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Finland Prepares Their First Tests Of A Universal Basic Income (futurism.com)
Finland is getting ready to launch their first pilot program with a Universal Basic Income -- one of several countries which are now testing the concept. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism.com:
Finland is about to launch an experiment in which a randomly selected group of 2,000-3,000 citizens already on unemployment benefits will begin to receive a monthly basic income of 560 euros (approximately $600). That basic income will replace their existing benefits. The amount is the same as the current guaranteed minimum level of Finnish social security support. The pilot study, running for two years in 2017-2018, aims to assess whether basic income can help reduce poverty, social exclusion, and bureaucracy, while increasing the employment rate.
In January a basic income program will also begin testing in the Netherlands, according to the article, which points out that Y Combinator has also launched a test program in Oakland, California. And there's now also calls for a Universal Basic Income in India, where one social worker argues it's "sound social policy," while pointing out that it's already being implemented in other countries. "In Brazil, it targets the poor and has been a way out of poverty; in Iran, it has substituted for subsidies and citizens receive about $500 a year..."
In January a basic income program will also begin testing in the Netherlands, according to the article, which points out that Y Combinator has also launched a test program in Oakland, California. And there's now also calls for a Universal Basic Income in India, where one social worker argues it's "sound social policy," while pointing out that it's already being implemented in other countries. "In Brazil, it targets the poor and has been a way out of poverty; in Iran, it has substituted for subsidies and citizens receive about $500 a year..."
Yeah, we all know that neighbor who's sister's daughter's friend knows that One Poor Person who blows all their cash buying a $600 cellphone every other week. They're all like "well I could pay for rent; or I could get a rose gold iPhone to replace my regular gold iPhone. I sure wanna get evicted." That definitely happens, like, all the time.
We already give them cellphones. I guess we'll just have to work on getting the drugs at better prices!
I don't know, maybe if you give the poor free money, but don't take away personal property everything works out better.
I heard that they would boil a potato before they left their apartment to stand in line. The hot potato in their shirt sleeve would keep them warm. By the time they got to the front of the line, it had fermented into vodka. A true win-win!
You are an over-entitled fool. Give people money and they spend it on what they need. That does mean food and housing, and while the long-term poor who have lived without longer than with may not have guidance to do that at first once the reality of a steady support sinks in and guidance is provided (it already is available at employment centers, which most of that group already attend often).
And if you want to save money on welfare bureaucracy just require less paperwork and investigation. And if there is a lack of jobs then just give people jobs, not free money. At least then taxpayers get something back. People have no right to vote to steal other peoples money for nothing.
TFA says it's the same amount of income as the "social security" there in Finland it's replacing (guessing that maps onto some combination of welfare/unemployment/EIC here in the US). But, TFA doesn't say how UBI is different, other than the name. Any insights?
The problem with the current system is that if you decide to start working they take away your benefits so people give up and they just take the benefits and don't work. I don't think we would have as many problems if we had guaranteed basic income versus all the social programs that we have now. With guaranteed basic income people will be allowed to look into different career paths and look into having a job on top of receiving the benefits and nobody could complain because everyone would be receiving the same amount of money. If they spend it then they're out and there is no other social programs that they can fall back on. The problem right now is that if you spend all your welfare you still have food stamps and lots of other charity organizations that will give you food and get the housing and pay electric bill which is why people don't manage their money properly.
It certainly would help to provide a basic income as long as people are free to work and earn extra money without loss of that basic income. There are a couple of difficulties as those that work in low paying jobs will resent people earning about what they earn without working. In the US there is a larger issue. We need the public to be able to spend money on more than just the bare basics of life. Businesses need buyers. The US now has way too many people who have to stretch every penny. That excludes them as buyers for numerous products and services. As employment becomes more and more an unusual thing due to technology replacing human labor, more and more people are excluded from the buyer pool. That means less employment and less taxes and more public expenses dealing with the displaced etc.. The one and only thing that can hope to work is to provide an income that not only covers all the basics but also leaves money left over to spend on things that are not basic needs. If we do not do this we will surely face a total economic collapse and a loss of our nation. It is also obvious that we will have to price control some items such as medical care and medications or no amount of income will help to bail us all out of the impending collapse.
