are blown off) are much lower. That alone is about half of the entire military budget. It's also not like you have a choice to buy foreign military gear, it all has to be designed and made right here, at great expense. And even so, 5% of GDP is a small price to pay for having your children die on someone's bayonets. If you want to tell me this can't happen, this has happened multiple times in just recent history to countries which also thought this couldn't happen. In fact, US military (and US in general) is a major reason there hasn't been another major European war. What you now recognize as the EU, was created with heavy prodding from post-war US diplomats.
One of my clients has 13 subsidized foreign (!) workers. In round numbers, he pays them $4/hr, you pay them $8/hr, but they only actually get $8/hr, because $4/hr goes to an NGO "acclimation and training" scam. I'll have to check to see if Greenstein is running it (and/or arranging their grossly overpriced 3-to-a-room housing).
One can believe all that, and still believe in UBI.
Learn to love Alaska
Dramatic decrease in crime due to minimal needs (housing+food) provided for. This alone will make the whole society much better place. There will still be crimes of opportunity and greed. But not out of desperation.
But what is the current cost of all the progress it wold replace?
I make robots and I'm pretty good at my job, so y'all better figure this shit out pretty soon.
till there are no rich no more - Alvin Lee & Ten Years After
i am sure all the multi-millionaires and billionaires and multi-billionaires can stand to lose a few bucks to help the poor, this nation favors the rich so much that it is sicking to see such wealth piled up while so many can not even afford clean clothes and food!!!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Using taxes to provide a UBI is stupid. The only way it works is to have the Federal Reserve create the money to pay out through the Federal government. This is not about wealth redistribution, but providing some basic level of capital that isn't zero.
The only question is what that does to inflation and whether that creates a de facto "tax" on the economy. As long as increases to the basic income are inline with increases in inflation then it is manageable. So the basic income should be enough to live on in the most affordable places, but not so much that it acts merely as an inflation causing subsidy.
In a world where nearly everything can be automatized, people will need to eat. And if they can't work, they can't get money. Farming jobs are very likely to be automatize soon as well, some farming jobs almost are fully automatize already.
Rich will set up a LLC or private corporation to manage their money and and only withdraw the maximum limit. If you think fixing corporate taxes will help, you'll be wrong. There are many accounting tricks to make the earnings go up in smoke. For example you reinvest the money to differ the earnings to keep them from being realized. Just look at GE. They are famous for not paying any corporate taxes for last few decades. In fact they have so much tax credit from "loses", they won't be paying any taxes for eternity.
Okay, we can do one or two pieces,' and too often the pieces that get selected out are pieces where a lot of the money goes to the middle or upper middle class
Say what? Who in their right mind thinks it would be politically feasible for UBI to be rolled out in pieces, where the first piece ends up with the money going all to the middle or upper middle class?
The left would excoriate it because it does nothing to help the poor; and the right would excoriate it because of the massive tax increases it would require to fund. From a political perspective, you couldn't possibly engineer a more infeasible proposal.
As an American, you should never allow it either. If you haven't figured out, the founding mantra of the USA is "equal opportunity, not equal outcome". By forcing successful and contributing citizens to pay for someone else's income encourages mediocrity and abuse. Just look at all the failed socialist countries who had this as their main goal, with Venezuela as the latest example.
Look at all the successful socialist countries who had that as their goal also - Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Switzerland, just to name a few.
Libertarians view the UBI as a potential way to eliminate the bureaucracy surrounding the administration of many social welfare programs.
Where you have billions being spent to "help" people helping the helpers rather than those in need. Give all people a UBI and you can let people determine their own needs, rather than having government workers paid to determine people's needs.
The GGP is, though possibly not intentionally. The only way to enforce the "a person who does nothing deserves nothing" rule would be to eliminate the stock market, eliminate corporations, and basically throw out the entire system as it is now. After all, the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent." It is basically the exact opposite of the fanciful notion that people should be rewarded for their hard work; the people at the bottom invariably work the hardest (to the point that they get home from work physically exhausted) and get the least benefit from that work, and the people at the top do the least work and reap the biggest rewards.
A universal basic income is really the only way to make it possible for people to be rewarded semi-equally for equal amounts of work. It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money. And whether they choose to improve themselves or not becomes entirely under their own control, rather than having menial labor forced upon them by the need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
What?
No, you have to fund UBI by taxing productive assets - that's the whole point: ensure everyone in society is getting the benefits of productive assets, not just the owners of the productive assets. The only way to do that without wholesale socialism (state ownership of productive assets) is by taxing the productive assets.
Simply creating money like you suggest, without tying that money creation to increased production, is a textbook case for triggering runaway inflation.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
In the 1980s, my parents paid 18% interest on their mortgage. The same go-go 80s.
Inflation has a LOT of room for accomodation.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
not just to help the poor, but because I'm sick and tired of all the social distortions and general nastiness that results from so much money being dumped in the hands of so few. Letting guys like Sheldon Adelson & the Kock bros. run amok is against everybody's interests except for them and a few of their best paid lackeys. Money is power, and nobody should have that much power.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the founding mantra of the USA is "equal opportunity, not equal outcome".
Apparently, you went to an American school too...
Perhaps start with portugal and italy then greece and spain... Let us know how it goes.
If you look at just how much we all pay in taxes you'd quickly realize our problem with poverty is self-induced. The government takes about 30% of peoples pay via taxes on corporations and then on your wages. Most people don't realize that there is a 15% tax on there wage in addition to a 15% tax that is hidden because your employer doesn't tell you that you would have otherwise made another 15% hadn't the government stolen it from them.
Now you have to add in property taxes which are paid by every renter and home-owner as well. Landlords pass on taxes to renters because it wouldn't be profitable otherwise. So yes you do pay taxes even if it isn't coming directly out of your paycheck or going directly to the government.
You also have various other types of taxes like sales tax and in states where there is no general purpose sales tax you have other types of taxes like 'prepared food taxes'. We also have taxes on phone services and hidden taxes like 'vehicular registration'. I paid over $200 in New Hampshire to register a 16 year old car that I bought with 207,000 miles on it. The car itself was only $500.
Do you believe that Calvin wasn't full of shit?
Some well meaning youngsters actually believe all the shit that is coming out of the Bernie campaign. But the people who will inevitably rise up and be put in charge of administering these programs will use them to benefit themselves primarily. This is why Hillary Clinton is in charge of 300+ million dollars with her global campaign for good. It is also why all these subsidized housing programs inevitably give rich landlords $800 dollars a month to house poor people in slums that are worth $300 a month. By basic human nature people should realize that every social program will always in the end benefiting the rich ruthless elite. Rather than trying to 'help people out', we should force them to defend for themselves. Show them that the way to wealth and self sufficiency is to start a business. Or better yet rob some of the rich with too much money. Robbery is a legitimate business in the Darwinian scheme of things. How did the USA become g8. We robbed the people that were living here previously. How are Mexico and China becoming gr8. By robbing and selling drugs to those that were formerly gr8.
Peoples that have become weak and effeminate will inevitably be replaced by those that are stronger, more virile, and more Barbaric
Thinking of you white liberals who want to save the world.
Swiss voters said Hell No to UBI.
The first three have small, and up until recently very homogeneous. If they start hading out $50k to the legions of Islmofacists flooding those countries, they get even more refugees and then go broke.
The difference is that inflation-adjusted housing prices have gone up like 40% since then. It's no longer possible for people to buy a starter house with mostly cash and only a small loan.
Every full human equivalent robot should be able to support a real human. As we get more and more automated the tax rate can drop.
We already have, robot surgeons, robot diagnosing doctors, robot truck drivers, robot short order cooks, robot farmers, robot warehouses, robot corner stores. These are going to become a lot more common quickly. Robots are going to be displacing pretty much everyone and leaving only small niches for actual humans. I would ask all the people going "people must work for money" what all the people are going to do, With robot workers our production ability will greatly exceed our consumption.
Right now when a robot displaces a human. The end product gets cheaper but the rest of the system loses human wage, taxes and spending from that human wage.With robots doing the actual work and producing value, we can tax human equivalent workers. Robots will still be cheaper than humans to employ for tasks.
Every full human equivalent robot should be able to support a real human. As we get more and more automated the tax rate can drop.
BASIC HUMAN NATURE
Unfortunately there is no such thing as equal opportunity, we have well and truly fucked that concept in the US. If you are born poor, you go to shitty schools, eat shitty food, have reduced access to educational materials, don't have the connections to get a good job, don't have a safety net to be able to make long-term beneficial decisions with high short-term cost (i.e. college), etc. It is not impossible to be successful, but the deck is highly stacked against you. That is the definition of unequal opportunity.
Instead with all those bored people on UBI, see how many of them get a stiffy at the thought of murdering people in some other country, and then raping their bitches.
Now you not only have everybody local meeting their minimum quality of living thanks to UBI, but you have all the violent sociopathic types off enjoying themselves somewhere else, leaving our society more peaceful at the expense of everybody else. And if that isn't the foundation of 'The American Way', I don't know what is.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent."
That's feudalism. In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money. Any company can go bankrupt any day, making your stock worthless. Holding cash will diminish your fortune by inflation. If you are not smart, you lose your money. Lots of aristocrats lost their relevance during industrialisation, because they were not smart. Some invested smartly and kept their riches.
Investing isn't just "doing nothing". You have to chose well and know what will take off and what won't. Do you think warren buffet just sat there all day and drank a coffee for all his life? Or maybe you think he became a freemason and now all he needs is to think of fake stories of how he got his billions?
Yes, you have a better position thanks to the fact that you have money, but getting richer or even keeping your fortune isn't guaranteed.
And i prefer this system ten times over one where somebody inspects your flat, says its too big, and tells you to house more people inside it because its now property of the people.
UBI is a good thing, don't get me wrong. Its just a matter of when and where first it will come. Its less a question of whether. Sometime around this century we simply won't need this many humans working anymore, and if the people in power (whoever that might be) dont want people to starve they'll have to introduce UBI one way or another, whether its free goods or free money.
Hey it worked for Zimbabwe!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
10K/year basic income for 300 million people is not going to "cost" 3 trillion. 14.5 percent of americans are considered poor. UBI will be structured in such a way to to supplement income of these individuals to the level where they can purchase food, shelter and other basic human needs. The other 95.5% will be paying the basic income they received and extra to cover the poor in taxes. So the net income transfer will be around 10% of cash flow (not all poor have zero income), or 300 billion. This is about half of 2015 military spending.
But wait, there is more. Basic income can replace most other assistance programs like food stamps and homeless shelters. These programs employee a large number of government bureaucrats and enforcement officers. If the value and overhead of these other benefits are saved, we can substantially reduce additional taxes needed or alternatively provide more substantial basic income for the same cost.
But wait, this is not all. Since basic needs of everyone are now taken care, you no longer need to pay "living wage" to your nanny or gardener. You can now hire people for a dollar per hour so long as that's the best money they can get at the moment. In fact poor communities can jump-start their economy by first providing services to each other and gradually attracting wealthier customers and raising their profits.
I don't know if the numbers match in the USA, but I ran the numbers once for Canada and found UBI would cost the government the same _or less_ than what they currently spend on EI and wellfare. The problem we have up here, is people make a lot of money collect a lot of unemployment benefits by taking seasons/time off. So they have high incomes all year.
The cost to provide everyone in Canada with a UBI (not every family, every person) with at least $5,000 is actually less than what we currently spend on unemployment. It's much less than unemployment and wellfare combined. When factoring in the boost that liquidity to the economy would bring, UBI would save the government money and probably increase income through sales tax.
That doesn't even factor in the amount the government spends on things like shelters and health care for people who cannot afford homes and good food. In the end, UBI would save Canada millions every year and raise the lowest class up a notch.
It is a trivial task to ban unearned income. It is fundamental to many of the world's religions, including Christianity (a banker could not receive a Catholic funeral or marriage or any other sacrament until the 1960s). It was arguably central to World War II and was one of the major popular political stances of the National Socialists.
AND those countries all all 1 race, 1 religion and 1 culture.
if you actually believe that the exceedingly wealthy actually do anything to earn it.
A level playing field like that sounds good to me. That means eliminating the cognitive load caused by not knowing where your next meal is coming from and not knowing how you're going to pay the bills, because that cognitive load is a burden on the poor that the wealthy don't share and prevents the poor from climbing out of poverty.
So the "equal opportunity" you seek requires some form of welfare.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
As proponent of Basic Income, I disagree with much of the analysis offered in the linked article. However, I wanted to sink into this one point in particular: "If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them." This is a seductive line of reasoning, and appealing to liberals. But it misses the point about HOW taxation must be structured to take this into account. While basic income must NOT be means tested, taxation almost certainly must be. Poor ppl shouldn't be burdened by having to prove or disprove wealth and income. Having grown up poor I can assure you that that IS a huge burden. Let those most benefiting from the system be the ones who fight for the most fair tax rate possible, because they have all the tools and expertise at their disposal to do that. Poor ppl do not. So to the extent that basic income hurts ppl on the bottom, the taxcode must to that extent raise revenue from the higher economic classes to compensate for it. Easier said than done, of course, but the practicality of moving forward is an entirely different issue than the theoretical underpinnings of the idea in the first place. http://www.cbpp.org/poverty-an...
https://slashdot.org/journal/2... is an intro to the topic, but to reword it in terms of this article:
What if there is NO work that actually needs to be done? Why should people be forced to work just so that filthy rich bastards like Robert Greenstein can get a little more money that he doesn't actually need?
The ekronomic answer is threefold:
(1) The nonessential investment work that they willingly do will help reduce the required amounts of essential work in the future, which is basically a nice thing. (No insult intended to the people who enjoy doing the essential work and more power to them. Actually, they are lucky to enjoy doing what needs to be done anyway.)
(2) The nonessential recreational work on the creative side will remain as bottomless as ever. Still not possible to force anyone to do it.
(3) The nonessential recreational work on the consumption side also remains as bottomless as ever, and they also serve who only sit on the couch and consume entertainment. However, if they have some money to spend, then it's an important metric what sort of entertainment they want.
What greedy bastards like Robert Greenstein can't understand is that ambitious people will be ambitious no matter what, and those ambitious people will eagerly invest their time in increasing their own personal productivity (rather than recreation). Creative people will be creative no matter what, and if they can get paid enough money to survive longer, then they will eagerly create more things (without wasting precious creative time on grunge work).
It is ONLY the money-loving greedy bastards like himself who desperately need to get more money no matter what. From Robert Greenstein's perspective, slavery is just as good as anything else that gives him the same amount of money. Unfortunately, his personal problem is fundamentally unsolvable because there is NO amount of money that is sufficient.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You mean the ones with oil and numbered bank accounts to pay for it all? OK. I've looked. I prefer to work for a living.
It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money.
You presume that, if someone is getting their basic needs fulfilled, that he'll be motivated to improve himself just for the sheer joy of it.
There are two ways to motivate the donkey: carrot in front or stick on the behind.
If the basic needs are fulfilled, there is no carrot in front NOR a stick on the behind; there would be no motivation to change anything.
I don't think man is, generally, motivated to super achievement... otherwise, Einstein (and his like) wouldn't be so rare; there's something unusual in those that over-achieve, and I don't think that's an element strongly apparent in common man.
The very political hacks that support a basic universal income also refuse to allow a fully funded social security insurance program. They want to spend the monies paid into the program on current misdirected spending. If Social Security monies were never raided and simply invested at 4%, with is achievable with many, many private securities, the program would be so overfunded now that premiums could be reduced while also assuring benefits for generations.
A similar thing could have been done for medicare. Politicians HATE to do the right thing, because a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
I say start now?
Use any proceeds from the Federal Reserve to repay SS IOU's not put it into the Treasury for unappropriated spending! SLUSH FUND!
I want Democrats to do this because they have a D President, that if he would sign it, the CURRENT R House and R Senate would send him that bill at light speed.
Generational problems solved. MAJOR Presidential accomplishment all sides would honor.
Um, that's the least libertarian thing imaginable. Steal from everyone working, pay people who won't.. . And somehow everything is magically fixed!
Except that it's a stupid fucking idea that would destroy our society in months.
You're ignorant propaganda
Pretty well speaks for itself...
Some areas don't have enough job openings because of modernization. Then, it might make sense to have unlimited public-private sponsored job openings at at least minimum wage. These could include tree planters, park cleaner, extra traffic cops, towel dispensers in public toilets, etc. Anything except nothing.
There is value in any kind of work, both for society and the individuals.
and less people useing the jail / prison for room and board.
Breaking News: Rich white guy worried that there won't be any more poor people for him to feel superior to. More on this shocking story after this word from Goldman Sachs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
minimum wage does other stuff may with the other parts moved to other labor laws.
Or we can have mc muck changing $2 HR HS students $50 for uniforms or places makeing people pay for the right to work for 100% commission
If you haven't figured out, the founding mantra of the USA is "equal opportunity, not equal outcome".
But UBI has nothing to do with equal outcome. It's about a minimum outcome, and takes the place of a myriad of support programs we already have in place to give people something to fall back on when they've got nothing else. Social Security, food stamps, unemployment, tax credits, etc -- these programs are already funded via taxes (yes, social security is more like mandated retirement planning) and would be eliminated with a UBI program. The savings in administrative overhead alone would be enormous.
encourages mediocrity and abuse
I think few people would be content with nothing more than the UBI, but if they are, then so be it. As for abuse, how can you abuse something for which everyone is eligible?
Venezuela as the latest example
This is a meaningless comparison. The Venezuelan economy has little in common with that of the US. As a single data point, in 2013 its GDP per capita was about $14,000 while the US was $53,000.
I'm not saying that a UBI is a surefire good idea, but it also shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand as a replacement to our current welfare systems.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Quit trying to bend half the planet to your will through the use of military tech and might, and we can easily afford a Universal Basic Income.
Hell, it would be shocking what we can afford to do if we weren't buying billion dollar bombers or trying to overthrow some non-Us friendly government this week.
cut fulltime 32 hours with OT having 1.75 / 2.0 / 2.5 levels.
That's bullshit. My family came into this country as refugees with almost nothing. We depended on social services while my parents were learning English. I earned my way into school, got a scholarship to go to college. I worked my ass off in college to have a high GPA, worked 20+ hours a week in a lab in addition. I earned my way into an MD PhD program and didn't have to pay for medical school... worked my way into residency and fellowship. In the meantime my parents are earning 5 figures.
