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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.
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.
--
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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?
Correction...they want to make everyone who's not independently wealthy work. UBI already exists for those who can afford not to.
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 ...
Because if you just top off people making less no one will do jobs worth less than that amount. You're pricing all low income jobs out of the economy. Those employers will be unable to pay enough to attract people. Whole industries will collapse, or the price of those goods will skyrocket.You have to let people work and still collect the income. An immediate dropoff at the income level is a bad idea because no one will work harder to earn over that amount. A better idea would be a phase out. Say, you get 80% if you make 1800, 60% if you make 2200, 40% if you make 2600, 20% if you make 3200, and nothing if you make over 3600
I'm pretty sure *you* can't do the math considering the drugs you must be taking.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Because that money has to come from people have earned it. It is good to earn an honest living. It is bad to not do enough to earn an honest living. You are proposing to take from good and give to bad. That is the primary characteristic of immoral behavior.
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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).
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.
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.
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.
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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)
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.
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Because that punished people that make $2500 a month. If you make that, you are better off not working. Or illegally working cash jobs. UBI will pay the "top up", it's just a top up from $0 to $2500, and doesn't decrease if you make $2500. This will encourage people to work and benefit themselves, while the "top up" programs often punish you for working.
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If you do it that way then there is a window of income below the minimum where you have no incentive to work harder or get a better job. With UBI you are guaranteed to have a minimum income in order to live, but if you want to buy nicer things then every dollar you earn above that increases your standard of living.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
I'm not a huge fan of a nanny state myself, but if you cannot trust people to make good choices...
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.
Excellent plan! We'll let Yemen and Somalia handle all those pirates on one of the world's largest shipping routes, because they've done a great job so far, and we'll let China handle the South China Sea. The Congo and Mali can deal with their own heavily armed gangs of bandits, and no one needs to care about a genocide or two.
Then next time that someone invades Kuwait, or Germany invades Poland, we can sit back and go tsk, tsk, tsk, safe in the knowledge that we aren't the world's police and it isn't our problem.
Yes, let's get right on that.
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.
You're ignorant propaganda
Pretty well speaks for itself...
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.
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No. Productivity could (and has) risen, while standards of living fall. We've seen it happen.
This is the myth of wage inflation. That if a certain segment of the population had more money, everything would become more expensive. It doesn't necessarily work that way. Wages (and the economy) can grow for the lower 70% of the population with negligible inflation. We have seen that happen before.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Not only are such returns long gone, the best and most reliable investments today are inaccessible to the common citizen. They're gamed to hell by the investment firms and if you want some skin in the game you have to pony up fees on top of fees to tag along and get the scraps they drop off the table.
We kind of already have this: your basic income is $7.25, and for that, you have to work 1 hour.
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.
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
Everyone can be a billionaire!
100% spot on
The Federal Government is taking in about $3 trillion this year. It will spend about $3 trillion on Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, welfare, and interest on the national debt. Everything else - defense, education, FBI, DOT, etc. - is funded with debt. And that is only going to increase.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
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"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.
Everyone can be a billionaire!
Like this guy?
But why stop at only a billion?
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
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.
It's all their fault for being successful.
Can we please quit referring to theft as "success"?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
The government can borrow that $50k each year, and pay it back in 30 years, for less than $1 Million (current value). But without the stock market risk.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
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.
It worked out pretty well for them. And the Germans. I mean, check out the state of their actual economic state, as opposed to the stupid stereotypes.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
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
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 *
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...
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!
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, 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.
In business and pretty much everything in life, the only true failure is to stop trying.
So actually doing it is wrong.
I see what you did there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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!
And... how many other people among your relatives were living in similar conditions ? Your parents ? All your life ? When you're second or third generation poor person - 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. You can't teach your children things you do not know yourself.
Sure, maybe better financial planning would help the poor - maybe it's possible to save tiny bits even on their incomes and be able to uplift themselves... but for that to be a possibility the skillset involved needs to be taught. If there is any truth to the idea - then the argument that follows is that 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 ? Why do we not teach people how interest works - and how evil credit cards are, how to do sound financial planning and staggered buying and how to tell good debt from bad ? Could it be because if we did - there wouldn't be a ready supply of desperate people willing to work for cheap and unable to negotiate anything in their contracts to their favour because there are 500 other hopefuls wanting the job ? Could it be because, 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. Every low paid worker in the world is one less potential customer for whatever you're selling.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>> 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.
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.