Post failed at the unnecessary failed and self-interested ideology. There is no connection between your "points" in reality. Government is the only force representing the interests of all people and is the only force to represent any interest against those of the wealthy and powerful. Dismantling ('defunding', etc.) official government leads to default government by the interests of the wealthy, which is normally called for what it is: slavery and feudalism.
f we reduce government spending and reduce the tax rates (which government employees hate), then we would also be making an impact on poverty, as well as empowering the people.
How does that work exactly? Because we have had a lot of tax cuts over the last two decades (mostly under Bush) and the poverty rate has only increased.
Makes sense, that's what the rich do with their money. If they didn't have so much of it they couldn't blow it all on useless crap they'd starve.
If we reduce government spending and reduce the tax rates (which government employees hate), then we would also be making an impact on poverty, as well as empowering the people.
Because people without money or jobs are struggling to pay their taxes?
Or are you some sort of nutjob who thinks the only reason these people are poor and/or can't find work is that rich people, by paying taxes, are prevented from giving charitably and/or creating jobs for them?
It simply doesn't work like that. There is no correlation between countries with lower taxes and a decrease in poverty.
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now. Recruiters don't wait, and neither do employers. The days of leaving messages are over. Guess what happens if/when you don't answer immediately and comply with every command/requirement? They move on the the next candidate.
This wont be long enough to show the true damage done to their society and economy. May take a generation, and then it will be too late to fix it.
So you are of the opinion that the poor are generally just as irresponsible in their spending as the wealthy, the only difference being how much they start with?
"That does mean food and housing"
And what they need does include entertainment, social connection and interaction, and VARIETY of foods. This may not be required to produce the physical meat of the body but it is a requirement for proper mental function.
There needs to be sufficient regulation to prevent free-marketeering from trying to milk the free money supply.
More generally, it is necessary that the universal basic income is sufficient not to force those on it into defacto poverty.
The two are related in the sense that, with an unregulated free market, if you pump money in but no more material resources, more money is chasing those same resources, pushing prices up.
In general, though, removing the anxiety about putting a roof over your head and food on the table should be considered a necessity if you want to get the best out of your workforce in a modern technologically driven world: the more you brain has to worry about the basics, the less brain there is left to think about productive things.
John_Chalisque
I had a potluck roommate at my university who was of meager means. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to stay in school, but then a $10,000 federal loan came in for him to cover his schooling expenses.
Guess what he did, even before the money had hit his account?
Shopping spree. Bought a gaming console with a number of games, movies, new clothes, went out to a load of restaurants...you get the picture.
By no means am I suggesting he's the brush with which we can paint the entire low income population, but it is safe to say that some people will be foolish with those funds and we'll be faced with the question of how to deal with them then.
Only if you ignore all the evidence that says that people actually use cash to improve their lives and not spend it substantially on drugs or alcohol.
You sound like the nutjob. Corporatism is a major part of the tax problem, and it erodes the positive benefits to society that a form of capitalism offers.
Well, for one thing you jumped to a totally different country than the topic, but to address taxes in the USA, they're crafted through corporatism very often, aiding countries profiting in the USA and paying little in taxes to the USA, but again, the topic is not the USA.
If you don't like the idea, don't live in Finland.
There are plenty of places that agrees with your point of view. In all of them the majority of the population is worse off than they are in Finland but hey, correlation is not causation.
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now.
You don't need a data plan. Voice and text are enough. You can get that with a $25 pre-paid phone from Walmart, or $5 if you buy it used. If you need to browse the web, go to the library. It is free. Or you can buy a reasonable used laptop at Goodwill for $25, and use the free Wifi at McDonalds.
Probably...
But conditions are different with the fins as well. Their welfare state already gives a lot of services and not everything is money.