United States is the most amazing country in the world, where opportunity is still pretty open. I am so thankful to be here.
For duck's sake, please don't turn it into the country I ran away from.
Because I know there are tens of millions, if not at least a hundred million Americans, that believe your statement sincerely. I even have a few family members that have espoused such sentiments. And so I will reply accordingly.
We Americans have been bred to honor and respect property rights. It is ingrained so deeply, even so far as our honorable Constitution itself, that the hard-working-man's "honest wages" are as sanctimonious as Holy Communion in the eyes of the red, white, and blue. So, no matter how absurd and adulterous ones income, I understand that taking money from those that "work hard" to distribute among those that "hardly work" is no different than the priest taking a piss into the chalice as his way of blessing the wine.
I get it. Really, I do.
But I just have one question for you: Are you OK with 20 people in our nation controlling more wealth than one hundred and fifty five million? Are you -really- OK with this? Because that's where our continued ignorance and/or unwillingness has gotten us. Your bull-headedness is putting the ridiculous wealth of 20 individuals in our nation ahead of the general welfare of 155 million. In any other nation throughout the course of human history, this level of wealth unbalance has instigated violent revolt and revolution among the masses. And it's only a matter of time before it happens here, as long as people like you continue to believe what you've just said.
Social Security and various federal aid including SNAP (food stamps) total, from what I'm reading, about $1.2 trillion. Those programs can and obviously should be completely eliminated if we instituted UBI. That leaves $1.8 trillion, and I'm sure there programs I haven't thought of that could also be counted against this number.
The number is still big. It's going to be. Of COURSE you need higher taxes if you have UBI. But it isn't apocalyptic, because we're replacing a number of far less efficient benefit systems.
It is. 18% interest adds a multitude more of a monthly payment well over a 40% increase in principle price wise. Housing is cheaper than it's ever been!
http://saveie6.com/
1. It is immoral to allow any government to initiate force against individuals, thus all income and wealth taxation is immoral theft, same as government printing money and manipulating the interest rates.
2. It is horrible economics to reward any people for nothing, simply for existing on this planet at the expense of everybody else. It is bad economics, since it destroys private initiative, creativity in ways that matter: it stops people from devising businesses that make the products and services that improve our lives, it thus destroys the very economic engine that created the societies in the first place.
You can't handle the truth.
Every person is entitled to their fair share of the worlds resources.
A basic income should be guaranteed to each person and should be untouchable by tax or anything else.
All other income should build upon this.
>That's bullshit.
Except it's not. You have scientific research demonstrating that even wealthier people in low income areas have less opportunity for good education, and we know that level of attainment and quality of education is an incredibly strong predictor of life outcomes.
By lifting up poorer areas, so that children have high quality education opportunities, and not having factors such as parental income influence a child's education, everyone gets an equal playing field. Imagine if you had to pay for your medical school. Not everyone gets those scholarships.
That's feudalism. In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money.
Are you suggesting that feudal lords did not have to be smart to get where they were and remain there?
Any company can go bankrupt any day, making your stock worthless. Holding cash will diminish your fortune by inflation. If you are not smart, you lose your money. Lots of aristocrats lost their relevance during industrialisation, because they were not smart. Some invested smartly and kept their riches.
Plenty of aristocrats went bankrupt prior to the industrialization of the west. In fact, the reason that Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky is because a king of France was on the verge of bankruptcy himself.
And look at Donald Trump. That guy is an idiot who has managed to hold on to at least some of his fortune and inheritance despite failed business after failed business. If I failed half as many times as Donald Trump has, I'd be completely destitute.
See subject: Spending monies on those = DUMB (especially war based on false pretenses) - It's 1 thing I'm CERTAIN of...
* Wars that also only benefit a ONLY A SELECT FEW financially for THEIR 'freedom' (financial freedom).
APK
P.S.=> I'd be willing to BET ANYONE that this UBI idea costs less by far... apk
It seems that one of the big monetary issues of the day is that all the central banks are fighting deflation.
We depended on social services while my parents were learning English.
This is the exact argument for expanded social services. Thank you for making my point for me.
What if instead of giving money to big banks and businesses via monetary policy, give it to any citizen that wanted it with the string of you must either volunteer, teach, or be going to class to receive that money?
Dude, money almost literally grows on trees. It's made of paper.
Greenstein "suggests instead focusing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable."
The whole reason for a UBI is that automation has changed the work paradigm. There are no longer enough jobs for everyone, no matter how much people may want to work. Jobs programs are useless if there are no jobs. Affordable housing is a great idea, but how is that different from a UBI? Whatever housing subsidy you apply is just part of the UBI. And of course you start with the neediest people first. There is nothing in the definition of a UBI that prevents that.
What is the point of claiming a $3 trillion per year cost? If it costs that much, then scale it back to a level that can be supported. This is someone who started out with an agenda and is manufacturing reasons NOT to have a UBI.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Of course we won't let this through. You want more tax money from those who work to gift that money to those who are capable but choose not to. Smart people will begin to ask why bother working instead of just collecting those gifts. This reduces the amount of tax revenue to be gifted and eventually the whole thing falls apart. Look around the world as all of the failed socialist experiments and how many people now live in poverty in those places.
So what you are saying is that people should go get jobs? Isn't that the problem?
Everyone can be a billionaire!
Then explain why the most successful economic groups are 1st and 2nd generation immigrants from Asia and Africa - and the come, overwhelmingly, with below-poverty-level assets. I grew up poor - very poor. And we always made our own food with basic staples. You can get nutrition if you're willing to put in a little time. Of course, we also had a 13" black and white TV until 1990, when I bought one with some of my first paycheck after I graduated from college.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In capitalism you have to be smart if you want to keep your money.
You forget we don't live in a capitalistic society but merely in a corrupt kleptocracy in which the government works for the wealthy and against the rest.
So 'being smart' doesn't help much if the tax system is used against you, and your money.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
They won't have a choice. The alternative is insanely massive and hard to administer welfare, or people starving.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The following numbers are indicative, so please don't get hung up on them. $3 trillion = current tax take. Wages that don't need paying any more because of automation, etc., are $12 trillion. Is it fair for companies to internalize all of these wages as profit? You could take another $2 trillion off companies and they'd still gain massively, and the UBI can be paid for and increased significantly if desired.
BTW for anyone who believe this is a lefty thing, it's not. This is a long-time Libertarian idea: if you have to have Social Welfare, what is the cheapest and fairest way to deliver it? The UBI.
That's not money, that's currency. Huge difference.
I never said it was impossible, just a lot harder for some people. You had to work substantially harder than a trust-fund kid, that is not equal opportunity.
"He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable."
Or in other words, doing the same shitty things we have since before I was born and hope to hell it does something _this time_? Most people that get these benefits have had to jump through so many hoops that they abuse the system. Everyone else is just left to rot and nothing changes. Our 'support systems' have failed. It's change or watch the system fail and possibly bring the whole thing to an end within another couple decades.
No one I personally know is even 'middle class' in the US anymore because that's somewhere over 150k/year last I checked and here in northwestern PA the number of people in that category is crazy small. Poverty in a very real sense is growing year over year and the state in general keeps taking away support for those in the most need while cutting nice fat checks for their own pet projects. Heck, 'obamacare' had minimum levels before it even kicked in and my state did raise their coverage minimums to include people between the federal minimum and theirs. This left hundreds of thousands without coverage and with no means of getting it (the federal site would give the raw rates to us, so even basic plans were over $500/month for people who don't even make $500/month). It has nothing to do with 'political parties' and everything to do with the way politics has come to work in this country.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
All I did to collect rent and interest was take the risk of a mortgage, empty units, damage, maintenance, taxes, insurance, and fees.
In exchange for that, I get to collect rent most of the time, deal with tenants that destroy my property, answer to the police when tenants do stupid things, and assure my lenders that I'm not in need of their 'homeowner retention experts' when THEY withdraw my payment late.
Other than that, and the occasional midnight call, I just sit on my fast ass and collect rent. And work my day job.
Stupid gits. You have no idea do you?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
People can determine their own needs already.
If they CAN'T meet them, assistance to those makes sense.
If they WON'T, I'm lost as to why we should for them.
Or they are UNABLE, we must be compassionate. Of course.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It doesn't matter. Those people just get removed from the equation. They're not taking a job someone else wants and not taking any resources that other people are willing to work for. Some people will be happy to live in their squalor, but most will want work to live a somewhat decent lifestyle.
Taxes on the rich are too low, and should go up, substantially, to pay for a UBI.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Obligatory: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
And you think the status quo isn't destroying our society, professor?
"ensure everyone in society is getting the benefits of productive assets, not just the owners of the productive assets."
Productive assets DO benefit everyone. Even without taxation. In the US we've chosen this form of taxation, mostly because it's the only one that can fund our excessive federal government.
Cut government.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Follow the process. The tax is levied. (They sometimes even say it's voluntary, like the federal income tax, but never mind that). They expect you to pay it. What happens if you fail to comply? They threaten you with jail (violence). What if you resist? They point guns at you (violence) and take you against your will (violence).
And some time ago when these schools taught correctly.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Honestly if I had UBI I could take more chances to create something new and interesting that would contribute to society rather than slaving away in a soul sucking job as a software developer for one of the financial companies that is leaching off of the working class.
However my family has to eat so as a responsible father I must not take chances and therefore waste my potential.
UBI doesn't prohibit or obliviate working. It merely provides for the basic necessities.
Everyone can be a billionaire!
Like this guy?
But why stop at only a billion?
Those that are smart in gaming the financial system do well.
Those that are extremely smart in their fields but are not when it comes to the financial system still get screwed
UBI is not a replacement for working, unless you're comfortable living in squalor, which nearly everyone isn't. Do you think smart people will eat dog food instead of doing some work so they can eat fresh vegetables?
The lie inherent right from the get go, money is a resource, it is not, capital is an illusion, an imaginary parking spot for the resource access it represents. We either have the resources to sustain the population or we do not. No amount of imaginary capital can create resources or distribute them, capital is simply the currently chosen means to distribute access to the available resources, however it is broken, because it purely aligns with greed, rather than need ie some have millions of times as much a they need, whilst others not only have nothing but due to capital debt, less than nothing.
Basically what they are really saying, is their needs, their psychopathic ego, demands poor people (a capital fabrication) they can exploit to feed the insatiable ego of psychopaths. The demand to have more, they must have more, the demand to be able to order other people about, not just some but as many as possible, in fact they fight amongst themselves for total control and absolute power over everyone else.
The resources are there, an administrative means of allocating and distributing those resources just needs to be found. However rewards come into play, extra for those who contribute more (not just take the credit for the contribution of many others or manipulate capital to no advantage of anyone except themselves). So having more than others by being wealthy but wealth is only fun if it is based upon fairness and generosity otherwise it is just harmfull and no fun at all (greed destroys it never builds). There in is the catch, they actually want that power to harm and destroy, to choose whether others live or die, it feeds there genetic anti-social cerebral disease. Going to them for solutions is like the chicken going to the fox for solutions on how to be safe, the foxes response, every single time, you can only be safe from the attacks of others, inside my belly.
Going to the current rich psychopaths for solutions, those who parasitically prey upon the rest of society, is just as stupid. Look at the response, it can't be done, we don't the capital. What the fuck does that even mean, when we obviously have the actual resources to do it, they are going to purposefully starve to death as many as they can for fun, they are going to stick as many as they can in labour camps for fun, they will lord it over us peasants yet again for fun (this after millions died stripping away that power, the current gutless generations will give it back, pathetic).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
U.S. Minimum wage appears to be around ~$1.2k/month rather than $2k. Maybe if you live in canada, you'd get more, but since this is US centric, we'll stick to $1.2k.
If you don't need to travel on a day-to-day basis, I'm pretty sure you don't need $100/month for bus fare, thus UBI can be reduced to $1.1k/month.
As you don't travel regularly, you don't need to eat out or rely on cafeterias. Generally saves $300, reducing UBI to $800/month.
If you're unemployed, you don't need as many luxuries such as alcohol - you could easily get by with what you already have, or stick with something that lasts a long time (e.g. a chess set - plus this has the advantage of making you look "smart".) Probably reduces this another $200, thus UBI is around $600/month.
If UBI causes an increase in NEETs, there'll probably be more of demand for employees and therefore you can easily grab a full time job. Maybe offset UBI down to $400/month, while your full time job lets you get enough money to actually get that $2k/month that you always wanted.
So am I, with the exception that I also did volunteer work at least once. If you can secure minimum wage for the hours I've done volunteer work, that'd be great.
Also Venezuela's problems stem more from the fact that they became strictly a Oil Based economy and do not produce anything that they need and have to import basic goods.
What if instead of giving money to big banks and businesses via monetary policy, give it to any citizen that wanted it with the string of you must either volunteer, teach, or be going to class to receive that money?
Because you would need a huge bureaucracy to ensure that people were actually volunteering, teaching, or learning. You would soon have thousands of sham "colleges" generating worthless degrees and sucking up the subsidies. We already have a lot of that from the student loans that foolish younglings treat as "free money", until it is too late and they realize they will spend much of their life paying off their debt. The end result of your proposal is that millions would be paid to do nothing productive, while taxes on actual productive people would be cranked up to pay for it.
How in the hell will job creators create jobs if the money they need to create the jobs is in the hands of the people they are creating the jobs for?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The same man also said, "all great truths start as blasphemies" which is very relevant here. Who just got offended?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Claw back military spending and a significant portion of that is instantly covered.
Investing isn't just "doing nothing". You have to chose well and know what will take off and what won't.
Speculation is trying to pick the right horse. Investment can be just as much about trying to create a balanced portfolio that'll get you a reliable return. You tend to hear all about the spectacular successes and failures, but a vast number of companies produce the nuts and bolts, everyday objects that don't change much at all - not the production systems, not the demand, not the competition. But somebody owns it and somebody's getting a return on it. It's not very exciting to hear that they got 5% ROI while the stock market index 4% ROI though, so you don't read about it much.
What really matters is the value of labor vs capital, once we had artisans and master craftsmen whose work was highly valued. Then we had industrialization and it trended more towards capital, then it trended more towards knowledge workers and now with automation it's trending more towards capital again. If the rich accumulate wealth quicker through capital than people do through labor then the gap widens. The winner is the ones who can invest a billion in self-driving cars, the loser all the people who used to earn a living driving.
Sure, some people will gamble and bet on the right horse or the wrong horse and either join the capitalists or flunk out back to the working class. But they're just statistical noise when it comes to the rest question, how much of the wealth does the 0,1%, 1%, 10% control? It excludes the whole issue about who left and who joined, only how unequal wealth is distributed. And last I heard the differences were increasing, the rich are accelerating away. They don't have to be super good at investing, they just need to not be super dumb.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A UBI is a nice idea but a fairer and cheaper idea would be a citizens dividend.
From Wikipedia:
The state of Alaska dispenses a form of citizen's dividend in its Permanent Fund dividend, which holds investments initially seeded by the state's revenue from mineral resources, particularly petroleum. In 2005, every eligible Alaskan resident (including children) received a check for $845.76. Over the 24-year history of the fund, it has paid out a total of $24,775.45 to every resident.[5] Alaska now has one of the lowest rates of inequality and relatively low levels of poverty compared to other US states.
By forcing successful and contributing citizens to pay for someone else's income encourages mediocrity and abuse.
Exactly. Let the executive and investor classes do some actual work, and not put productive middle-class people in the position of having to subsidize them, or starve.
Ever since the Federal Income Tax placed vast amounts of money at the Federal Government's disposal about 100 years ago, the ideas of how to spend it expanded far beyond the original few applications.
I'm not going to discuss, how counter-productive this is, but rather how this confiscation of money — and spending it on stuff we would not have spent it on ourselves — robs us. Literally...
First, on "valid" taxes: think of a city facing imminent assault by some barbarians... They need to build defenses, equip and train defenders, procure weapons. In that case confiscating money and materiel from the city's residents, as well as conscripting some of them into service and/or work is appropriate — if you don't do it, the entire city (including them!) will be no more...
There may be other examples, but "charity" is decidedly not among them. Not only by definition — it is not a charity, if it is mandatory — but also because the struggling poor do not materially affect the rest. Those of us affected mentally can always donate to a real, voluntary, charity of their choice — but not a dime of monies confiscated by the government at gun-point (which is how all taxes are collected), should be spent on that.
That we are even discussing the possibility of this new compulsory "spreading the wealth around" is the sign of how the mission of taxation has crept over the years. The creep must be stopped — and beaten back. So the healing can begin...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
>> And then are still in desperation because of poor choices.
> So what you're saying is "we cannot trust people to decide where best to spend money; instead, we must trust the government to spend it for them"?
> if you cannot trust people to make good choices...
People making choices about their own lives do in fact frequently fall into short-term thinking. We do things that we prefer at the moment, and we don't like the long term consequences. 90% of my "bad choices" have been of that variety. Politicians making decisions about other peoples' lives made bad choices too. Not just bad in the long term, but also bad in the short term (for the populace). So no, having decisions be made be politicians doesn't prevent bad decisions. The history of centrally-controlled economies strongly indicates that bureaucrats make WORSE decisions than individuals make for themselves.
What can we do about the fact that people make bad decisions / short term decisions? Certainly we can try to educate people, so they can at least make informed choices. They'll still make bad decisions based on short term desires. We can try to train kids. When my daughter asks for a cookie, I can say "you can have one cookie now or two cookies after dinner." That may help, but she'll still do stupid sometimes.
The bottom line is that people do stupid, self-destructive things based on their immediate desire rather than long term well-being, and they always will. Some people will make worse decisions that others. Some will mature sooner and mature more, making decisions like going to school, setting aside savings, and choosing jobs where they can learn and advance over jobs that are more pleasant. Those who think short term will enjoy high school for four years, those who think long term will enjoy retirement for thirty years. Nothing will change that fact.
This has been a theme in scifi books for years, and is inevitable as automation improves (assuming we don't sink into a Mad Max dystopia) but we're not there yet and I don't see it in the next 20-30 years. For UBI to work and stop the us against them argument it does need to be universal.
