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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.
How many jobs are already makework?
It's been 30 years since Lotus 1-2-3 became cheap, available, accessible, and accurate. What the hell are all of these accountants still doing? I personally think a lot of it is work for idle hands, but makework if you prefer.
What the hell are all of these accountants still doing?
I think they're busy deciding which country to set as their headquarters for tax reasons and what internal costs to invent so that the income is made where it should be to minimize costs. For example, having the headquarters in Ireland and paying them all their income to use their brand name elsewhere so they make no profit where it would be taxed.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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)
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.
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.
If we want jobless people to live and the economy to keep working, we need to give them money somehow.
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?
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.
Actual accountant here.
The industry has a fuckload less AR/AP. There's a lot less clerks. There's no typists. There are no filing clerks. There is a lot less of anyone other than a handful who run much larger books and much larger payrolls. A billion dollar business has one Director, a handful of managers and a handful of divisonal staff under them, rather than the hundreds that used to be
So there are in fact a HELL of a lot less employed in the accounts department than there used to be. You haven't noticed as Old Mabel who retired was never replaced. The remaining have a lot to do with shit like payroll, applying the lastest rulesets, budgeting doing the work that 10 - 20 people would have needed to do 40 years ago.
Lotus 1-2-3 was a fucking godsend and presented complex accounts simply. It took a whole tho for the mass of jobs the Accounts dept supported to disappear tho but disappear they did. What's left is actually quite minimal and VERY different to when I started.
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.
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.
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
Is the current economic system so inevitable or desirable that those things are preferable to just letting people stay home?
And that's the rub. You would think that if we need to do a lot less work to make the stuff to make all of our lives comfortable then we could find a way to spread the work out more or less evenly amongst those who can do it and consequently spend a lot less time doing pointless pointless make-work and a lot more actually living. Working 4 hours or less a day 5 days a week (or compressing that into 2-3 8 hour days per week) each should be entirely feasible and our lives could be richer for it. Instead we seem to be concentrating the work onto fewer and fewer wage slaves to concentrate the wealth into the 1% while the rest fall by the wayside.
I'm not saying that capitalism is the problem, but our rigid adherance to certain extreme forms of free market economics and the woeful lack of creative or original thought on behalf of our leaders toward solving this growing problem is very worrying.
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.
Of course you can give them money forever. You know money is spent, right? That the crops to feed them are a renewable resource? That, as automation takes over more and more jobs, we're rapidly approaching the point where 1% of the population working can support the other 99%?
I mean, why can't we keep unproductive people around? What's the limiting factor? We already give the computers, and internet access, and food and medicine.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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
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.