Sweden and Finland have system that do not only favor giving monetary service, but a lot of it is in additional education, so this really might save them some cost, because the real benefits of their system lays elsewhere.
When you give people money taxpayers always get something back, those people spend that money which drives the economy providing jobs and reducing prices.
I'm not sure what a basic income has to do with welfare or even taxes since doing it properly it should come out of the fed tap as an alternative to fueling needed inflation by giving funds to banks. The entire global economic system depends on giving out free money, I fail to see the benefits of giving it to those who have the most right out of the gate vs giving to everyone across the board.
Thanks to globalization and automation there is a shift of labor overseas and a reduction of new jobs to replace less skilled jobs with, a basic income in the western nations that developed the technology that developing nations are utilizing makes sense and enables those nations to bring more of their population into an investment class that actually benefits from their large corporations globalizing and making increased profits. The current system leaves no room for the lower class to invest and all but the upper middle and above can only invest retirement funds. With no wages there is no system of investment for the middle class, leaving no negative impact to the wealthy as jobs disappear domestically and they relocate to newly developed nations with improving and more modern infrastructure. We need a basic income that allows 25-50% of domestic wages to be invested so that the western world becomes the top 1% in the globalized world of tomorrow and not the dessicated corpose left behind by the wealthy who have moved on.
Only the titles have the "Universal" tag attached. The article (and summary) refer to a "Basic Income" that is given to people already on welfare benefits (i.e. not universal), and replaces those benefits. I find it interesting that this will be at the "guaranteed minimum level of Finnish social security support", which suggests that people might end up losing money as a result of this.
What country do you live in? A place where government is a force "against the wealthy and powerful"? Sounds wonderful. Never happened in all of history, but wonderful.
The government represents the interests of the powerful by definition. That's just what "powerful" means.
Now, you can choose between systems where the wealthy become powerful (like capitalism), systems where the powerful become wealthy (like socialism), or systems where those with military might become both wealthy and powerful (like feudalism), but one way or another that connection between wealth and power remains.
What I'd like, here in the real world, is a system that discourages concentration of wealth and/or power across generations of the same families, without sabotaging fundamental freedoms. Outlawing of primogeniture was an amazing step towards that (and we've forgotten than lesson, BTW). We can't seem to figure out the next step.
But, keep in mind, redistribution of income is orthogonal to redistribution of wealth. The amount you prioritize savings and investment matters more than your income stream. We talk a lot about diverting income streams (which always is in tension with basic rights). Why aren't we talking more about teaching people how to become wealthy? Is it because the people benefiting from concentration of wealth want it that way? I really think it might be.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Projection is one hell of a drug.
These people have no money yet they walk around with expensive cellphones..
That is not a problem limited to "the poor". 47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 to meet an unexpected expense.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
It was a vast improvement over the samoderzhaviye system, so there's that. They didn't have any toilet paper before.
Ezekiel 23:20
To give money, you have to take it in the first place. And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something as well as consume. Instead you are taking money, taking a cut to support the bureaucracy that administers the money and basically you are paying somebody to not do anything at all. You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment. When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something you get more of it. It's pretty simple.
Well, we could also spend more and tax less (as we likely will), or spend less and tax more (as if we intended to pay off our debt). But under all the various tax schemes in the past 100 years, federal revenue has never sustained itself about 20% of GDP. It's currently just under 18% of GDP, so we could maybe squeak out 10% more revenue if we really wanted to, but that's not a difference in kind.
Here's the thing though, in the context of Social Security:
* Social Security is just barely enough to live on if your medical bills are also paid for separately.
* About 20% of Americans receive SS
* SS is already 27% of federal revenue, or 24% of the federal budget
* Medi* is 32% of federal revenue, or 27% of the federal budget
We can't pay everyone at the subsistence level SS pays out, unless we take the attitude of "we'll just print al the money we need, nothing can go wrong with that plan!". If you want a basic income in the US that provides actual subsistence living in the US, that's 150% to 200% of the federal budget (depending on health care costs). And no, universal health care doesn't meaningfully change the amount health care costs the government vs what Medi* pays, so no magic bullet there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Again that's a space and time problem. If you want people to work you can't be picky about how or when they can be contacted for it.