How about raising the incomes of those who actually do work first? If you are so good at analysing where their employer rips them off then you should make that info available or support a bill that makes it available.
It wasn't then either.
Houses were less than $100k, but salaries were less than $20k
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
No an insult but 'potentially waste your potential'.
I am in the same boat, work mind numbing job and support my family now but I have several things that I think would be fun to work on and benefit civilization.
Yammer all you want. I vote no. If you feel the need to subsidize others, do it. I don't and I won't. Don't drag me down with you. I've worked my ass off, I don't feel the need to support UBI, and I will fight forced UBI. UBI ignores human nature. There are those that will accept that income, and yet still whine they need more. Then there are those who're more 'enterprising' and take what they want with force rather than exercise their more creative side.
More utopian SJW bullshit.
We're already taking money from people. Social security, medicare etc are all paid for out of taxes. We've already reached the conclusion that this aspect of UBI is okay, so why are you bringing it up as if it's significant?
Say no more.
People that are very wealthy pay other people to be smart for them, i.e. the wealthy don't have to do anything because they have money.
Who's talking about abolishing capitalism? It just shouldn't be a life-and-death situation.
But there are plenty of other likely better solutions than Universal Basic Income. The public works projects of the past are great examples. Why can't we do something like that today? Today most of the unemployed are unskilled but it's still possible. A simple proposal would be to have a place that anybody who shows up gets a job at half of minimum wage. The job might be picking up trash, planting a tree, or even sitting in a classroom learning a new skills. Surely we can find something useful for people to do after the robots take all the unskilled jobs. Even if it was just sitting in a room reading a book or watching a video for personal enrichment, it makes more sense to me to pay someone to advance their skills than to sit at home and continue to struggle.
And less children in foster care due to parents unable to provide for their children or in jail.
And individual resident home ownership is at an all time low. Most real estate is now owned by property management companies or foreign investors. Sounds like we need another housing market crash, but this time we should let it fall until Americans start buying in at the bottom.
responsible for providing bread and circus. I would prefer that the money be invested in R&D, education, infrastructure, beautification and health care.
The claim that BI works is wrong, and it really should not take a whole lot of thought to make you realize it. Start by studying the current Government Welfare and see how it works. It does not move anyone out of poverty, and quite frankly it is abused by a massive amount of people.
Why did they make SNAP all card based and put restrictions on what you can purchase? Because an extremely large percentage of people were not purchasing food for their kids, they were drinking and smoking the money away. So what do you believe will happen when someone gets a basic check? Same damn thing.
Now what happened when people smoked away their food stamps? Did we cut them off? No, that would be cruel to the kids. We had to come up with other money from numerous other sources, and the bad behaviors still don't change.
Taking from the productive people to give to the unproductive incentivizes non-productivity. That is the only way to give everyone money, by taking it from people that have it. That is why all communist countries must be tyrannical. Fear is the only other incentive, and that incentive paralyzes innovation and thought. It is the Dark ages versus Renaissance. That is the reality of BI.
If you want to see the experiment in action, go live in China and become a Chinese citizen. How about instead of "giving" them money we continue to have jobs so that people can work.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The only question is what that does to inflation and whether that creates a de facto "tax" on the economy.
Luckily that question has an answer - printing more money the the (only real) cause of inflation and it will act like a universal tax on everyone, as everyone will pay through the devaluation of their earnings. Inflation is possibly the *most* unfair tax that there is.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
You mean the ones with oil and numbered bank accounts to pay for it all? OK. I've looked. I prefer to work for a living.
The problem with the future of AI and automation is that you might not have the opportunity to work.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Until we can identify the problem, we can't adequately craft a solution. And poverty isn't the problem, it's the symptom. The problem is a lack of jobs for people to do. And it's won't going to get worse, because automation *will* replace almost all jobs, starting with the lowest paying jobs first. Transportation, food service, construction, waste management, manufacturing, agriculture and livestock, retail (especially inventory management), logistics and deliveries, and housekeeping/landscaping are all prime targets.
Maybe it won't happen in 25 or 50 years. I think it will, but maybe it won't. But regardless of whether it's 50 years or 200 years (which I think is overly generous), it will happen, and the progression will likely be logarithmic rather than linear, as each successfully automated industry lays the groundwork for the next.
Humans will still be desirable in many roles -- arts and entertainment, customer relations, supervisory roles -- but even if everyone could perform those roles adequately, which is a stretch, there still won't be enough demand to keep everyone employed. We need to think about what we want a society with very few jobs to look like: how we adequately incentivize the few jobs that will remain or be created, but more importantly, how we subsidize the ones that go away.
As for dealing with poverty in general, the Netflix documentary "Poverty, Inc." is enlightening, if only to illustrate how good intentions go bad. I have both worked in the humanitarian sector, and have friends who still do, and it's pretty spot-on regarding the pitfalls of humanitarian work, even if the capitalistic prescription is, IMO, just as unsustainable, due to the future of job scarcity.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Einstein's day job was being a patent examiner. If you aren't contributing, it's because you're a lazy shit, and not because the Man is holding you down.
You are certainly correct this is a straw man argument, but not really in the way you describe. The US government (federal, state, local) spends just over $400 billion on welfare per year, and $1.2 trillion on pensions and social security (94% of that on SS). That only comes to half the $3 trillion figure, and certainly not all of this would go away. I'd say its reasonable 2/3 of it would go away, leaving $2 trillion of the author's figures left over. Take away another $500 billion by removing children from the calculations, and you still have $1.5 trillion of increased government payments.
Then comes the real problem with the author's argument. No one claims everyone's net income would increase by $10k per year, just that they would all get a $10k check. We already have a progressive federal income tax, so it would be easy to adjust the brackets to ensure only the needy would receive an increased net income from UBI.
To simplify math, lets say 1/3 get $10k extra income, 1/3 pay the same in extra taxes that they get in UBI payments, and 1/3 pay for the lower third. Considering the top 40% of earners already pay 97% of federal income taxes, this wouldn't be much of a change in the status quo.
So now we are down to $500 billion in extra costs, which is a much more realistic figure. The federal government collects $2.4 trillion in income taxes, so the 50% of households and companies which pay any incomes taxes today would need to pay 20% more. I pay a little over $30k per year in federal income taxes, so this would mean almost $6500 in extra taxes for me personally.
But I would get something for this money. Reduced crime is hard to quantitatively measure, but removing the minimum wage would significantly impact the costs of basic services. If my food, daycare, house/lawn care, haircuts, etc. dropped by just 10% that would save me $6000 per year so this would be a wash for me.
These figures are all obviously very rough, but they at least show UBI is not as drastically unrealistic as this article suggests. It may still not work, but it is a very reasonable alternative to a future where technological disruptions make the status quo impossible to maintain.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
He's probably responding to an ignorant git like you that will happily be the pawn of the 1% that sow intra-class warfare by fueling class-jealousy between groups of people that really aren't all that different. Once you buy into the socialist nonsense you will actually make it HARDER for a normal guy to get ahead. Meanwhile, the expansive meddling in the economy will ensure the position of the aristocracy.
Socialists are the same kind of dupes as ditto heads.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
UBI was never discussed when the cotton ginny was invented. Never mentioned when the steam engine was invented. Nowhere to be found when the tractor was invented. Not on the radar when the word processor became common. But when the upper middle class jobs (doctors, lawyers) are set to be automated with AI there's all kinds of interest. That's how this time is different. Previous rounds of mechanisation and automation replaced low skilled, repetative, physical labour. AI is set to replace mostly cognitive occupations that only the upper middle class could access.
Have you ever wondered what it was like for average everyday people to live through the times of Adam Smith, or Karl Marx?
It's interesting to read the historical accounts of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. But can you imagine what it might have been like to actually live those experiences? These were huge events that shaped the world we live in today. But what did they feel like day by day as they unfolded for ordinary people?
I'm not talking about George Washington or Napolean. Not Nicholas II or Lenin or Mao Zedong. I mean just ordinary people trying to make their way through life.
I think it probably felt a lot like things in the world right now. I am constantly stunned by world-shaping huge things happening around me today. The Arab Spring, the 2014 Ukrainian uprising, the Brexit, and even Donald Trump. I see polls that say 67% of Americans don't think Hillary Clinton can be trusted. Yet she is the current favorite to win the American election. People in Venezuela are rioting for survival, and Americans spend trillions of dollars to bail out the wealthiest bankers and corporations in the history of the world. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to the Oregon Occupation to Open Season on law enforcement. i can't help but think that these are all hugely momentous and building into something that will change the world. And this is what it feels like to live through it.
Eventually, someone will take the hundreds or thousands of events of this decade and summarize it into a page or two for students to read in history books. And it will explain how the world evolved into a better place with better social and government systems. But, I think, within 50-75 years new authors will write new history books to explain how everything went wrong. It might be interesting to read what people of the future think about how these times unfolded.
For me, I am living it as it happens. And I am stunned. As all the truths I was raised on are thrown away, the things I was taught were lies of failed systems of the past are heralded as the new way forward. The Socialism and Communism of the 60s and 70s disintegrated in the 80s and 90s. We all celebrated when they came to their senses and people were liberated from all that. Now, we clamor for UBI, unemployment extensions, universal healthcare. Capitalism is the new pariah. Our only protection from religious extremists is to give more power to government. And our only protection from government is to assassinate people in uniforms.
Snowden flees to China, then Russia. Finicum gets executed. Bundy gets locked up for years without even getting a trial. Trump rages that we can't trust people who have benefited and continue to benefit from the current system to be able to change the system. So we have to vote for him? That make no sense! Once or twice a month the news gives round-the-clock coverage to another unarmed black person gunned down by police. Now we see a handful of policemen getting murdered every week.
We've all lost our minds. Is this what the 60s felt like? Or the 20s? Or the 1860s? or 1820s? or 1760s?
First peoples' taxes will not go up as people will not be taxed. Businesses will take on the tax load as well as the rich. Because the masses will have more money to spend the sales taxes and income taxes paid by the businesses will generate more wealth than the wealth formerly garnered from taxing workers. The idea that job programs will work is absurd. The US has had numerous job programs and they have pretty much been worthless both to society and the workers. That is severely compounded as we simply have less and less need for human workers. Every little advance in technology means less and less jobs will be available. Look at it on a simple level. The new Elo car gets 85 mpg.. A Harley motorcycle only gets about 40mpg. Now just how many jobs will be lost driving gas tankers due to the high mileage ability of the Elo cars? The point being that even a bit of a new technology in a car design ripples through other industries and causes job losses along a large chain of businesses. How about gasoline taxes on a vehicle that gets 85mpg? Some states already apply a tax on electric cars as they pay no gas taxes. It is easy to see just how society resists changes even without taking a vote or considering the effect of new laws and regulations designed to cover changes caused by advancing technology. For decades we were told that good Americans would stop using so much energy. Then electric cars come along and the same government applies penalties for doing exactly what they asked people to do. These problems are a strange and perverse corruption that is so built into the system that we have no answers at all. And by the way, who will buy that Harley when an Elo has air conditioning and gets twice the gas mileage. And the Elo is so simple in design that like Tesla they may not need dealerships at all. How many people work in car dealerships?
Printing funny money is clearly not the problem. If there is an overproduction, then THAT is what needs to be spread around. People fixating on the UBI are whining that the rules of society are changing while forgetting that the rules about money will probably change too. The concept of money as we knew it will probably be equally obsolete.
Handing people money just sounds like an easy solution when presented to people who can't think anything through or see the big picture (which is unfortunately most people).
UBI is a solution to a future problem that lacks any imagination.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Then you got NOTHING to lose. On the other hand those who have something HAVE soemthing to lose. tritte isn't it ? But it reflects that once a huge part of the population get rationalised away by automation, well guess what ? Assumign you are one of those "not mediocre not abusing" folk (already holding that kind of thought is all kind of wrong for a variety of reason but i disgress), then suddenly you will become a prey for those who have nothing to lose. Societal network will debgrade and it will end in blood and revolution. You can't have a huge part of the population left dropped and hope they will go lie in the street die for you.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Unless you were poor, or a slave or a woman of course. Those people could go fuck themselves.
It's the same thing all over again. I find it most enfuriating in the context of taxing gasoline (or other) in order to reduce greenhouse reductions. Then we figure out that it would cause hardships to people driving to work and we subsidize that and/or hand out breaks.
And once we have all the hardships for the masses dealt with, surprise surprise, nothing changes except for having ten thousands more of people in employment for juggling with all the complications from trying to not actually change a thing.
Of course there is hardship for the masses. That's the whole point of changing behavior on a scale where it makes a difference. So of course a UBI would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. This is how this works, regardless of whether you try masking it by printing money (a bad idea, by the way, just ask the Reichsmark how that went).
It's an investment into quality of life for all as well (a career of crime becomes less attractive if the relative benefits decrease, so you can expect quite noticeable drops in crime rates). Of course it is going to cost. Everyone. It's a really large national investment.
Racist pseudo intellectual, go grow a sense of empathy.
Can they be taxed a little more?
That sounds like a very progressive income tax and steep property/wealth/inheritance taxes, something those evil "socialist" European countries have been doing for a long time but which was rolled back due to the neolib trend over the last few decades.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
So, free and equal education and meals for all kids?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I grew up poor as fuck in the Appalachian mountains. Poor White Trash is probably what you would call me. Now I make $150k a year and live by myself. People can come up out of that mess, but it takes a lot of work and pride. Trouble is most of my cohorts didn't have supportive parents who pushed them to study harder and compete with the rich kids, and they're still there either trudging through shitty jobs, or living off the government. It is not as simple as Basic Income. It's about education and familial culture as much as $$. UBI is a panacea, what it takes is a cultural shift and learning to be self sufficient.
I presume you think that you should have the OUTCOME as the 'trust fund kid' too right? Look, you don't get to have 'everything anyone else could possible get', it can take time (generations) for any 'family' to get to a level where they might consider themselves 'comfortable/middle-class' & yeah that may mean a generation or two of 'busting ass' to get there. My parents were by no means well off, but their kids are 'better off', some of us 'very well off', others 'just doing good', and their kids are better off they they were...
So yeah, someone whose family hasn't 'made it' has to work harder & won't get as far NOW...that's the way life works. It is only a 'give me everything now' generation that expects to get/have what the 'trust fund kid' has...jealousy & entitlement is no basis for a system of government/support
Let's just try this. Move 5% of the weath from the the top earners and give it to the bottom bracket as a pay raise. See how that effects economy and society.
UBI is needed.
More and more jobs are automated. A machine does your work for a fraction of your salary. So the industry uses machines instead of humans. Now there is money, which is not spent on your salary. Currently this money is addition profit for the big company, at the expense of you being without work.
You being workless isn't the problem. Your job can be automated and it should be, as it is more efficient. But you still should get money. And the money is still there. The only difference is, that you won't get it, but the big bosses.
Now this money, which were available before, should be used to pay your UBI.
To make the point more clear: Think of a far away future, where all work is automated. If you have an UBI, this is an utopia. People finally do not need to work anymore and all people can live a calm life, because the machines do the work.
Without UBI its an dystopie. A few rich people live an expense life, while the rest of humanity lives in slums and cannot efford their meals.
You may know movies predicting this future. Let's prevent this, lets pay an UBI which allows a life in dignity but sets an incentive to work to get more luxus.
Not at all. His point was the help was temporary until they understood the culture. Until you have grown up around generational poverty and people who accept it as normal,you don't know what the duck you're talking about. People need hope and education, not hand outs until the Sun turns into a cinder.
>> please don't turn it into the country I ran away from
As a successful immigrant myself, this is _exactly_ my sentiment. Fuck that commie shit with a broomstick. I came to this country not just with not a dime to my name, I had significant debts as well. I now pay four times in taxes alone compared to what I made here in the first year. It took me 15 years and a lot of hard work and perseverance to get to this point. Now some communist comes out of the woodwork and says I need to "share". But dude, I already "share". Even with my great accountant doing my taxes, Uncle Sam takes fully 29% of what I make, with nearly zero accountability for how this money is being spent. To me it appears as though it disappears into the void, since neither the federal nor the state government ever has money to fund even the basic necessities like education. There's literally zero incentive for the government to spend this money wisely, _especially_ if the government is run by democrats who think they should have unobstructed access to my wallet.
So can someone who believes in UBI tell me what we're going to do with the people that don't spend their UBI for the things it is supposedly being given to replace (e.g. welfare etc...e.g. 'food/clothing/shelter'). To be clear, I'm not saying EVERYONE is a deadbeat, the vast majority aren't but there will be a significant non-zero population that will be & will not be using their money wisely. So now what is in place to support the true deadbeats? If there are no welfare, food-stamp programs etc. who exactly is taking care of these people who we're all claiming should be taken care of simply by giving them a UBI?
That's true, we'll continue to do stupid things. You and I will do stupid occassionally.
> Everyone already knows smoking is bad for you ... driving without a seat belt is bad for you
Far fewer people smoke today than before the education and other efforts. More people use seatbelts more often than 50 years ago. So these efforts are not useless, they do work to some degree. And I just smoked a cigarette; they aren't 100% effective.
I remember a story that I read when I was in college about some guy who got laid off from his job, so bought a pail and a squeegee and wandered through neighborhoods washing people's windows for $5/house (this was 20 years ago) and wound up making some serious money. His son also worked with him.
.., then a lot of them are going to do just that. Not only do the taxpayers lose the money stolen from them to pay those who want to be idle, the economy doesn't get the output that the idle would otherwise have to produce to support themselves.
Expanding welfare payments to everyone is not a solution.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I like the idea in theory, and if the unemployment numbers go up to 25-50% because of automation and AI, we will need to do something.
The solution might not be to just hand out $10k to everyone though. I wonder how much it would cost to setup a Dept. of Automation in the government to produce crops with their own GPS controlled tractors, automated watering systems, and harvesters? Build a few factories to process the government food. Do the same thing with healthcare. Turn it into a factory type of system, where the doctors are ultra specialized and will do the same procedure over and over. They shouldn't need all of the medical training and education if they get trained very well on the one procedure. Use computers and on-line treatment for some mental illnesses. Make the cheapest, basic level of medical care free for everyone (including tourists, homeless, refugees, and immigrants).
Figure out how much money could be saved by reducing or eliminating agencies that do the same thing or provide these basic income services.
The problem becomes that it would push people to enter the black market to make money on the side, and that people won't be desperate to be wage slaves at the first job they can find.
I'm not sure if Bernie was for the basic income, but he needed to go into detail about all of his changes that he wanted to make. And how different people would be affected.
The problem with the future of AI and automation is that you might not have the opportunity to work.
Maybe if we didn't have a bunch of people breeding or migrating just so they could get various welfare checks there would be enough work to go around and enough leisure time for people to enjoy life. but its politically incorrect to say any of the following.
1) if you can't afford to raise that child don't have it.
2) Or get a job then a house then have a child.
3) stay in your own country we are full
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
They can starve while living naked in the streets. Or, if their state is the result of mental illness, they can be put into treatment.
They don't need to be taken care of further - they get their income and sooner or later they will start spending it on food or die - in both cases the problem is solved.
So you'd support a system that takes children away from their parents at birth and raises them in communal homes.
Because that's the only way I see of creating an 'equal opportunity' society.
Focusing efforts on the neediest is exactly what it's being done nowadays. It isn't working so swell, and that's the reason the Universal Basic Income idea is floating.
The truth is that nobody knows how UBI is going to work out, it would be an experiment. So this kind of "studies" are just adding some numbers and pretending that they tell you something. Nobody will know anything till it's tried in some country, and we are not there yet.
The real reason why UBI is being talked about is not the present, but the future. If and when robots take the jobs of half the people in a country, you have to be ready for it or face social unrest. For that situation, where the 1% could have the 99% of the rents, you need UBI or other similar redistribution mechanism, or face revolt and people with torches in the streets.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Through hard work you were fortunate enough to receive a scholarship. Imagine for a moment that everyone was equally intelligent and all worked very hard, yet there were still limited positions. In this scenario, you might not have ended up with a scholarship. It's great to suggest that hard work pays off, but if everyone did the same hard yards, then we end up right back at this point, only with the bar raised.
An honest person does not expect to be paid for doing nothing. A person who does nothing deserves nothing. Do you not believe in the action of moral law?
An honest jobless person expects to starve and enjoy it? How are you going to improve your level of qualification in order to reenter the job market when you are dead? Are the jobless people supposed to die on their own or are we going to round them up into concentration camps for that purpose? "Arbeit macht frei" ("work will free you") literally was the inscription on the gates to Dachau and Auschwitz, and the official justification for those institutions was very much your rationale.
Bad move. This is something for nothing dot. The website where wishes are horses and pulling reality into an argument is considered trolling.
It's more complicated to do this without unintended consequences. If you are a litter picker (and some people are employed as such) then your proposal halves their wages. Also, half minimum wage is not enough to live on, so you end up having to subsidise people but with administrative complexity unless you can automate that.
UBI would also have unintended consequences too, I would expect, so it would need more research and modelling before implementing it, and plenty of tweaking after. If UBI made contact with politics a danger would be tinkering without an evidence base, but I don't know what the sensitivity of implementation might be; if behaviour of UBI turns out to be sensitive to implementation details it would be a bit of a nightmare
Everyone is hung up on how a basic income would be paid for, how much "money" it would cost, etc. What I think people are missing is the fact that UBI is designed to transition society off of a work-based, money-based economy without the bloody revolution.
Think about it in terms of a 50ish person who has paid into retirement their whole life, and is about to start drawing it down so they can live out their final years. How would you feel if, all of a sudden, new entrants into the economy no longer had to fund their own retirements partially because there aren't any paying jobs left and a UBI is the only answer? The UBI lets society keep the crutch of money and the work-for-income reward system. it lets that 50ish person enjoy a retirement commensurate with the amount they put in, while acknowledging that for most future workers, there won't be jobs or a retirement. If we didn't have this, those people who saved would lead an armed revolution and destabilize everything. So, we start with the UBI, then slowly phase it out as "work" becomes obsolete for most of the population.
I simply don't get why people don't see that there's nowhere left to go on the "better job" scale for a vast percentage of the population anymore. Agriculture is dead, manufacturing is dead, corporate work is dead and service jobs are dead in terms of good solid jobs with incomes allowing people a good life for hard work. I almost want the vast factories employing thousands of unskilled people back just so we could have balance in the economy again. Unless a basic income is implemented, the income disparity is going to keep getting worse, and even educated people are going to be destitute.
Sadly the products of too many university courses are not significantly more employable than they were at 18, and some - having received damage from social justice warriors to their shoulders - significantly less. A cut of 25% in the total number of undergraduates, spread between a 50% cut to English Literature, Philosophy, Gender and Media studies, 25% to foreign literature, social sciences and the like, and zero to STEM, would improve outcomes significantly.
As those nice Muslims of Al-Quaeda proved, having a big military is no solution to asymmetric attacks. Putin's takeover of Crimea is equally a classic demonstration of what can be achieved with minimal military effort. And of course a nuke in a container on a ship from 'X' would be highly effective; living in 'fly over' territory' has its advantages...
> In the meantime my parents are earning 5 figures.
This tells us something about the lie you are presenting us. The truth of the matter is that effort is hard, and there was effort.
But the "lie" is to use the word " refugees with almost nothing" which is demonstratedly false. Going by the wage figure, and the story, all they needed was the language. What they came with, seemed to be trade experience in a high value trade. The fact is that a high value trade would equal "refugees with extremely wage earning skills" not "nothing".
I get that the story is fancy, and that working towards a goal under your families support was "harsh". But the fact is, it wasn't.
There is a good chance the entire "high wage career" is fueled by very good proxy support, combined with good support mortals.
If that costs $3Bn, why don't we just cut it down to 9k and cure world hunger? http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06...
I wouldn't obsess too much about how the resources are counted (via money) as really it boils down to giving people resources (food, water, heat, light, etc). The best way to distribute it will dep
The biggest problem with UBI is that it requires a strict birth control policy in order to continue being feasible. Birth control isn't very popular these days...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Do you not believe in the action of moral law?
No, I prefer ethics and scruples to completely arbitrary "because my badass sky-daddy says so" rules.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Do you accept that the majority of people are not in a position to be able to do what you did, or are you really intent on extrapolating from a sample size of one?
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
And I always thought WW2 was all about militarists seeking to conquer all their neighbours. Thanks for enlightening me, you Fascist moron.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
He suggests instead focussing on the nerdiest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs and making housing more affordable.
Founding mantra? "Equal opportunity" wasn't even a thing until about 50 years ago.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
that we keep trying the same policies that have failed to achieve this for over 2 centuries. In politics, consistent failure is never a reason to abandon a policy - that's why we still have austerity policies despite 2 centuries during which every time it was implemented it utterly failed to achieve it's stated goal (austerity makes deficits worse and debts higher - because it decreases income more than it can ever decrease expenses. It's the national economic equivalent of burning your paycheck to save on your heating bill).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Any successful UBI program must start with free education and health care.
There is no way around this, and it wont happen in the USA.
Why ?
Under a UBI all other welfare programs need to be scrapped. A UBI should be an equal, always there subsidy for all citizens , but we are not all equal.
Some individuals have medical needs, wheelchars, speach therapy etc. All this would be covered under free health care. Free education ensures societal progress and sparks the desire to put knowledge to work. In some it will instill the desire to seek employment even if it is just menial work , even in the event that they are not required to work.
The big problem that I have with basic income is that the whole idea is that so people can live a fairly austere life on just that. The thing is that if everyone had it then the prices for limited resources like housing, etc. will go up - just as they did when two earners per household became common. Unless the government controls things like house prices, utility prices, food prices, etc. it won't work.
I like the idea of a basic income, that as jobs become automated people don't have to rely om welfare, but I would be very uneasy with the government controlling prices of so many things. Unless someone can come up with a way of avoiding the extra income resulting in higher prices without massive state intervention, on balance I am against it.
Social Security had a total administrative expenditure of .7% in 2014, the most recent year for which I could find statistics. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS...
The combined personal income in the US in 2014 was almost 15 trillion dollars. Around 320 million people live in the US. That means on average every american from baby to elderly could recieve some 46000 dollars a year. Comsidering this you got the income to provide a UBI to everyone its just a matter of your taxrate
How so? It has better meaning his way; the sentence lacks a comma, though.
I think you need to learn more about the distinction between libertarian and anarcho-capitalist. You seem to be conflating the two.
productive assets like derivatives?
please realize that an estmated 1000 trillion dollars worth of derivatives are traded each year in the USA.
1% of that is 10 trillion dollars.
immediately, Jesus reached out and caught him
Mt 14:31
"Doing" and "nothing" are how you define them -- a hunter gatherer "does" a hunt, using his nature given ability to run (no stick needed, just run the animal to death). I suppose that looks like hard work, but then society doesn't allow that anymore because of nation states and everybody owns something and there's no vast free plains anymore. On the other hand, that hunter gatherer was at the mercy of the elements, and migration patterns, and disease. Yet, he or she might only have hunted twice a week, and spent the rest of the time "doing nothing". Our world is very human made, and "doing something" might one day just be signing a document to say you want a free basic income for life. And "basic" is going to change. I mean, here's your basic income of half a goat, and now you just have to do the rest. What's that, you can't get electricity and internet using your goat meat? Well, now you want internet and healthcare and a house made of bricks too? The standards are always changing depending on what we manage to invent. Cotton used to be a luxury and nowadays even the poorest in the world have cotton t-shirts. The problem as aways with social welfare is, how do you help people live long and prosper? If there is a moral issue, I think it is, are you helping people grow and develop? And that's possibly a big criticism with the markets and so on, where many are "doing something" yet stuck in dead end jobs which don't develop them in any way, and consequently, are something of a drag on the progress of civilisation. People should be "doing something" but not because laziness is a sin according to some ancient goat herder, but because most progress depends on people's creativity.
You obviously aren't doing it right. I only met the owner of the last I apartment I rented once in the eighteen years I lived there. All of my dealings were with a property management company. They collected the rent and took care of maintenance... eventually. And this wasn't some multi-million dollar building in a big city, but a converted furniture store/warehouse located in a small suburb of a rust belt city.
The county I lived in put their property tax info on the web, and you could look up any property and see how much taxes were paid on it, where the tax bill was sent, who owned it, and how much was paid for it for every transaction since they computerized their records. A search of the building I was living in showed that it last changed hands for the grand sum of $1, paid by the current owner to his father.
If you want to believe that most landlords are hard working schlubs like yourself, be my guest. I think a lot more are like the guy above; I'm damned sure Trump never had to unclog a toilet in his life!
thats whole idea.
but you would have the basic income level and people could work for higher income, albeit it would be taxed more heavily of course. you could double the income tax, easily, and make it heavier progressively. or you could just raise the tax levels say to finnish levels and progression and throw in universal healthcare to boot.
american taxes are still very low and the wages are very high - and yet people in finland manage to buy for eat and clothes okay, but going from public cases streetwalking coppers in usa for example make same money as a police chief in finland.
The problem with the future of AI and automation is that you might not have the opportunity to work.
You always have the opportunity to work. The opportunity to work, not to have a job. You just have to be clever enough to figure out what people will pay you to do. Robots are pretty good at doing jobs where the tasks and outcomes are defined. They are exceptionally bad at inventing new kinds of work.
One of the utopian visions is to have machines do all of the mind-numbing, back-breaking work, so that people are free to express their creativity. If you're actually creative, people will pay you for it.
we don't and can't have enough money for everyone to be rich, but we can have enough government for everyone to be poor. And then we will finally have the 'equal outcome' some many clamor for. except, funnily enough, for about 1% of the population who are smart enough to game whatever system is in place so they can accumulate power and wealth.
And, by the way, why work hard if it doesn't benefit you? not that many people are altruistic enough to work hard so others can benefit. why work if you have a basic income? Then we will have *more* jobs americans won't do...until the government forces you because they need to keep their tax revenue afloat.
Do you really want punch of AI on lose hacking anything and everything, when theres enough trouble with people already doing so...
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You are entirely missing the point. The reason that some people (i.e. black people) are behind the economic curve is because of centuries of slavery followed by another century of government-imposed segregation and racism. We need policies like this because, for them, the game was explicitly rigged. You can't cheat for hundreds of years and then one day say, "ok starting now we play by the rules, sucks that you are so far behind lol".
Over here in "socialist" Europe, most people subscribe to those ideas. And many governments try to implement them. Note I say "try" because in practise it has proven to be not at all easy or cheap to for example separate the Cants from the Wonts. And if they Can't or are Unable to, how do you best assist them? Help them pay rent? This predictably increased rents, which they fixed with rent control. Which destroyed the private rental market and pretty much locked up the rental market for low middle class incomes. Asking development/construction companies doing housing projects to build cheap low income rental housing and paying for that by asking a little bit more for the larger houses they were going to sell, increased housing prices across the board, including prices of rental properties, further damaging that market. Same for incomes: make it too progressive and pile on benefits for unemployment people, and you end up in our situation where an unemployed person who goes back to work actually has less to spend. Who the hell is going to get up at arse 'o clock and work a crap job for less money? And in some situations the marginal tax burden is through the roof: a person going from minimum wage to a salary that's 80% higher has, when all is said and done, only 7% more to spend.
A lot of those nonlinear effects are due to governments trying to fix side effects brought about by programmes to help those who Can't. And those programmes either have a lot of people to apply the rules correctly, or you get a lot of Wonts taking full advantage. Even a relatively simple program like our "personal healthcare budget" needed some rules, bringing administrative waste and leeches. Under this program, people who need special care like a wheelchair, help around the house or a part time nurse, get assigned a personal budget which they can then use to buy the help they need. But of course it's not to be used as beer money, so there are rules. Complicated rules. So complicated that agencies sprang up to help people administer their assigned budget and ensure that they are in compliance, while of course taking a bit wet bite out of that budget as well. Then the government made hiring such agencies mandatory in certain cases. In other words, a simple idea to let people manage their own budget turned into a big mess.
UBI has the promise of not requiring any rules, but there are bound to be side effects that have to be addressed, with rules. For instance: companies who used to pay €2000 a month can now get away with paying only €1000 because that other half comes in the form of UBI. Do they still get 40 hours a week for that or are wages set to plummet? And do they get to keep the difference? You could tax them... but they will try and evade those taxes, and this will unfairly burden companies that do not use a lot of labour.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So I glanced through the article and it seems to me that they're making a few bad assumptions about UBI to arrive to their conclusion. One is that they're saying it's bad because it's not tied to working like most existing social programs and there's little experience from social systems that are not tied to work. However the very reason the western world will need UBI or something like it in the close future is that across the board the western countries are facing a situation were automation is making many, many jobs obsolote and the rate at which these technologies create new jobs do not match that. It is pretty much agreed by economists at this point that a 100 % or close to a 100 % employment is an impossibility when you start seeing jobs such as driving and data-entry etc. disappear in the coming decades.
Secondly about the cost: they're saying that the cost of 219 billion would be too much, but really, it's not if you actually started making sure the companies and super-rich paid what they're supposed to. Look at the corporate tax revenue for example, in 2014 you got around 320 billion dollars out of it. However, we know that the effective tax-rates of corporations are far below the nominal 35 %, at 27,1 % because many corporations pay nothing or close to nothing in taxes.
Just by making sure corporations actually paid the required 35 % instead of the 27,1, you'd get an extra 95,5 billion. And we're not even talking about raising the taxes, this is the amount you're currently missing by allowing corporations dodge taxes. and that alone would fund nearly half of the program.
Then if you look at the state of the estate tax:
So you're essentially taxing 1 % of the 1,2 trillion dollars that gets passed down from generation to generation every year. This is insane. The whole point of the estate tax is to try and prevent income inequality from exploding since wealth once accumulated can create more wealth for its holder without the holder having to do any work for it. As an example say someone who is 35 inherits say 6 million today. Let's suppose he's not some financial genius but simply puts it to some safe index fund to sit and generate profit, let's assume 5 % PA, and let's also assume the guy in question pays his taxes, which for long therm investments at that size would be 20 % if I've read the US tax code correctly (and do correct me if I'm wrong), and after that spends half the profit he makes on living, buying things etc... so the total profit he'd be making every year after taxes and living expenses is 5 % * 0,8 * 0,5 = 2 %.
The average life expectancy in the US is about 79 years, so let's assume a period of 44 years from 35 to death. At 2 % a year, this comes down to 11,72 million dollars that's left in the fund, and this figure obviously does not include all the assets and mansions the guy has bought with the yearly ever increasing half of his profits I've assumed above, so in reality the wealth to be inherited is even greater than 11,72 million, that's just the cash.
This is the reason the estate/inheritance taxes are important when you have as much super-concentrated wealth as you do
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Why shouldn't people work?
THIS!! also if you are a good honest person its extra difficult to become rich, since most methods of acquiring wealth require at least some exploitation and malleable ethics
The problem with UBI is that supply and demand curves are nonlinear, especially for inelastic supply goods (goods where bringing on additional supply is hard).
You can give everyone a UBI, which would absolutely cause an increase in demand across the board, especially for basic necessities like housing, food, gas, clothing, energy, and so on. For necessities like gas, energy, and food that are in limited supply, the price increases nonlinearly with demand, so for every dollar in UBI, there will be greater than a dollar increase in price for these items. This will also extend even to elastic supply goods because while it is somewhat possible to increase the supply of luxury items, it still takes time to respond to market demands.
UBI in general is a terrible idea. This is basically rent-seeking behavior, where money is paid to get basically nothing of value in return. Without productivity there should be no money changing hands.
You live into a modern version of feudalism, get over it.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
So, your parents depended on social services to get started, and you got a scholarship.
You are the very definition of not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but benefiting from the kindness of strangers. The bequests that paid for your scholarship and the taxes that paid for your parents to integration in your new home are as responsible for your success as your hard work is.
Well done for your hard work, but for every guy like you, there's a bunch of guys in the same situation who fought for those opportunities and came second, didn't get the scholarship, couldn't go to med school. Just because their story didn't resonate as well with the scholarship board doesn't mean they are any less talented, or any less talented than the rich kids who's parents paid their way - why don't they get your opportunities too? Because equality of opportunity is a lie.