Every you say is false. Any business run so close to maximum leverage that the funds required for quarterly taxes are the difference in project decision is about to declare bankruptcy.
You mean your biased, opportunity based, convenience samples collected by untrained observations with unchecked internal bias on interpretations? Yeah, the research with carefully planned survey analysis is better.
Posting ANON because I just moded you up.
I know someone making $250,000 who is over extended and living paycheck to paycheck. It is not just the poor.
Im like you, I have saved and stashed away money for many years. Hell If I had to I could come up with enough to pay off my house in a week just from savings, stocks, bonds, investments, and other cash I have available.
To everyone just starting out, this is how you get ahead! You live within your means and as soon as you can, you save and invest as much as you can!
Base income to increase employment rate? How is that supposed to happen?
Robots are replacing humans left right and center at an ever increasing rate.
Base income is there to mitigate the effects of increased machine productivity and preventing a rare few from being the only ones reaping the benefits of increased productivity. That's what gouvernments should be seeking to do. But I guess shit will have to hit the fan before anything happens addressing that problem.
Somebody didn't get "basic income". I hope they'll learn before it's too late.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yet they all had healthcare.
Two things people also need to keep in mind when talking about what "Finland" does. First, the US is already spending considerably more per capita than any other country on social welfare (as well as education and healthcare). So, the problem is that the programs we have don't yield results commensurate to what we spend. Second, the way European countries finance their social welfare states is through massively higher tax rates on the middle class, often nearly twice as high as in the US.
So, a basic income to replace the current welfare and social safety net, and giving individuals to spend their government welfare as they see fit, would be great. But that's just not in the cards. Do you seriously think that a Congress that doesn't believe individuals are qualified to make decisions about mortgages, payday loans, health insurance coverage, or which school to attend is going to give welfare recipients a couple of thousand dollars per month and tell them to spend it as they see fit? And do you seriously believe that the millions of people who currently work on delivering and supervising welfare-related benefits are going to just quietly give up their jobs?
Another moron who believes the welfare queen lie
To give you flip side on this, if you have been denying yourself for years it becomes very hard to work up enough enough willpower to abstain when you get a windfall. I have this problem but to a lesser degree (I would have bought myself a pizza, and the stupid overpriced dessert). Perhaps having a feeling of security regularly would make it so it wouldn't go to his head? Also a basic income is very different from what I am assuming is a lump sum of money?
Better get off Slashdot and back to work, you Fins!
"Each according to his ability; each according to his need!"
People _in aggregate_ yes. But individuals will be outliers. In a world where everybody gets $50 per day, most of them will buy food, and pay rent, and so on. But some of them will wake up every morning and buy $50 of scratch cards hoping to get rich. Then, broke again, they will beg for crumbs. So you still have to decide what to do about that.
Have you ever heard of the CCCs and the WPA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A lot of the bridges nearby me are old WPA works.
I think it would be a good idea for the gov't to be a employer of last resort. (!!Other than the military!!) Although they would probably have to fight with the current employer of last resort McDonalds.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
won't work in america because 600 dollars a month is not enough. it would be closer to $1000 a month for a single person and $2000 for a family of four. over 15% of americans live on less than that, more than 50% live on less than two times that amount.
it needs to be a credit on tax returns (that can't be claimed back by anything except owed taxes) that brings a no or low income taxpayer up to at least the poverty threshold (for their household), and send them (if a citizen, and for them and their qualified dependents) a fully paid health care insurance plan (honored anywhere that takes any type of private or public insurance) and card automatically (records of those with past drug convictions would be manually screened, of course), unless they already get a plan from an employer (some of what they pay each paycheck towards that would be a deduction on their income before calculating the 'minimum income credit').
there would of course be a rule that says you can't have a(nother) baby to collect more 'free money', because you're supposed to have (and are expected to) used that free health care to get and use effective birth control (religious beliefs be damned; this is the ultimate separation of church and state. the church doesn't get a say here, period) and that includes guys who can't keep it in their pants getting clipped if necessary.