I'm not saying that a UBI is a surefire good idea, but it also shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand as a replacement to our current welfare systems.
Depending on whether you believe the Heritage Foundation or Congressional Budget Office, US "welfare," ie: means-tested aid, is between $590-1000 billion/year. Between $1800-3000 per capita. "Means-tested aid" includes Pell grants, food stamps for people with jobs, and Medicare part D subsidies for people who worked hard all their lives.
The closest thing we have to "welfare," as it existed in the 1970s, is "Temporary Aid to Needy Families." Per capita spending on TANF was $15 in 2014. That's $15, not $15 thousand, about the cost of a movie and popcorn. And it turns out that states have diverted most (ie 70+%) of TANF spending away from direct payments to individuals.
So, if your argument is that there are so many 'needy' people in the US, and our bureaucracy prevents much of that money from getting to those who need it, then one alternative is to just divide all the means-tested aid evenly. We could give everyone $2000/year of UBI. That's not what UBI proponents are asking for. They're asking for $2000/month. That's not a rearrangement in the distribution of current assistance spending, it's a 10-12x expansion.
Even if you include all payments to individuals, Federal 'aid' for 2014 was only $6000 per capita, and you only get there by taking away medicare and social security payments that many people believe are their personal retirement account. UBI is not just another way to manage current social support programs.
Wouldn't this be a replacement for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid except it wouldn't be a ballooning Ponzi scheme? 85% of all tax dollars already go to these entitlement programs. If we were to drop the existing entitlements and replace them with the living wage, it's not much different than what we currently have and everyone benefits not just old people. The problem with the current benefits is that young people are paying it to the old people. The payouts aren't really coming from the trust anymore because the payouts exceeded the money in the trust and the trust was "robbed" several times.
I'm not a big fan of unsustainable entitle programs but this one seems better than what we currently have because everyone would benefit more equally.
Side Note: It would be interesting to see the correlation of the increase in poverty as it relates to the existing entitlement programs by not providing enough incentive for people to plan for their retirement and old age.
We'll make great pets
This AC must not follow me much - I'm not really a proponent of UBI. I was just saying that you have to use tax for UBI, you can't just use monetary policy. That is actually one of the reasons it won't work like people think it will.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
In business and pretty much everything in life, the only true failure is to stop trying.
Unemployment is at near historical lows. If you aren't a total fucking moron, or a criminal shitbag, you can find a job.
I suspect you're one or both of those, in which case you're exactly where you're supposed to be: Dying on the streets.
Your scholarship, the money to pay for your lab work, even the very existence of that college is due in large part to resources provided by society precisely so people could benefit as you have. If you hadn't been able to come to this country, and you were now living in poverty somewhere with no opportunities, would that have been a reflection on your worth? Sure, congratulations, some of what you have now is very much through your own talents and determination, but you also were lucky enough to be in a position where that even mattered. One illness, one missed opportunity, could have prevented you from succeeding.
Unless you survived on your own after being born "naked and afraid" in the wilderness, you are not a self-made person, you are the beneficiary of millions of people before you.
That's bullshit. My family came into this country as refugees with almost nothing. We depended on social services while my parents were learning English. I earned my way into school, got a scholarship to go to college. I worked my ass off in college to have a high GPA, worked 20+ hours a week in a lab in addition. I earned my way into an MD PhD program and didn't have to pay for medical school... worked my way into residency and fellowship. In the meantime my parents are earning 5 figures.
United States is the most amazing country in the world, where opportunity is still pretty open. I am so thankful to be here.
For duck's sake, please don't turn it into the country I ran away from.
The US is certainly not the "most amazing country in the world." The US is at the very bottom for social mobility among OECD countries outdone by only a few. The lack of free or affordable higher education is an important factor. The lack of single-payer healthcare is another.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Yeah, he put a lot of effort into what could have been summed up with, "fuck you, faggit"
Which matters not one shred. Sure, it's a nice excuse, but it has no bearing on reality, except for letting everyone know you're not colouring with a full box of crayons.
So actually doing it is wrong.
I see what you did there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's never been OK. Violence is never OK.
1) Society needs that child more than it costs society to pay for it, as one day that child will be paying taxes and working
2) Society still needs that child, regardless of whether the parents own their house or rent
3) The US needs immigrants, and is far from full. Hell, most of the western world needs immigration to shore up the coming problem of "too many old folks and not enough workers" which are looming.
Maybe if we didn't have a bunch of people operating on ridiculously short-sighted, superficial appraisals of complicated issues, we'd not have to waste time and energy explaining to people why countries need tax payers.
There's -some- truth to that for the truly poor people in the world, those living on less than a dollar a day.
In the US, though an attractive argument, BELIEVING that causes poor choices, but the assertion simply isn't true. Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of lump-sum lottery winners are broke within three years? If lack of seed money were the problem, $50 million dollars would solve that, many times over. The fact is, they normally go from having $50 million to broke very quickly - by continuing to do things that result in being broke. Things like buying lottery tickets.
I've worked with a lot of guys just getting out of prison and homeless guys. There are basically two paths they can choose when it comes to buying groceries:
Plan A) get six frozen meals ($12), a four pack of toilet paper ($3), two cold sodas ($3). Total $18. Repeat every few days.
Plan B) get a pound of dry rice and a few other things to make nine meals ($13), an EIGHT pack of toilet paper ($5), and no soda. Total $18. A couple days later, you don't need toilet paper - you got an eight pack. You have a few ingredients left over. You had a $20 bill and invested $2 in the larger pack of toilet paper, skipping the soda. Next trip, if you love soda, buy a 2-liter for a dollar. More soda costs less - two liters is cheaper than 20 ounces, and the big bag of beans for $3 rather than the can for $2.
That's the facts I've seen - even when you have only $20, you can invest buy getting the economy pack of one essential such as toilet paper or staple food, by just one week skipping the soda or lottery ticket. With the savings, you can buy the economy size of next item next week.
It truly IS a problem if you believe that you can only afford two cans of beans, a four pack of toilet paper, and a cold soda. That'll keep you broke. A bag of beans, an 8 pack of toilet paper, and a 2 liter of soda wil cost less and last longer.
No-one is saying it is a lifetime guarantee of free money and phones. Your observations of Katrina and the single anecdote you are discussing don't matter, as they are devoid of any actual usable information, and are indistinguishable from fantasy. We need data, and you don't have it.
Looks good. The bogus numbers of the opponents are still going strong, but time will fix that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Okay, I just did a rough calculation, if 15% of the over 300 million Americans need a UBI, then the cost to give them $22,000/year is roughly $1.089 trillion, not including the cost of administering that program. We bring in about (round numbers here) $3 trillion per year, so giving the 'bottom' 15% $22,000/year would cause a (roughly) 33% increase in taxes across the board.
Do you want your taxes going up by 33%? (i.e., I currently pay 30% in FEDERAL taxes, in the new schema, I would pay 63%)
What happens to the next 15% of the population when the bottom 15% is given $22,000? are they dis-incentivized? They suddenly will be the new 'bottom' 15%.
(disclaimer: I took those numbers without any concern for the idea of 'family' or age, so just 15% of 300,000,000, so even babies 1 month old, and all persons, not presuming families, one could make a more accurate projection by presuming that there are roughly 174,000,000 'households' in the USA, and then the cost would be, roughly, half, thus taxes would only need to go up by maybe 17%, not including the cost to administer such a program, i.e. I currently pay 30% in FEDERAL Taxes, in the new schema I would pay roughly 47%)
Not afraid enough of robotii, IMHO.
davecb@spamcop.net
Hmm... let's say there's an overproduction of apples right now. In an ideal world, we'd all receive an apple or two for free each week until the surplus was gone.
However, it's hard to electronically transfer apples, so we use money instead. It means that apple-addicts can buy extra apples, and fruit-haters can buy nuts instead. Thus, people have a choice, the trade-off being that it doesn't guarantee the redistribution of apples (and so is inefficient).
I'm okay with saying I have no imagination though, so I'm sure there are better ideas that apparently the politicians haven't been told about yet.
didn't have to pay for medical school
There it is. That is how you did it. You have privileges as a refugee that others cant match. A less-desirable program candidate (native non-minority doesn't help the school out politically nearly as much as a refugee) born in the US with a 3.9 GPA isn't going to get a fraction of what med school costs.
Guess how I know.
Some people get opportunity handed to them. Others don't. That does not negate your hard work, but without those opportunities all the work in the world wont draw blood from a stone.
That's a great argument for some level of economic protection of minorities. Crunchy white art-school millennials? Not so much.
Yes, the cost would be a large chunk of our GDP; why is that a problem? Where else should that much of our GDP go, if not to food and shelter for people?
And how much would our GDP improve if, all of a sudden, we had a strong consumer base, again? I'm not an economist, so I can't run the numbers, but it seems obvious that the economy as a whole would improve massively.
We've been hearing the rhetoric that tax cuts increase tax revenue by stimulating the economy for decades, and that's true, IF, and only if, the tax cuts go to people who will spend more money. The problem is that they keep giving the tax cuts to rich people, who don't spend it, which leads to lower revenue and an even worse economy.
A Universal Basic Income is just the reverse; give money to people who sill spend it on goods and services, and it will drive the economy.
In an era where increased productivity and technology has radically improved the ability of an individual to accomplish work, it is only natural that fewer and fewer jobs will become available, and there is a strong argument that many jobs that exist today are make-work programs; effectively a UBI for certain people. We need to extend it to everyone, or there are going to be a major problem.
The human element of success is drive to achieve that success. It's been proven that people without incentive tend to stay in a stagnant form. This has been proven with poverty as some simple accept that what the government gives them is enough. No incentive to go beyond what their aid will provide them.
It's been the argument to at least require people to obtain some sort of steps to get away from aid. More education, relocate, provide a least community service.
Goals in life are what drive humans to go further, and the reward is money and better lifestyle. It's not a given you should make a certain amount, the pay has always been driven by the requirements of the jobs. Minimum wage is determined by these factors in the economy, if people are willing to work for that wage it doesn't change. When workers won't work for that wage it goes up until it attracts enough workers. I agree, its very much a relative comparison when you factor wages. Some would never work for $7.25 others would gladly do work for that. Some wages were meant for younger people and not family earners who need more and have more expenses. It should not be expected that your wage is determined by what you need. You should obtain employment that properly matches your income with your lifestyle. If that means getting skills, more education or relocating. That should be what you do, and not expect a minimum wage job to pay more than its worth.
Why do you assume someone on UBI is sitting at home doing nothing. My guess is they will be doing things that will supplement their UBI, but they can be more selective. Your basically asking for a centrally planned economy vs a free market labor economy.
Cheap storage VM.
Robots will do all the work, and people who own robots will make all the money. The people without robots will have to either starve or overthrow the system.
We'll have UBI over the Republican Party's dead body, which is entirely possible as political parties are not immortal. (Where are all the Whigs?)
>> the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
Hold on, buddy. Let's take a simpler case: that of a surplus. Suppose you earn $10 but you only spend $9. You now have a $1 surplus. If you do this ten times, you'd have a $10 surplus in your bank. You could then live one pay cycle without income or "doing nothing" as you put it. That doesn't make you "evil", that makes you prudent. You've earned that right... much more so than someone who spent $11, earned $10, and now needs a bailout from someone else.
When you come in and look at this after the fact and say, "look at that rich bastard, sitting on his ass", you're really deeply twisting the situation by not examining how we got there in the first place.
If you take away the ability for people to earn, keep, and invest a surplus, you take away the incentive to produce anything beyond what you personally need in the near term. Production is the foundation of wealth. All of these dollar bills mean nothing without it.
You're so focused on "haves" and "have nots". But how did the haves get to have? That's the important question. Most of us earned it through honest means: building and selling products and services to others who needed them.
To read your post is to believe that anyone who ever built anything is a thief, and anyone who ever didn't build anything is a hero. Isn't precisely the opposite true? Shouldn't we be celebrating people who built the goods and services we rely on?
People that are very wealthy pay other people to be smart for them, i.e. the wealthy don't have to do anything because they have money.
Seems like "paying other people to be smart for them" is doing something. (Btw It's probably the best one-sentence description of Capitalism I've seen!) Rather than this being the opposite of doing something, it's the best possible thing they can be doing! For example, all the programmers on Slashdot (are there still any?) :-) are most likely benefiting from being paid to be smarter at programming than the person/organization doing the paying.
Paying others to be smarter causes investment in businesses and ventures that generate more jobs and grow the economy. Even the stereotypical "rich d-bag" with a gawdawful big, tacky mansion, provides jobs for construction, plumbing, electrical, architects, interior designers, furniture builders, artists, landscapers, etc. (Paying each for being smarter in their respective trades.) i.e. It benefits people at every tier of society.
This system has produced the most innovative society ever! Technology miracles happen so often now we take them for granted, because of this system. The overall standard of living is much higher for everyone in societies that adopt this approach.
Please, please encourage the wealthy to pay others for their smarts!
In America, you can be a stupid as you want to be. Money hasn't anything to do with it.
The problem I am thinking is what does society need to give to a human to encourage learning and good behaviour. UBI could be a part of a solution to that problem. To evaluate UBI, a set of model of living standard is needed. These models define the necessary thing that is require to live a life in which there is enough space for learning and improving one culture. The model should include the size of home, clean and orderly living space, clear policy of good neighbor, balance diet, etc. After these models are well define, it can be used as a guideline and to evaluate the cost. Improvement can be made on these models as long there are basic model.
EVERYONE should work.
And before you get started, just tell me how you feel about Clinton getting more money for one speech than many will make in a Lifetime. Or her bitch spawn getting 6 figure, no show job...It's like the Sopranos with these people.
So speaking is not work? It's pretty obvious why no one will pay you to speak.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
It sounds like he's made a great case. A basic income on top of existing social programs, paid for by income taxes, is certainly a bad idea.
Next step: survey American UBI proponents to see if that's what they're actually proposing, or cite a popular UBI plan in the criticism. It's clear no one did this part already.
I'd like to propose that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities disbands, as its "progressive" goals appear to actually be supporting large complicated government instead of actual social progress. I'm not going to do any research or anything, I just felt like writing a wall of text based on what I assume someone else believes from internet arguments.
The basic idea of the UBI is that there are a hell of a lot of people out there who make astronomical sums per anum and do nothing with the money other than sock it away. That money helps no one but politicians who are bought and paid for and told to go protect it.
The UBI would take that money (which does F-all for the world economies, BTW) and "invest" it in a basic income. The money would flow back into the economies, be spent and MAKE US ALL RICHER. Think trickle-up economics.
Really people, how hard is this?
Until you can honestly answer that question, you don't understand economics. You get paid for contributing something. You don't get paid because you spent 40 hours of your week in an office. You get paid because what you contribute has value to someone else. Only the payee has the right to decide what that contribution is worth. Oh, sure, the worker can demand that they get paid more but the payee can tell that person to go pound sand... in a free market system. So, a universal basic income means one of two things: Either your mere existence in the world is valuable or the money is worth that much less. The former is B.S. The latter only proves that universal basic income is inherently inflationary.
Automation and increased productivity hasn't yet made most the population wake up and realize the serious problem. Sorry friend, that ship has not sailed as far as the masses.
If you want to help, you can try to inform everybody you know so we have less clueless people out there. Once enough of the population realizes then solutions could be possible assuming the public is not still engineered to serve our current masters. It's far more likely the ruling elite drives more of the population down while distracting us and using wars and man-made disasters (such as global warming) to cull the population in something that makes one think of "The Time Machine" isn't such far fetch fantasy.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is ethically the correct stance.
The prebate component of the FairTax is similar to a UBI, but without having to pay for an IRS.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Right up till you have to buy a loaf of bread, then you're broke again.
As many as one-third of tax filers receive more in refunds because of deductions then they paid in taxes each year.
These people, because of their income level, number of dependents and other deductions profit from the tax code - rather than paying their fair share actually collect their fair share...
That is a form of Badic Universal Income.
Ps to my other reply. I've lived under a tarp behind Target. I've lived in a delapidated mobile home that was offered for sale for $2,500 (I rented, with a roommate, for $150 each). Now I own a 3,500 sq foot home in a desirable part of town. My comments about the decisions we make and the consequences aren't a theory; I'm not guessing. I've lived it both ways.
It can be imagined someone taking a loan (say $40000) offering his lifetime UBI payments. Two months later she is back to square one.
So same outcome as now?
You can work and spend your money wisely or you can starve while living naked in the streets.
Depends what you consider work. For example, a mother taking care of her children is certainly work. Why not pay a mother that stays home and raise her kids (which in most cases is the best and least expensive option) rather than forcing her to get a job and spend large part of her income on daycare?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Anything special you had in mind?
The law enforcement that makes sure that people with money actually gets to keep it? The bureaucracy that makes sure that the law enforcement is funded?
The schools and hospitals that make sure that people have the option to follow the law and not resort to crime?
What exactly do you think is unnecessary? If you can write that down in a coherent fashion you can make a great career as a politician.
I suspect you can't and that you just believe that somehow everyone but you benefits from the taxes you pay.
Menial labor jobs could be completely eliminated within a 50 years. UBI might be a way to start that transition.
Construction, manufacturing, garbage collection, maintenance and similar are all on the chopping block. There is even talk of automation of many software development activities and high-knowledge professions like medicine and engineering. When I look at my role as a coder, data modelling, product design and requirements analysis are the only bits that I think might be very difficult for a non-sentient entity to do. Everything else could be done more efficiently by a machine. That's a probably 80% of today's jobs, gone or totally changed. The only activities that I don't anticipate being replaced are the truly human ones that harness our innate curiosity and creativity: art, music, law, research and exploration.
As a society we need to figure out how to keep the everyone engaged and interested in life. They need to be doing productive things or boredom will give rise to unrest and revolution will follow. The Romans knew this, "Bread and Circuses" kept their citizen populace occupied, while the menial labor tasks were 'automated' by slaves (who were treated as robotic minions essentially). We have the power to move the entire world population past the work required as part of the struggle to survive. What will they do next?
I think, we need to start transitioning to a cultural Renascence. A focus on art, music and creativity instead of work may very well be needed as the 'work' part is going to be hard to come by. If interplanetary and interstellar travel becomes viable, the focus could be on exploration and colonization. We need something to work at together to achieve, otherwise we will start to work against each other.
It looks like automation will eventually be able to replace all the jobs (maybe 95% or 99%, let's not quibble). At that point the vast majority of the citizens will be living on welfare programs, which is like UBI but with less dignity and little self determination.
In fify years some version of UBI is inevitable, so our goal should be to design an approach for reaching that future with a soft landing.
If I failed half as many times as Donald Trump...
then you you could be president!
Swiss voters said hell no to UBI because the proposal in front of them was complete and utter shite. There are many ways to implement UBI the concept. Just because it was (rightly) rejected in one specific case does not invalidate the entire idea.
.
To get equal opportunity you also need to make sure that you can't be born rich.
For capitalism to be fair you need a 100% inheritance tax.
The country was founded almost 300 years ago, when automation meant horses and mechanical clocks. The longer the pols believe there's a magic formula to create more jobs to keep people busy, fat & happy, the more suffering there will be as jobs simply go away.
Just because you refuse to look for it or at it does not mean it does not occur. The UK 27% number is worse than what we have in the US
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Wouldn't it be nice if we actually *had* equal opportunity in this country?
C|N>K
Feudal lords only had to make one smart choice in their life: who their parents were.
Mobility is exceedingly difficult in a Feudal society, usually requiring a plague or war to clear out new opportunities for the lower ranks of nobility.
The commoner moving to nobility is almost impossible.
Going from lower class to middle or even billionaire (nobility) is very common in Capitalist societies, more than any other sort of society.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
...that's free.
Less opportunity, more opportunity. Fucking opportunity is opportunity. No, it may not be the same exact opportunity, but not everyone gets to go to Ivy League schools. Everyone has a chance to, if that's what they choose to drive towards. Parents make decisions that affect their children. Children can make decisions that lift them up above where they came from. Some parents choose to sacrifice their own opportunities to try to ensure their children have more than they did. Some parents make terrible decisions that make their childrens' lives harder. But we all are born with the same things available in life. Some people have to work harder to get to those things, that's just a fact. There is never going to be an "equal" playing field as you describe, except that we all get one life and decide what we do from there. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are constantly infringed upon by these government programs that presume to know how to mete out fairness and justice better than without it. As soon as you take someone from one person against their will and give it to another, you are infringing on that person's inalienable rights. Doesn't matter how altruistic you want to make it sound. There is a limited amount of stuff regardless of what stuff may be, and that means some people will get that stuff and some people won't. There is one POTUS job at a time. That means 350 million other people don't get to be that. Setting aside the age and other requirements, every one of those 350 million people had the opportunity to be president. But someone else won out. Opportunity is about having the option to try. Some opportunities have a very low chance of success regardless of who you are or what income level you were born into. Equal Opportunity is not about everyone having the option to try. You are not legally restricted from running for president because you went to a public school in a poor neighborhood. But if you decide to let that guide you into a career at McDonald's then you're ;probably giving up your opportunity to be POTUS. UBI ain't gonna get you into Yale. Hard work is going to. And someone who gets to Yale with hard work versus someone whose parents could afford to send them to every university at once is probably going to be better off. Does that mean since the hard worker now has a better opportunity for a job that the trust fund kid should get some sort of government assistance to help offset his laziness brought on by affluenza? No, he chooses what to do with the opportunity. Some choices you make, some your parents make, some your parents parents make. What you do with opportunity is up to you.
Funny that asian immigrants seem not experience this drag on their prospects you are mentioning.
Telling people they can starve because Einstein did it better and they ought to have been like Einstein is more than a little disingenuous. What just about everyone who isn't Einstein CAN do is mark a ballot and pull a trigger. I'm curious as to which one happens to fix this expanding problem of systemic unemployment and underemployment; I sincerely hope people are given the opportunity for it to be the former.
"Ethics", "scruples", and "moral law" are all synonyms, unless we're into the technical jargon of moral philosophy. You're arguing about the basis for ethical first principles, but the GPP never made any assertions about that, religious or otherwise.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Fuck UBI and FUCK every one of you lazy good for nothing "intellectuals" who have it all figured out, how to use other people's money to line your pocket and the pockets of the countless other non-contributors.
I earned my money and you can eat a bag of dicks if you think you're entitled to anything for nothing. Just FOAD!
Not to mention that the CBPP basically does research and makes policy recommendation on various government run social support programs.
Basic Income would more less eliminate all those social support programs.
Which would basically put CBPP out of business.
So while I'm not saying there is, but there is the potential for some bias. At the same time, it does sound like they have experience dealing with social support issues so their comment may be valid. I'd read into it critically however just the same.
Also there is the "Accountability" of a certified accountant, that is often required for the books. Some dude using financial software isn't the same kind of responsibility. It maybe (or may not) end up as the same result, but I expect in many cases, legally a certified account is required to vouch that the correct and legal processes were taken to validate the numbers.
In Canada the biggest benefit of a Universal Basic Income is eliminating the Welfare bump.
Poor people here lose subsidized housing and welfare and child benefits get reduced while some medical benefits are taken away if a poor person starts to earn money. Theoretically a poor persons marginal lose of income could several hundred percent. These people are stuck. Even if they want to get a job and eventually better themselves they can't get started because they won't be able to live in the short term.
I know a lot of very well educated, competent recent immigrants to Canada who are stuck. They can't get a job in there profession because they don't have any work experience in Canada and they can't get a job in Tim Horton's because then they will lose their apartment.
Venezuela failed not due to socialism, but by betting their entire economy on oil. The US isn't dependent on one single product.
Reduce the population. Free vasectomies and tubal ligations. Why this need to breed like rabbits?
Bankruptcy doesn't mean what you think it means, It occurs when a person's or Company's cash flow is insufficient to meet it's obligations; a Company can be quite profitable due to the ways capital assets are depreciated, yet have insufficient liquid assets to pay it's bills.
Most truly wealthy people have several bankruptcies; to become that wealthy you have to be much less risk adverse than the average person.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That might have been true 20-30 years ago, but these days, finding a job is very tough. I see college students coming out with at best $36,000-$40,000 for a starting job, and that is lucky. This has been unchanged since the 1990s. Back then, $36,000 could get you a decent car for $15-17k, a house, and something to set aside. Now, 36k won't even pay for a 1 bedroom rathole where I live. Hell, you have to have $250k a year to even afford a house in the city... and I live in a flyover state where owning more than four sex toys is a state felony, much less somewhere like SF or NYC.
If you are established in the US, it is a completely different ballgame than it is for people who are trying to get started. If you are not established, the opportunities are few and far between, because you have to out-compete not just Americans, but _everyone_ worldwide, due to offshoring, outsourcing, and H-1Bs.
This is the exact argument for expanded social services.
No it is not. It is an argument for leaving the system as it is.
No that is not, that only says the social services available then worked sufficiently well.
Depends what you consider work. For example, a mother taking care of her children is certainly work. Why not pay a mother that stays home and raise her kids (which in most cases is the best and least expensive option) rather than forcing her to get a job and spend large part of her income on daycare?
In my neck of the woods, daycare runs $5 per child per hour. I have 2 children, so my wife would need to earn over $15 / hour (pre tax) in order to pay for day care.
To avoid inflation at some point someone has to add value to the money, which means someone has to work, some will work harder, others will work smarter. If you give someone $10K in UBI, then somebody put $10K of work value into it; There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Never go back to the place you got this argument from. You are stupider than you were before someone fed this to you.
Do you also tax insurance by the face value? Idiot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not that simple. Since the US is a Reserve and Global currency. "Making" trillions more money since 2008 hasn't created much inflation because the US dollar is used not just within our economy, but as a currency used in international trade. In essence the US can tax global trade to some extent before we create inflation at home with additional currency creation in the US.
The country was founded almost 300 years ago, when automation meant horses and mechanical clocks. The longer the pols believe there's a magic formula to create more jobs to keep people busy, fat & happy, the more suffering there will be as jobs simply go away.
The US declared independence from England in 1776. 2016 - 17776 = 240 years. Not quite the "almost 300 years ago" you claim. European settlers arrived in North America during the 1630s, but it wasn't yet the US.
US census bureau has 55% of single family houses owner occupied in the USA for 2016. www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
You don't know what property management is, they deal with tenants for landlords. They rarely own property.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
between paying trillions for tanks and planes the army and airforce says we don't need and billions to imprison people for non crimes (at a cost of $31,000 to $110,000 per YEAR) and having poverty level basic income support which would drive up wages?
I think so.
The study is way off.
As automation and robotics becomes ubiquitous and an estimated 30 to 38% of people can't find work at any salary, we'll need something to prevent civil unrest.
What's the cost of mass rioting by abandoned people?
We have a LOT of guns in this country.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Make it so the spending doesn't start until years from now, but we start paying for it right away.
That way it can pass in reconciliation because we can say, "Hey! Over an X period of time it is solvent."
Our descendants can pick up the pieces later or start riots when it all fails. They have some options there.
The economy doesn't work unless a certain amount of people are starving.
All of this needless baby proofing of America and the world from the ill effects of life have got to stop. We are ceding vast controls of our daily lives to government and people in government who can't do anything right and now we are talking about UBI as if it's an inevitability. Why are so god damned dead set on plowing our citizens and the US into national suicide like this? It's never going to end is it? More people will ask to be taken care of in return for whatever the government asks of them. They are willingly marching into the ovens so to speak.
Hear hear. The stock market has been grossly perverted from the original purpose. That people can not only make a living but get rich from bullshit like currency trading shows that The System is rife with parasites. Send them, along with telephone sanitizers and HFT leeches out to hoe fields for a few years.
AND those countries all all 1 race, 1 religion and 1 culture.
Indeed, Switzerland is so homogeneous that they have 4 official national languages. And the Sami people of Finland, Sweden, and Norway share race, religion, and culture with Finns, Swedes, and the Norse all the time.
I keep coming back to slashdot to hear commentary as well-informed as your own. Kudos!
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Eliminate the Department of Education. I don't believe there is a constitutional basis for it. If for training the workforce, Labor can advocate and try to guide the states.
And Commerce. Trade and treaties could be dealt with at State and Customs, part of DHS.
Then reduce regulation and thereby the size of other agencies.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For decades, I've been trying to start a serious conversation on what I call Post-Adamic Society (where you no longer have to earn your bread by the sweat of your brow).
We've all read how some manufacturing has come back to the US... and employs an order of magnitude fewer people, due to automation. Mining - the "war on coal", for example, was really run by the coal companies, and won by going from tunnel mining to mountaintop removal, where they can use giant shovels into giant trucks, and have cut the number of miners in the last 40 years by an order of magnitude.
So, when so much of it all is done by automation and robots, including some of what we call "intellectual" work, how *do* the other 80% live? Will you give them makework jobs, where they push papers (or .pdfs) to each other, and don't actually add any value?
Where's all the jobs the billionaire "job creators" created? If they're not *here*, why *not* tax the shit out of them, and give everyone a basic income, and healthcare. *Then*, if you want better, find or make a job, and you'll *always* earn more, since it would be on top of your basic income.
And if you disagree, give at least one *workable* and *achievable* alternative plan. And just handwaving doesn't count.
mark
Very similar story here. My family came to this country as political refugees from a soviet satellite state. Mom cleaned houses, dad drove trucks, I ended up going to school for EE, bouncing around a few different graduate programs, and ended up with a great career writing code. Good times, hooray America.
That being said, there's still some huge failings in this country, and I'm sure my experience would've been different if I wasn't white or if I spoke with an accent. Furthermore, there's a difference between the countries we ran away from and places like Sweden (unless you "ran away" from Sweden, in which case I'd question your decision-making skills).
I support socialist policies, and I'd disagree that I'm trying to turn American into the country you or I ran away from. I didn't run away from a country that sought to minimize stratification of wealth or ensure that its most vulnerable members were cared for. I ran away from an unaccountable faux-communist authoritarian regime that made no efforts to further the political philosophy of Marx but instead chose to sell oppression under the guise of charity. You might argue that this is the only possible outcome of socialist policies, but I have yet to hear any rational argument for why this must necessarily be so.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Not exactly. WAY too many people now can't work because they can't get a job. While there's a whole debate about the underlying reasons for that, it seems clear that further automation is only going to make that problem worse.
I am a convicted felon. I have an MBA. My IQ is about 160. I work as a dog bather for$8/ hr, 25 hours a week, and I'm grateful for the work. It took me 3 months to find this job. Some people are less fortunate than I.
Arguments for or against BI don't really mean much until you actually test the theory out. There have already been BI experiments and one of them was in a town in Manitoba Canada back in the 70's. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome. The experiment was to observe the effects on productivity and the labour force or rather: if people would just sit around on their assess if they knew that they would be taken care of. It turned out, that in the 5 years it ran there was a slight drop in work hours but mostly by new mothers wishing to spend time with their babies and teenagers focussing on their education. Also, there were fewer hospital visits and fewer consultations with mental health professionals.
The experiment only ran for 5 years so it doesn't really give us much information on the long term effects. But I think it does show us that there was no drastic collapse of our social and moral fabric, instead it was strengthened. People didn't morph into the welfare bums overnight that some would argue is the "obvious" consequence of BI.
Lack of distribution is the problem. Coupled with a lack of a market for the available labor. If all the workers could work twice as hard, the compensation would just be cut. An example is farming. A farmer can work all day if he wants to, but it may not increase his income. So, the government paid farmers to stop farming the old money crops. So a lot of land lay fallow. I think some of that is being repurposed as organic, but much sat unfarmed for years. A farmer could work twice as hard without making twice as much money. All it did was put too much of the wrong stuff into the system and into our diets.
Similarly with labor, a worker can't double his income by working twice as hard if no one will pay him to do so. If everyone wants to work twice as hard, the market will just cut the compensation.
Remember when an honest day's wage paid for an honest day's work? It might now make sense to pay people what they need as long as they stay out of trouble. Unemployed at home with decent food doing just about anything is better for society than hungry and homeless with nothing to do but riot or rob or loot.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Basically they seem to assume retail pricing on everything from housing to commodities, ignoring the fact that most of those prices are inflated artificially by the "free hand" of the market. The "free hand" of the market is currently working to optimize maximum movement of currency per transaction, rather than a maximum amount of transactions. And this is surprisingly simple to fix, too, though it scares the shit out of greedy rich people and business owners enough that some of them will probably even reply to this message to claim its not possible to do.
Sadly, I chose the trigger. It cost me a lot, and made things worse. Unfortunately, people don't see the desperation around them, and they don't think about how they are incentivizing people.
Make it free and encouraged. The problem will fix itself in 2 generations.
Again we have another income redistribution (like Obamacare) to remove even more money from what is left of the middle class so there is no middle class anymore and the globalists finally have their feudal system.
How about we start by requiring companies to pay a honest days wages for an honest days work, as a taxpayer i really don't see the benefit in creating jobs that pay at a level that people still need public assistance. . . And i could care less if they have to settle for one corporate jet instead two...
Just going to leave this here.
Sure it is work, but it isn't valued work. It is the high value of their vanity - they get paid by the level of cheer.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
POW!
Not to mention we already finace lazy people who sit around and do drugs all day . Immigrants who don't speak the language manage to feed their families in much but American born lazy people don't .
Many of the programs you list have stigmas attached by long histories that are not really rational. Social Security and Government pensions escape that by being described as deferred compensation or even "insurance". Whether or not the stigma is deserved is a political problem, but it affects the economic problem. UBI not only saves money by consolidating programs, it also allows the political debate to form which would reset stigmas that no longer make sense. The receivers of corporate welfare don't care about stigmas as long as the program is legal and available. Why should other parts of the economy be hobbled by obsolete moral issues?
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
An experiment in Canada did not significantly damage the town they tried it in. Is that saying the same thing as "it will totally work on a nation of 300 million?" No. But we don't know what would happen, and you don't either. With something like this, progressively larger empirical experiments are needed. Anything else is just Ideology.
Alternatives invlude massively cutting the minimum wage and then subsidizing the difference. Multiple methods of dealing with the looming robot jobpocalypse right-wingers ideologically believe is impossible ("a computer will never win at an intuitive game like Go..." is the sentiment) should be studied and experimented with.
I don't care if we have people digging and filling in holes just to scratch your sense of moral outrage, but those truck drivers can't all become Web 4.0 Startup Entrepreneurs.
UBI is just one step in the process of moving off an economy that depends on artificial scarcity of basic needs. What must change is our upside-down thinking that rising stock-exchange indexes are indications of a healthy economy -- they are not. Rising indices are mere indications of economic growth; an ever-accelerating express train to no-where. . . or maybe to a cliff. Handled gently, industries that thrive on jobs filled by desperate people will collapse, leaving only industries with people who have a desire to work (S.T.E.A.M). There would be a period of considerable discomfort as various industry-specific recessions occur and a world-wide economic shrinking commences. I'm pretty sure, however, that the economic collapse that *may* happen during this shift is enough deterrent to ensure that our current fear-based economy will continue to limp along until it's destroyed by some kind of cataclysm. You could build this kind of economy from the ground-up, but not from one that already exists. I'm afraid were stuck with an ever-bloating, growth-for-growth's-sake economic system, at least until the next major collapse. If that's the case, then the best thing might be to lay out a plan for economic recovery that involves some kind of base-line income or non-stacking reverse credit that pays itself down to zero over time.
"Going from lower class to middle or even billionaire (nobility) is very common in Capitalist societies, more than any other sort of society."
Try this in my country (Brazil is officially a capitalist country). You will quickly find that if you are not the son of a wealthy family, you're very screwed.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Not any more. Sweden became the rape capital of the world by expanding to 2 ethnicities, 2 religions, and 2 cultures.
Your efforts are terrific, but I hope you know that you are in a tiny minority. Where I live/what I've seen, it's so thick, one could cut their laziness and apathy with a knife.
To the broader topic, we shouldn't be making easier for people to get free money. Paying people to (essentially) sit around and have children is a terrible idea, and going in the wrong direction. It means $10k+ per year, for each new child, for life. How many of them are going to pull themselves up and be doctors? The statistics point more to them becoming street thugs, no?