Perhaps you would like to go and tell the people in Oakland, CA that they are not in the USA. Or was that part too far down the summary for your reading skills?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The simplest way to start addressing wealth concentration (not income concentration) is to change to only tax wealth, never income. Make the tax rate proportional not to total amount of wealth, but wealth percentile. Those two things would immediately start addressing wealth inequality, something you rightly assert that income equality won't (can't?) accomplish.
But nobody is willing to tax wealth other than property taxes (and the general public wants to reduce those, too!), which don't really apply to enough types of wealth as it is. I'd say it probably really is a combination of those with lots of power holding it tight, and convincing other people that the status quo is actually better than they suspect.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Maybe the US government could scale back the golden cow (otherwise known as the military).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Right, a program that mentioned no results is completely relevant to derail the conversation and avoid the major points, my apologies.
It actually does happen all the time
My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
Except you know.... the house? If that's downpaid or at least eligible for a bigger loan I'd consider that a rather healthy savings. I mean it's one thing to run a tight ship on liquidity if you really have the assets and you're just aggressively paying off a loan or investing and use the remainder of the paycheck as a form of self-procrastination, as opposed to running on fumes. I'm usually not cutting it that close as $400... but if I did I'd have a $6000 credit limit that I'm not using and much more once I've increased the mortgage so it's not like I'm really cutting it close. It's the 14% that said "no can do" that have a real problem, the other 33%... maybe, maybe not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They already allow the banks at the top of the chain to just wish money into existence so they can make even more money demanding interest on it. Why not wish the money in at the bottom of the pile where it will actually fuel the economy that keeps the country running rather than the non-productive swapping of game tokens?
"Wonder how people managed to survive 100 years ago without Facebook, $250 tennis shoes, Xboxes, and a smart phone with unlimited data"
You know, with simple things like entertainment, social connection and interactions
"You are a fucking moron ..."
And what does that make you
He's of the opinion that the poor are just as irresponsible with their spending as everyone else, and after giving them the handout they will still be without the essentials. The rich person, hopefully also spent his money on too much car and too much house in a suburb far away from the poor, and will only eat at a locally owned 5 star vegan gluten free place with wifi.
So how long did you spend studying the 'hood to come to that conclusion? Did you actually talk to anyone there?
You're not basing it on what you saw on TV, are you?
The lesson to be learned is that wishing money into existence is a pointless exercise and the benefits never live up to the expectations.
I agree with the message, but I find I'm less happy than those people day to day, I stare in the face of 10 years of future debt, possible economic collapses and unexpected eventualities every day, it's depressing. At the end of the day no matter how good my performance review was, I know the company will drop me like a bad habit should it become necessary, and they will run the company such that it becomes necessary if anything at all goes wrong.
Of course, I'm significantly more happy on the days when they are panicked about money. I'm not sure about the payout, although I think my kids are much, much happier than their kids on a daily basis. The trades we make.
No matter how much water I pour from my bucket into your colander, you won't have water to drink. You can only fix wealth inequality by teaching people the importance of accumulating wealth, and showing them the evidence that this is possible. (If you have any doubts, look at lottery winners as a group.)
Some individual efforts have been successful here with small groups, from the Rich Dad Poor Dad followers to the Mr Mustache followers. Lots of people from all walks of life have seen both the recipe and the example, and done well for themselves (so many scams too though: the government could certainly do something there).
But why isn't this stuff taught in school? It's shameful that we ignore one of the more important life lessons, and perhaps the most important lesson not caught up in contentious religious argument. It's an utter failure of our culture that we're not passing this basic survival technique on to our youth.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Every you say is false. Any business run so close to maximum leverage that the funds required for quarterly taxes are the difference in project decision is about to declare bankruptcy.
You mean like Apple deciding to locate in Ireland ?
Doesn't matter what else you cut, you can't spend 150-200% of the budget (for long). Do you see this?
Military spending is only 18% of federal revenue, or 15% of the budget. Don't be confused by "discretionary spending" pie charts: those are pure propaganda. We spend almost twice as much on each of SS and Medi*.
Check out http://www.usdebtclock.org/
BTW, other welfare programs that a UBI might replace are only about 9% of federal revenue, or 8% of the federal budget, so we get relatively little by replacing those.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In a relatively short amount of time, the Basic Income will be co-opted as a business subsidy, by businesses slashes wages in line with the Basic Income.
How on earth do people think this is better, than government actually creating jobs, as part of a Job Guarantee program? (if you haven't heard of it before, or are about to make a wrong assumption/statement about what a Job Guarantee is, have a quick read here).
The Basic Income is downright dangerous, as it can be used as a trojan horse to consolidate all welfare payments into one - and then provides a very politically easy to attack target, which can be easily destroyed once a big enough economic crisis hits - consolidating and then destroying the entire welfare system.
People need to be a bit more skeptical/cynical, and a bit less gullible/trusting.
Watch out for the obvious politically motivated mods; there is nothing "troll" about the parent post, welcome to meta-mod hell.
Yeah, especially now that in fact Apple is leaving Ireland it was a bad gamble violating Irish EU treaties, Irish public welfare, and all Irish interests.
You don't need money for entertainment, social connections and interactions.
At some point you can't pay a person's health costs as there's no cure for entropy. At a certain point people will have to accept that they're going to die and the best that can be done is to make them comfortable, or as much as is possible. It doesn't make much sense for society to bear the cost of treating cancer for someone who is in their 80's. If that person has a bunch of money saved up and wants to try to use it to prolong their life, that's their own business, but at some point no amount of money will be able to impede death.
If we're going to move towards a basic income and universal health care, we have to be pragmatic about it. A basic income based off of the current government spending on social programs is certainly possible, but it's going to be a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country. Health care costs in general could be brought to manageable levels if the population as a whole were healthier. The dysfunctional system in place is only partially to blame.
By all means you are suggesting that.
What if he used the money that way? Who cares? That is the point of basic income. Make people responsible for their own future. You give them the money, you don't care. Let them blow it all on shopping spree one month and starve the rest of it. They will get the picture soon enough. If you will coddle them all their life, how are they supposed to learn?
The major reason why you don't want to check how the money is used is that:
1) It just cost more money to check. More money than how much is "misused".
2) If you make them jump through hoops for the money, it feel like work and they feel like they deserved it by doing that work. It creates dependency, addiction.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Same thing happened with me, except I paid six months of rent upfront with the money.
Have gnu, will travel.
Interestingly enough, countries with the highest tax rates also tend to have the happiest population. Not having to worry about medical or education costs does seem to be quite a nice trade-off.
So someone works their whole life, and because they're smarter than you, or more frugal, or more disciplined, you'd prefer a system where the money they've saved is simply taken away from them until they're back down to having only what you have, so you won't hate them any more. That about sum it up? Or are you of the naive position that once you only take things away from "wealthy" people, that the same framework would never be used against people who are simply better off in any way than someone else?
The USSR tested widescale corruption. All the country's resources were swallowed up by the ruling class, who had their own private supply chain of the best products.
UBI, noun; cracker for GibsMeDats
Leave the false imagery aside and try to form a coherent position first. Your argument relies on assumptions and assumptions on assumptions that the poor in society (any of them) are there due to some moral or character flaw which could have been prevented with a bit of ingenuity and work. That is false, proven so by thousands of years of human history if you ever care to study it. The poor are there because of inefficiency in knowledge and physical transfers (both types have costs which in most cases must be paid prior to any service). The poor are poor not because of lack of Puritan work philosophy but because they lacked the advantages that allowed others to avoid most obstacles. Bad health from lack of care in childhood, poor food in childhood, etc. Bad education because of the above, or because of under-funded education systems, or simply being prevented from attending school by war, civil or international, famine, general unrest, etc. Apparently, your environment failed to equip you with empathy or intelligence enough to understand that on your own.