The problem with this old-fashioned notion of capitalism is that it works only if value-creation comes from labor: you buy leather and make shoes, then sell them. You have a profit motive to make shoes, and if you work hard making shoes, you get money.
The problem is that the economy has been shifting for a long time away from that. If I have capital, I can buy a robot to make the shoes for me. If robot maintenance is cheap, then I can create value for almost nothing. Then I earn a lot of money, for doing nothing other than investing my capital. So, my ex-employees starve. (And then I have no one to sell shoes to! Oh no! Recession!)
Large pots of capital are growing larger, which centralizes wealth. We need a way of spreading this wealth around so that everyone can live. There are lots of ways to do the taking (capital gains, inheritance taxes, etc etc) and lots of ways of spreading it around (food stamps, social security, etc etc). UBI proposal is one of the latter, but it's important in the magnitude that it suggest is neccessary.
That's what all those robot cars, robot forklifts, robot assembly lines, and so on will be for.
If UBI becomes feasible (I want to see more experiments), automation will be why.
All those successful countries would probably be better described as Social Democracies or Welfare Capitalists. It's a key distinction. You can wring production out of privately owned businesses to fund your payouts that way, rather than turning over the means of production to a bunch of well-connected politicals.
>> the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
Hold on, buddy. Let's take a simpler case: that of a surplus. Suppose you earn $10 but you only spend $9. You now have a $1 surplus. If you do this ten times, you'd have a $10 surplus in your bank. You could then live one pay cycle without income or "doing nothing" as you put it. That doesn't make you "evil", that makes you prudent. You've earned that right... much more so than someone who spent $11, earned $10, and now needs a bailout from someone else.
When you come in and look at this after the fact and say, "look at that rich bastard, sitting on his ass", you're really deeply twisting the situation by not examining how we got there in the first place.
If you take away the ability for people to earn, keep, and invest a surplus, you take away the incentive to produce anything beyond what you personally need in the near term. Production is the foundation of wealth. All of these dollar bills mean nothing without it.
You're so focused on "haves" and "have nots". But how did the haves get to have? That's the important question. Most of us earned it through honest means: building and selling products and services to others who needed them.
To read your post is to believe that anyone who ever built anything is a thief, and anyone who ever didn't build anything is a hero. Isn't precisely the opposite true? Shouldn't we be celebrating people who built the goods and services we rely on?
Except that's not how it works. The "haves" earn $10, but receive income of $3000 by making sure other people who earned $10 only receive income of $9. Then everyone has roughly the same $11 cost, but the "haves" have a $2989 surplus and the "have nots" have a $1 debt. Further the surplus is then given to children of the "haves" who earned $0, but start with surpluses undreamed of by the "have nots".
That's extreme income inequality, and that's what people are complaining about. The person pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to become one of the "haves" is almost but not quite mythical. Most people that are thought of being in that category had backing that a "have not" doesn't have access to.
He effected a bored affect.
When the market recognizes that there is "free money" out there prices adjust to eat that new found purchasing power while generating nothing in return. Tuition used to a fraction of what it is now but then we started giving out student loans. Schools realized there was all this free money out there and that they could get away with charging more for the same thing so they did. Your landlord and your grocer will do the same thing the moment they realize you have this UBI income in your pocket. It wont make poor people better off.
Money is the oil that must be kept in circulation. If people can't eat and can't work because employers want to work some people hard and others not at all, then some things we consider antisocial (crime, begging, rioting, looting) become a more productive use of time and energy for the criminals, beggars, rioters, and looters. If taking from the rich is the only way, then debating the fairness politically would be less violent . BTW, the criminals, beggars, rioters, and looters may exist simply because they are the only ones that the elite and political class notice. Plenty of people want to be treated better, but don't have either the social skills or the anti social skills to get a soapbox.
Rent seekers have a long history of using the political system to get what they want. Much of what goes on in business is not productive, but rent seeking. Have you thought about how so many corporations are run by accountants and lawyers than by the people who actually design or make the products? It used to be, the C Suite was occupied by people with backgrounds in engineering, operations, manufacturing, and even marketing! At least the marketing department is focused on the customer, if not the product, instead of elaborate rent seeking schemes.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
The GGP is, though possibly not intentionally. The only way to enforce the "a person who does nothing deserves nothing" rule would be to eliminate the stock market, eliminate corporations, and basically throw out the entire system as it is now. After all, the people at the top of our economic system make money by doing basically nothing other than loaning out their money.
In fact, capitalism in its purest form can best be described as "Those who have get; those who have not get bent." It is basically the exact opposite of the fanciful notion that people should be rewarded for their hard work; the people at the bottom invariably work the hardest (to the point that they get home from work physically exhausted) and get the least benefit from that work, and the people at the top do the least work and reap the biggest rewards.
A universal basic income is really the only way to make it possible for people to be rewarded semi-equally for equal amounts of work. It takes away the necessity to work for your most basic needs, thus freeing up time for people to learn new skills and improve their abilities so that the time they spend working is actually valuable to society instead of just continuing to do things that a robot will soon be able to do for less money. And whether they choose to improve themselves or not becomes entirely under their own control, rather than having menial labor forced upon them by the need to eat and have a roof over their heads.
social welfare is not universal income, but guaranteed income. Society needs to take care of the poor and needy, or expect civility to disappear and crime to rise.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
That worked well in Venezuela, didn't it.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
When what people do becomes makework, then the people are called deadwood. Maybe they get laid off, or maybe they are bought out. Maybe they just work until they want to retire. But, one thing is for sure, deadwood is not replaced.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
That's bullshit. My family came into this country as refugees with almost nothing. We depended on social services while my parents were learning English. I earned my way into school, got a scholarship to go to college. I worked my ass off in college to have a high GPA, worked 20+ hours a week in a lab in addition. I earned my way into an MD PhD program and didn't have to pay for medical school... worked my way into residency and fellowship. In the meantime my parents are earning 5 figures.
United States is the most amazing country in the world, where opportunity is still pretty open. I am so thankful to be here.
For duck's sake, please don't turn it into the country I ran away from.
My guess is your parents hated every second they were on assistance too, that's a big part of the difference, they didn't view public assistance as a career choice.
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You mean like Chelsea Clinton, who walked out of college into a $900K job, while her mother was lecturing 6-pack-joe about "White Privilege"?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
So what happens when everyone is on UBI? You go to the grocery store for food, but there's nothing there, or what is there is of very poor quality and/or very poor selection (why would farmers farm, if nobody has to work?). You've been robbed/assaulted/raped several times because there is no effective police force (why on God's earth would anyone want to be a police officer even now, much less under a 'nobody has to work' system) . You don't have a car, because gasoline is no longer available. You wind up poorer than you were without UBI, because now there is no longer anyone working to produce all the things you take for granted. It takes work to produce goods and services, and nobody is going to do that unless the rewards justify the effort. If all you get for working hard and producing goods and services is a ruinous tax system designed to take all your money away and give it to others who don't work, then no one will work - how could it be otherwise?
America USED to be the place where people who WANTED to work came to make their lives better, escaping from places that didn't offer that opportunity. UBI and it's brethren are slowly converting America into the place where the people who want to work and make their lives better escape FROM. This is a law of nature - if you keep 'spending other people's money', then sooner or later you will run out of people willing to put up with that, and you will have finally achieved 'income equality' - i.e. everyone will be dirt poor, and America will have been transformed into just another 3rd world country.
I have a very hard time listening to someone bashing 'the rich who don't do anything', while typing on a keyboard in front of a PC, in a house with a 2-car garage containing late-model cars, camping/hiking equipment from the last vacation, and a hobby workshop filled with top-end woodworking equipment. Where do you think all that stuff came from? Do you think you would still have it if nobody wanted to work? It's real easy to bitch and moan about 'the rich' and to talk about the 'perfect future' where nobody has to work and everyone has everything they need - but in the end TANSTAAFL applies.
But hey, what do I know? UBI *could* work - and water could flow uphill.
I'm 100% with you on:
> financial planning should be a public school subject in every grade from K through 12 to teach these skills.
Even though I suspect you are extrapolating from anecdote and it's just not true for most poor people, I would still favour that as it can only help (I doubt it is a cure, but it may help make a cure easier to reach).
> So maybe ask yourself - why isn't it ? Why is there hardly a public school on earth that teaches the subject of financial management at all ?
I agree too it's not a a "cure" - some people, probably most, will AT LEAST try out the "easier way" to confirm for themselves that it really is stupid. Some will do dumb often no matter what they are taught. But damn we should be teaching this stuff.
I was happy to learn the other day that high schools ARE starting to teach it much more. I took a class from one particular provider that was really good. Their high school has really caught on in the last few years - about 30% of high schools now teach their curriculum.
Particularly they teach what you described as "Why do we not teach people how interest works - and how evil credit cards are". They basically teach that any debt other than a mortgage is quite suspect, and Capital One is a trap.
> without that resource, the elites would make rather less money ? I'm not even sure that's true, cheaper labour does save a business money - but it also costs it income.
Their are of course some predatory businesses. pay day lenders come to mind. In general, "business" probably does a lot better selling to people who can afford iPads and cars than to people who can't. I think -most- businesses do better when everyone's economic situation is better.
You asked about my family history. In brief, my dad's family was extremely poor by US standards. His childhood home had no floor, just the dirt. They ate meat on Sundays, rabbits or squirrels they killed. His first saw a toothbrush when he was about six or eight years old. He became very successful financially, mostly by working extremely hard. Initially the Navy offered the opportunity to go from nothing to something, if he was willing to work for it. After the Navy he worked for companies. Once the whole family went with him for business trip, on the corporate jet. When he died, when I was seven, my mom re-entered the workforce after being a stay-at-home mom for several years. She worked extremely hard to maintain a similar standard of living.
My parents didn't teach me much about personal finance - the trap of credit cards and note lots, etc. heck, my mom was at work until late, so we kids were basically home alone. We did see the example of hard work. From a young age I took it upon myself to learn about compound interest, etc, reading Kiplinger's magazine when I was twelve.
I basically thought that because my parents were did pretty well financially, I would too. Like it was automatic that successful parents have successful kids, as if the amount of my paycheck and savings account were in my DNA. I would have known better if I had thought about how my dad grew up. His parents were among the poorest of the poor in America, he was the vice president of an oil company. Since having upper middle-class parents doesn't provide automatic success, at 20 years old I was homeless. I lived in the empty lot behind the Target store, along with the people who panhandled on the street corner.
Over the next ten years I made some good decisions and some bad. I owned multiple cars, then sometimes had to hide one from the repo man. By about ten years ago I had already made most of the mistakes someone can make, so I began to make smart financial decisions most of the time.
I'll close with these two thoughts:
> you've been raised by people who had limited choices and even more limited finances - and thus had neither the means nor the ***possibility*** of learning good financial planning.
My dad's backwoods upbringing made it -harder- for him to lear
Feudal lords only had to make one smart choice in their life: who their parents were.
Tell that to Richard III's nephews, who he had killed, so that he could take the throne.
Bankruptcy doesn't mean what you think it means, It occurs when a person's or Company's cash flow is insufficient to meet it's obligations; a Company can be quite profitable due to the ways capital assets are depreciated, yet have insufficient liquid assets to pay it's bills.
Most truly wealthy people have several bankruptcies; to become that wealthy you have to be much less risk adverse than the average person.
I used to work for a bankruptcy law firm, I am aware that one can be forced into bankruptcy due to a lack of liquid assets. Anyway, we all know that when Trump puts a value on his net worth that he says:
Or figure out a way to control population growth. Because you can't continue to "give them money" forever; eventually the well will run dry. Then what?
An obvious solution would be to give people a basic income in return for agreeing to be sterilized.
There's a good historical reason we shy away from that
This is one of those ideology-driven subjects where everyone starts with a result and works backwards. Ironically, the "negative income tax" was advocated my Milton Friedman in 1960. Too simple for liberals, too humane for conservatives.
Go to the grocery store or a restaurant and tell me that we have a deflation problem.
The long comment modifier is configurable. I have it set to give a bonus to long comments, you apparently have it set to penalise them.
Spent a while wandering around in the Options and Account section and couldn't find such a setting. Also tried to find a setting place out of the comments section, but without success. Where is this setting?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
None of those countries are socialist. At best, some of them could be called a mixed economy. A generous social welfare system, does not socialism make. Stop pretending it does. Sweden for instance, has a lower corporate income tax, lower federal income tax, no inheritance tax, no gift tax, and less resrtictive trade rules than the US.
Real socialist countries are listed here. None of them are shining examples of economies that should be emulated.
I think the real problem is that there's a minimum required to not be homeless in most developed nations. There are ZERO apartments in most areas that would be described as "basic", having just a bedroom and a bathroom and a kitchenette. We are therefore burdened with having to have middle-class income to even live within the law. Nobody builds basic, poverty-level housing anywhere. This means that while you work in a gas station or restaurant, or wherever you're underpaid or not employed within your primary career, you're shit out of luck. This affects college students whose parents do not contribute, or can't, and disproportionately affects teens who grew up in state care as orphans or wards of the state. In those circumstances, when you turn 18, you're turned out onto the streets. If you make it, fine. If you don't, nobody cares. Having a brother in law who grew up in state care and who is currently homeless, I am always surprised at the sheer number of homeless people who have similar circumstances, and cannot get out of it because to maintain a job, you have to have a place to live, and to have a place to live, you have to have maintained a job long enough for first and last month's rent, a security deposit, and you have to miraculously have a decent credit rating, somehow, after being homeless. It's one of those things where there's a crack in society, and once you're in it, unless a miracle happens and someone offers you a place to stay for basically free, you'll never get out of it on your own.
If the government were to give everyone 10 dollars a month for basic necessities, you should expect the price of basic necessities to increase by 10 dollars a month.
Basically what you're saying is that black people are too dumb to succeed. A perfect example of progressive racism.
Opportunity does not mean what you think it means.
Like in Sweden where they have no inheritance tax at all?
The GP's point is that these social services already exist, and allowed the GP to be upwardly mobile. That is not an argument for increasing them, any more than it is an argument for reducing them.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
They can't even produce oil, you idiot. It has nothing to do with what you claim, and everything to do with socialism. It's a story we have seen dozens of times, and yet you idiots on the left never fail to learn the lesson.
You need to go do some more reading on the topic.
You're ignorant propaganda yet another reason people are fed up with the left and why Trump is doing so well.
"Running more money through the government is a rotten idea" is left-speak these days?
Yes - much better to have absolutely no minimum income for all persons so that we can have actual starving children living under bridges while the rich fat cat 1 percent of the world's population continues to accumulate loot an an even greater pace.
There is only so much loot that the 1 percent can accumulate before there is simply not enough left for all persons to have a warm dry house, healthy food, reasonable clothing, and a good education.
We've already passed that point so it's no wonder the rich fat cats don't like this policy.
Sure it is work, but it isn't valued work. It is the high value of their vanity - they get paid by the level of cheer.
It sure seemed to be valued by her listeners -- they were willing to pay quite a bit of money to listen.
No. You're discussing equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. Hint: I grew up dirt poor and wanted to get out of it.
If the job creators were doing what they say they do, we'd all have four of them by now.
Shouldn't you get on topic instead of being an admitted sockpuppeteering troll https://slashdot.org/comments.... ?
* There's also all the times I've utterly DESTROYED YOU on technical topics in debates too, but that will wait until we see if you OPEN YOUR PIEHOLE in reply to this (just so I can further illustrate what a total FOOL you are even more, lol!)
APK
P.S.=> It's always a pleasure proving YOU are a trolling FOOL, Zontar The Mindless ("courageous guy" hiding behind sockpuppets & fake names online that you are (lol, not))... apk
I think you don't understand how the Federal Reserve works, we (your government) borrows money from the Fed. Reserve and pays it back with interest.
state ownership is communism, NOT socialism.
The value is added as it circulates through the economy where people decide what goods and services provide value.
I get your point, but as it stands now new currency is input into the economy only when the Federal reserve makes a profit and pays the Federal government and the Federal government turns around and increases spending by that amount.
Otherwise all that currency creation which goes into the economy based on loans by the Federal Reserve eventually must be paid back which means taking capital out of the economy. It is a zero sum game and it isn't clear that there is a great deal of understanding about that and the effect it has on the economy to have such restraint on currency creation.
I can assure you, that most people would strife for more than meeting their basic needs, which would be cheap, simple housing, cheap, simple food, cheap clothes and education, might add social participation like going to museum or so.
It would seem rather odd, if most people would be fine with that.
Actually check that... Profit to the Federal government isn't net positive to the money supply either because it is coming out of the economy.
So really the Federal Reserve seems to lack a way to inject money into the economy without having to eventually take it back out.
Same thing happened when Seattle adopted the $15/hour minimum wage. Prices (particularly rent) jumped, since the market saw the the potential increased demand. Funny thing: The $15/hour wage hasn't actually kicked in yet, so some people working at the same old low wage rates are now living under the freeway in tents.
Have gnu, will travel.
The historical trend is for workweeks to steadily become shorter and shorter. But that trend has been interrupted and for some reason we've become stuck on the concept that a workweek is supposed to be 40 hours.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the problem, but our rigid adherance to certain extreme forms of free market economics...
Correct, there's nothing inherent in capitalism that says workweeks should be 40 hours.
One solution would be for the Department of Labor to index the length of the workweek, just as tax brackets are indexed to inflation to prevent bracket creep.
A better solution would not involve government at all. Salaries are just numbers that are freely negotiated between employers and individual employees, and the length of the workweek should be handled in the exact same way. (The problem, you see, is that it doesn't occur to most people that this particular degree of freedom should be one of the things that defines a truly free market.)
Employers always strive to attract quality employees, and they would gain a powerful edge if their initial offer to applicants could include, say, a 28-hour workweek. 40 hours was a rather arbitrary length when it was instituted, and it's even more arbitrary today.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I trust people to spend income that they have earned. I don't trust them to spend income that someone else earned.
There are all kinds of strings attached to assistance programs like SNAP (for example, can't spend that benefit on Jack Daniels). Do you really want to remove that restriction?
When I travel while working government contracts, my per-diem allowance is so generous that I can always stay at four-star hotels. My coworkers and I could choose to stay at two-star hotels, and save the taxpayers a buttload of money, but we don't. We are spending income that someone else earned! This is an example of where an additional string should be attached.