EU countries can cover everyone with universal healthcare on 9% of the budget. So the 27% of federal budget just for medicare is overpaying by a huge margin.
You can get everyone on basic income and universal healthcare for less than 50% of the budget. Less than what you today pay in SS and medicare. The reason is that you can do it all automatically, no people are needed to administer the programs when everyone is covered. You would pay it to everyone, including people who work. For the ones who work it would replace the standard deduction and they would pay taxes from all they earned above the basic income. You would not need any unemployment insurance, any maternity leave, paternity leave, medical leave,... it would be all covered by the basic income. The number of salaries in administration that would be saved would more than cover it. It would also replace a lot of the subsidies and incentives we give to poor regions as the people there would simply get the basic income. Some people could choose to live on the basic income and do work benefiting their community.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
One could argue we had tax cuts but that hasn't translated to spending cuts. There is more money being paid in social welfare programs today than there was in 2000. If you subsidize something you are doing so to help prop it up. Subsidizing being poor simply keeps poor people poor. I'm all for a simplified social welfare system like this because it puts the responsibility on those getting the aid, but I want to see it include the middle class. If climbing the ladder into the middle class didn't cause you to "lose" a benefit, it would be more worthwhile to climb the ladder. (i.e. Why work for $300/week when you get unemployment of $400/week?) Most social welfare programs have simply made the ladder steps further apart. This economic conservative is willing to humor basic income if it includes most people. If it only props up the poor it will fail.
Laptop at goodwill? What fucking goodwill a are near you?
"That does mean food and housing"
And what they need does include entertainment, social connection and interaction, and VARIETY of foods. This may not be required to produce the physical meat of the body but it is a requirement for proper mental function.
And thus 'need' becomes the only, and most important, 'virtue.' That's the underlying problem with (honest (snicker)) communism and socialism- there's always justification for a greater 'need.' However, the mental and verbal gymnastics that justify that greater need cannot produce anything to meet that 'need.'
I agree that there should be a baseline existence that we don't let fellow citizens fall beneath, but where we draw that line is the difference between creating an idle, trouble prone permanent dependent underclass that bankrupts the country, and a bare-bones safety net that makes sure people are fed enough to be able to figure out a way to serve their fellow man.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Do you not do percentages? Taking the figures from the post you're replying to (As you've not disputed them, I will assume for the moment you accept them.).
If we expand SS to cover every American, that means we have to cover 5 times the number of people. Which takes 5X as much money (Assuming efficiency remains the same. It's hard to tell if we would gain benefits as we wouldn't need to check eligability, just that you have a valid number and a pulse, or if the beaurcracy would expand in proportion to it's duties, or whatever. That's a major guessing game.). At 24% of the federal budget before upsizing, it becomes 120% of the current budget. On it's own. Or 135% of current revenues. That's assuming we don't expand medicare coverage to match or anything. So not only would we have to cut the military, we would have to cut federal parks, federal highway funding, federal educational funding. Everything. The federal taxes would do nothing else, and would still need to be raised.
I like the idea of allowing people safety nets. I like the idea of there being things that being in America and having a pulse entitle you to. But I also respect that if we want to do that, we have to understand that it's not a matter of the boys in green going without Oakley protective eyewear, or a few less 5K toilet seats. It doesn't mean cutting the F-35 Program. To do it at that level, without reducing benefits for those who rely on it, would require collecting more money, and radically restructuring the entire fiscal system of the USG. I would prefer the things that people are entitled to are freedoms, and the safety nets are government works programs that give us some societal benefit we can point to as far as the money goes. Keeps anyone from saying it's useless, or being jealous about people not working for income. If we rebuilt roads, laid rail lines, cleared brush, cleaned up urban decay, and did that with the people who otherwise can't find a job, that's a net benefit. They benefit, we benefit. If we make it such that they can advance to higher roles, like Foreman, or shift super, or can get specialized training, then it's not just a bunch of labor with no career in sight. For people who can't do that labor, well, the idea of having a place that will find them something, anything to do for their money that they can do should both benefit society, and help them keep some self-esteem together, as they are doing something for society. But arguably, that is even more of a headache fiscally and culturally than UBI.