When poor people are given money, they will spend it, which would boost the economy.
A much too simple and fallacious analysis.
If a dollar is not coercively taken away (i.e., taxed) from the person who earned it, it serves as an incentive for the earner -- who is productively producing goods or services -- to produce even more. That, in turn, drives down the costs of goods and services for poor and rich alike.
And three things can happen to that dollar:
1. it will be invested, which boosts the economy
2. it will be spent on a productive good or service, which boosts the economy
3. it will be spent on a vice, such as a bottle of Jack Daniels, which generally has a net negative effect on society.
If that dollar is taxed away from the person who earned it, and given to a poor person,
* Its above-mentioned incentive effect is completely destroyed
* Let's be generous and assume that only 10% of it will be consumed by the overhead of the government redistribution program. Now, the same three things that were mentioned above can happen to the remaining 90 cents. But things (1) and (2) are less likely, and thing (3) is more likely, after income redistribution has occurred.
Am I saying that no income should ever be redistributed? No, I'm just saying that we should enter into that arrangement with eyes wide open, and not on the basis of oversimplified and fallacious analysis.
UBI is a nice idea for countries who have their economy in order with the goal of long term prosperity.
Even if that statement is correct, this does not look like a country with its economy in order.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Um, that's the least libertarian thing imaginable. Steal from everyone working, pay people who won't.. . And somehow everything is magically fixed!
Except that it's a stupid fucking idea that would destroy our society in months.
Not an ideal of libertarian thinking no... the point is to give people money they can use towards whatever they freely choose versus a thousand different social welfare programs that create a top down approach and impose solutions on people.
There are many people that are incompetent, so just handing out money won't work for everyone. But for people that are simply without enough money to boot strap themselves, giving them money without strings attached would be better than giving them money with all sorts of hassles and oversight which traps them in "the system".
Maybe that means some 3 strikes rule where you get your cash for a while, but if you blow it all and still end up showing up at the soup kitchen looking for free meals then you are cut off and go under supervision and are provided services instead of money because you are incompetent to manage money.
The point is that the libertarian view of social programs is that many are a necessary evil, but they should be reformed as much as possible
Your point was that the poor stay poor. Crypizard gave an example of where your point is false.
I am another example. My family received NO government support, as we were working white people. Delivered papers to buy clothes, worked on an oil rig to afford college, got a degree that could get me a real job.
Your line of reasoning is consistent with the rich, guilt driven white liberals I met in college.
Why do you assume someone on UBI is sitting at home doing nothing. My guess is they will be doing things that will supplement their UBI, but they can be more selective. Your basically asking for a centrally planned economy vs a free market labor economy.
No, I'm asking for a safety net. Somewhere where you can go and work 10 hours to get some food. Some sort of day labourer gig of last resort for someone who can't find work elsewhere. A stopgap that allows someone to survive while they look for work. My comment was to someone talking about the life/death situation of being unemployed. It wouldn't be designed to support you long term. Society needs to figure out what exactly they want. The program we have now SNAP even has the word "supplemental" in it's name but I've read dozens of articles about how you can't feed yourself on the amount of money you get with SNAP. Social security was also designed to be supplemental not someone's sole source of retirement. That's actually one thing positive about the reemergence of the "gig" economy. It makes it easier for people to supplement their income with odd jobs like they used to 50 and 100 years ago. It's only in recent years (and even today only in certain countries) where steady employment is the norm. Even in many well to do countries, odd jobs are a still lot more common than they are in the USA today.
it purely aligns with greed, rather than need
The facts disagree:
Charitable giving continued its upward trend in 2015, as an estimated $373 billion was given to charitable causes. For the second year in a row, total giving reached record levels, and taking 2014 and 2015 together, charitable giving has increased over 10% (using inflation-adjusted dollars).
The wonderful thing about that $373 billion redistribution of wealth is that it was not coerced by any government.
High-income people tend to give more of their income to charity, in percentage terms as well as in absolute terms, than middle-class people. (Of course there are exceptions to that rule: Bidens gave average of $369 to charity a year.) That explains why, say, 3% GDP growth results in greater-than-3% growth in charitable contributions. Most of that $373 billion in philanthropic donations was given by -- according to you -- "psychopaths who parasitically prey upon the rest of society".
If we can just obtain a few more decades of economic growth, we will be able to have a more robust social safety net than the one we have now, funded entirely by voluntary contributions. Government will be able to get out of the wealth redistribution business, and focus on the sole job it was created to do: securing our rights.
For that reason, I'm betting the economy will never be permitted to grow that much. Restoring that limited, Jeffersonian scope to government is anathema to too many people.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Wish I had mod points for you. If you've never rented out property, you are likely clueless how much work actually is required.
I purchased my first townhome in '85, and a week after closing, my company sent me on an overseas assignment. My home was rented out for the next seven years. Sure, I could have sold it right away, and taken a bath on the closing costs. Or, I could have refused the assignment, and risked losing my job in what was a very shitty economy. Over those years, I had new tenants roughly every year. I specified no pets...good luck with preventing that, and have fun with the resulting cleanup, er, carpet replacement. I had to pay a property management company to collect rent, and find new tenants. The rent barely covered the mortgage. And, during the next few years, home prices tanked, finally recovering in the early 90s. In the end, I was able to move back in and spend the next six months cleaning up the place in preparation to sell it. Overall including taxes, commissions, expenses, I might have made maybe $10-20k on a $100k home that resold for $125k. But if you think I was able to... "do nothing but collect rent ", then you're a fucking idiot.
Just another day in Paradise
I read my first article on UBI on fivethirtyeight. http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
As a fiscal conservative, I looked at it with high suspicion. But, the basic idea presented seems plausible enough to suggest serious study, if for no more reason than that jobs will disappear as robotics take over. I'd like to suggest that those of you who doubt or dislike the idea, set those feelings aside for a moment, and read the article. Then, come back and give a good reason why it shouldn't at least be experimented with on a small scale somewhere. Honestly, my own kneejerk reaction to the idea is...WTF, pay people for doing nothing???, are you fucking crazy??? Well, unless you have a better solution going forward, you might want to reconsider.
Just another day in Paradise
When you say currency, do you mean M0 or
M0-M3 as I meant when I said Money? There is a lot that the Fed can do to control the money supply, just a tweak of cents to loosen or tighten how much a bank must have on deposit to loan a dollars can change the money supply by billions of dollars.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
When unions threaten a strike if they don't get their pay rise or if the pay cut isn't removed from the table, you whine and whinge and moan.
When rich people may get a pay cut *you make the threat for them*, they don't even have to threaten to take their "work" elsewhere, you do it for them before it's even proposed to them.
Why is it poor people standing up for a bigger slice is bad but rich people shouldn't ever be at risk of losing their slice?
Go on, Mr Trump, build a hotel with your own hands. How much will your empire be worth if you had to do the work yourself, personally?
But higher income tax and a much more extensive welfare state.
Maybe the lack of inheritance tax isn't the determining factor....
If housing is limited to less than the population of the USA, then you have fucked up housing. You have admitted that there IS NO WAY to house everyone.
And part of the price of housing is demand, but demand is high in cities because the city still wants cheap labour to clean the shit out of toilets and there are no options to move out of the city until AFTER you have a proven and stable opportunity elsewhere.
With an UBI you can move to bumfuck, alabama where you can afford a home and leave the job in the city, reducing the demand for housing in the city and therefore reducing the cost of homes there. When in the bondooks, you can start looking for a job. You haven't any risk moving away from a city you can't FIND, let alone afford, a home in.
They chose poorly.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
After all, I, as the payee, get the sole right to decide what the work you put into manufacture is worth, including the effort of mining and refining the metals, right?
Ah, the Big Lie of the post-Reagan age.
Greed is when you want more than what self-interest demands. Greed is excessive desire that exceeds what is reasonable, healthy or meaningful.
Many, if not most, of the rich are greedy. They want more than what is best for themselves; they don't understand that impoverishing others also harms them.
As Adam Smith figured out a long time ago, a viable economic system has to work despite the existence of greed. This is not in any way the same thing as rewarding or encouraging or worshipping greed, as lassiez-faire capitalists want to do. In fact the principal function of government in a market economy is to provide regulation that will restrain the destructive effects of greed on social structures (such as the market itself).
As you say, a market should work best for those who behave in their own self interest. Greed is by definition excessive and thus not in one's one self interest; it is a character flaw and not the virtue that greedy folk wish you to believe it is.
What happens when all the sellers up their prices because they know everyone is getting an extra $10k?
... human work out.
This would make up for all UBI you can think about at 50k a year for all.
Robots and computers are doing FREE work for their owner who don't have to pay anyone, anymore.
But the problem we're discussing is an automation-caused shortage of work for human workers.
If an aging population reduces the number of human workers, that will HELP reduce that shortage of work for human workers!
It's clearly an advantage. But one that can go away overnight.
As soon as a big currency is managed better than the US dollar, it will take over.
But the other major currencies don't even appear to be trying. If anything they are getting worse and are proud about it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If you believe that, you are an idiot.
The speaking fees are influence fees.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Certainly. Seems more likely we will see proxy currencies emerging which are baskets of other currencies in order to manage risk of value fluctuations. Really it is the smaller countries that are not aligned with a major currency that are going to be de facto taxed.
I am not actually suggesting that we overnight go towards a UBI, but if you see some sort of steady increases in things like the earned income tax credit and pay for it through borrowing from the Federal Reserve, then I think we could move towards a UBI from there without major disruptions to the economy.
are you the guy that thinks that deserve more than your work colleges?, you get rammed in your arse while sucking dick while thinking than the rest should stay low and suck their mouths already, who the hell are they to demand better?
Lobotomised Ignorant smuck
In addition to a breakfast program, we have started a 'backpack' program so that kids can have dinner and clean clothing as well. During summer we have a free lunch program to keep them from starving. An alarming number of people seem to expect the state to raise their kid already; might as well go the whole nine yards with 'orphanages' where kids never have to leave the safety and the comfort of their school.
I'd also support a system that allows for chemical induced infertility for those proven to be criminally negligent of children or mentally unfit. By having some amount of quality control, money for orphanages could be found in savings by reducing special needs programs. Entire wings of campuses are dedicated to retarded or deformed kids who might not have been had their manimal parent not consumed drugs while pregnant.
It may not be possible to create an 'equal opportunity' society but we can at least try to level the playing field a little.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... hates UBI
Casteism
That has never been proven! How dare you drag a theoretically innocent man's name through the mud just because it passes Occam's razor and is the only explanation to the mystery that makes any sense! GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!
"Where would the money to finance such a large expenditure come from? " asks the author.
The same place the rest of the money comes from: the monopoly producer of (non-counterfeit dollars) is the U.S. government. It **NEVER** needs to tax anyone to get dollars. In fact, if you were to go to the Treasury building to pay your taxes, after they marked your bill "Paid" they would shred the money. They make the stuff! In fact they don't even print most of it now. They type it as account balances with computer keyboards!
Sovereign, fiat money creators are *fundamentally* different from money users (households, states, local governments). They can NEVER be involuntarily insolvent if they owe their "debts" in money they can create.
Government is not--and obviously not--provisioned by tax revenues. Where would people get the dollars with which they pay taxes if government didn't spend them out into the economy first?
So...Robert Greenstein is ...let's just say "not fully informed."
Why have taxes at all? To make the money valuable! If I told you I'd posted guards at all the doors to your room, and they'd require my business card before they'd let you out, then my business card would be valuable too.
Read these: http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf (first page is blank for some reason) and http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/02/wray-the-federal-budget-is-not-like-a-household-budget-%E2%80%93-here%E2%80%99s-why.html
Finally, let's take on the inflationistas..."B...but if you just print money, you'll have [gasp!][hyper-]inflation!"
Let's admit there's a theoretical possibility government, with its unlimited dollar resources, could get into a bidding war with the private sector and bid up the price of goods and services. But notice, bidding has to occur for this inflation to happen. No bidding, no inflation.
So if, for one example, Treasury were to mint a few trillion-dollar coins and deposit them at the Fed (the U.S. Central bank), to balance the national "debt"... Where's the bidding? No inflation occurs. In fact, paying off debts is un-spending, so if the Government issued $50K per taxpaying household to be applied to debt retirement first, far less than the $50K would be spent, and less bidding would occur.
A better policy than the Income Guarantee (which is why it's seldom mentioned) would be a Job Guarantee. Employing every unemployed person who wanted a job would not cause inflation either. Who else is bidding for the unemployed?
Strangely enough, though, it's only when social safety nets are the issues discussed that this money limitation talk comes out. Where were the "Fiscally Responsible [tm]" pundits when multi-trillion-dollar Middle East wars, or multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts were the topics of conversation?
The misery, poverty, homelessness, unnecessary illness and hunger inflicted on the population is a very deliberate policy. It's the whip in the hands of the economic elites. You'd better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty, homelessness or even starvation. That's the real message behind this excuse for inaction.
You first. Starting with how NAFTA and how it makes it very difficult for countries like Venezuela to create an ag sector that pays a living wage, as their export market has to compete with U.S. crops subsidized below cost. Then maybe venture on to currency manipulation, and working with the Saudi's to ramp up oil production to hurt their shared geopolitical targets (Venezuela, Russia, Iran).
Which is horseshit sloganeering to begin with.
Another temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Hint: if you really grew up poor, then you really must have seen drug addled delinquent assholes make it much farther in life than you have, because they had rich asshole parents who steered them into positions earning six figures as their first "real" job.
Yes, the scion of a wealthy right-wing family was 'born on third base and thought she hit a triple', to borrow Molly Iven's line on another child of right-wing parents who only made in life because of who his parents were. Why do you ask?
Dude, never go full Nelson
Uh huh. And you're ok with a trust fund wanker making 100 times what you do while doing no work to speak of, because the wanker's last name is Walton or Clinton?
Are you? The more social services there are, the more people there will be like the parent poster, because they were able to focus on school, and not if they were going to be homeless the next week.
Though, hopefully they wouldn't be elitist pricks about it, like the parent poster.
Why Venezuela? Why can't people buy toilet paper in Venezuela but they can walk across the border to Colombia and buy it off the shelf? What makes Venezuela different? They didn't have this problem 5 years ago, at least not to this extent. The answer is right in front of your face, but you choose to believe stupid propaganda instead.
Currency manipulation, artificial shortages, and other CIA-backed shitbaggery. Why are you commenting on a topic you lack remedial knowledge of?
Yes, it is.
Yes, you do.
Lol. Yes, people can't even buy toilet paper in venezuela because of the CIA. Thanks for clearing it up for me.
The Clintons are not a "wealthy right-wing family" by any stretch of the imagination, Hillary is so far left she has a self-avowed socialist for a running mate.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Calling a tail a leg does not make it one.
Morals are handed down/imposed by some "authoritative source"--usually a deity or said deity's earthly rep.
Ethics are the product of reason.
Less libertarian that our current mess of a welfare system?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
If the basic needs are fulfilled, there is no carrot in front NOR a stick on the behind; there would be no motivation to change anything.
How your post got modded insightful is beyond me...
This idea of yours comes up frequently in /. UBI discussions, but it doesn't hold water. If it did, why aren't most people doing just the bare minimum to get by right now? The guy earning a better-than-subsistence paycheck to collect your garbage once a week could be doing an easier and less disgusting job for just enough money to survive. Somewhere else there's a DBA working 50 hours a week for a fat salary when she could be stocking shelves at Wal-Mart 29 hours a week for just enough pay to cover the bills and fund the cost of wasting the time difference playing video games. Many people don't do the bare minimum or choose the easiest path now, yet you and Eric Boling hold the unsupported notion that handouts will necessarily result in widespread sloth.
I don't think man is, generally, motivated to super achievement... otherwise, Einstein (and his like) wouldn't be so rare; there's something unusual in those that over-achieve, and I don't think that's an element strongly apparent in common man.
In the context of UBI, this is a red herring and/or moving the goalposts. I propose to you that the typical garbage collector and DBA are not "super achievers", nor need they be for an economy to function. Perhaps some over-achievers who were motivated by poverty in their youth would never flourish under a UBI system. However, perhaps under a UBI system, those who are too risk-averse to over-achieve without that strong safety net could reach heights they would never attempt otherwise. Maybe it balances out, maybe not - but I think you cannot definitively say that it wouldn't. Regardless, that is orthogonal to the idea that many people do more than the minimal or easiest job now, so it seems many would do more than nothing at all under a UBI system.
- T
As long as we pay for primary education via local property taxes, we are explicitly saying that we DON'T care about giving equal opportunity. Along with all the other implicit ways we do it means we don't get to claim that.
Hint, I'm no more than middle class, not a millionaire. If I was a millionaire, why would I be wasting time on slashdot? And YES I have seen that, and YES I don't think it's a good idea. But again, that just proves my point, that the left cares for equality of outcome than equality of opportunity.
Repeating the empty slogan does not get the shit off the heel. Hint: if, on aggregate, you don't have equal outcomes, by definition that means you do not have equal opportunity. Medical school alone proves my point - it's an incredible gamble to risk a lifetime of student loan debt if your quest to become a doctor doesn't pan out - unless you have rich asshole parents to back you up.
If there was equality of opportunity, a black kid from Detroit has as much chance as a rich asshole kid from a rich asshole neighborhood of being your next doctor. But we both know that's not the case.
The are the most successful right-wing family in the United States, far beyond the Bush's. Clinton passed corporate trade laws, deregulation and the gutting of welfare that Reagan could have only dreamed of. Monica Lewinsky is the reason your Social Security benefits weren't blown up in the 2008 economic collapse, as Bill wanted to privatize it long before Dubbya wanted to.
As for Hillary, she exported fracking to the world, loves corporate trade, starting a new cold war with Russia, and has ever met a regime change or regional conflict she didn't love, or a brutal dictator she wouldn't sell arms to, as long as they play ball with "American interests".
In some other planet where she picked Sanders to be her running mate, rather than colluding with the DNC to cheat him out of the primaries? Tim Kaine is another pro-corporate shill who loves right-to-work laws and could easily appoint a pro-life justice to SCOTUS, if he were to become president.
Y'alls need to ignore party labels and speeches and look at what politicians do.