No, you just need money for the food that you would eat together, the cable/netflix you would watch, the money for the theater, or sporting event. The gas to get there, and all the little shit along the way. Unless you expect the poor person to be the moocher of the group. You know because social interactions don't just include standing in the front yard going "Yup"
The other thing you'll see with the poor is they're used to everything going to shit. It's tough to plan ahead and stick to the plan when you've spent your entire life having shit fall apart around you. When things are going well you don't expect it to last, so you live for the moment.
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Please, Honest days work for an honest days pay and you might have a point. But the fact is the leading employer in the united states in Walmart, 50 years ago it was General Motors. One job paid a living wage where everyone made a decent living and you didn't second guess that the degenerate on the corner was a lazy degenerate. Now, the top employer forces you to pull government subsidies to survive. I understand that some people have an iron will and can become a millionaire making $20,000 a year. but that is the execption, not the rule. Most studies have conculded that $74000/year is required to comfortably live in america, and still have money for savings and a vacation. The median household income is $50,000(ish) That is the problem. Our wages have hardly doubled since the 70's yet the cost of living has almost quintupled.
Every you say is false. Any business run so close to maximum leverage that the funds required for quarterly taxes are the difference in project decision is about to declare bankruptcy.
vs
Yeah, especially now that in fact Apple is leaving Ireland it was a bad gamble violating Irish EU treaties, Irish public welfare, and all Irish interests.
Seems to me you're trying to deflect from your premise that successful companies don't make decisions based on taxes.
doesn't mean it shouldn't be better, which, like it or not, is the subtext of your post. Maybe you don't personally mean that, but the folks opposing progress (billionaires. the ruling class, etc) do.
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A few points:
1. Try not to generalise.
2. Many poor people are already costing a significant amount in social security etc - UBI won't cost much more (or less) in such cases, it just removes a whole stack of expensive and degrading hoops that make (some) people want to seek solace in drugs.
3. Suppose you are right. Now ask which would you rather: a homeless addict robbing you to pay for their habit (and potentially ending up costing you a bucket-load more money for a few years in crime-school - aka jail - as a result), or an addict who sits at home taking selfies.
4. Many are poor not through bad life choices but rather because of their parent's bad life choices. Others are poor because of just plain bad luck (eg vanishing industries). UBI could be the difference between such people finding their feet and becoming an asset to society, or being ground down by the system and becoming cynical and marginalised.
and, finally:
5. Try not to generalise.
You don't need an 'expensive' one.
I was wondering about your stat, so I googled it. The two take aways from that article are
1. They're counting our entire healthcare system ("The private sector finances a much greater share of social spending in America, particularly healthcare")
2. The numbers are being calculated off our per capita GDP. In other words, they're not taking into account the effects of our insane levels income inequality.
Sorry, but If this were one of those fact checker sites you'd get 4 Pinocchios.
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As jobs start to decline, and this starts to bite into the regular workforce, people are going to really appreciate some basic security which they can then build upon as opportunity allows. People should not lose this benefit until they earn a very significant amount of money, thus keeping the greatest possible incentive for people to try for any extra income they can, thus paying tax, gst, and generally helping the economy to keep rolling. I think it's a great idea, and desperately needed for this age. It should also save an enormous amount of money in administering many parts of the current welfare system.
It seems you got the wrong impression from my post. I actually lean in support of UBI and am eager to see how these experiments go, since it's clear we need something different than what we have now. That said, I want to push back against the false notion that this sort of thing never happens, when I've had direct experience to the contrary. As you said, we may be able to deal with it by simply letting those people starve, but that's a conversation we all need to be having. UBI has its drawbacks, just as with any other system, and we need to be honest about them if we're to move forward.
I've never had a recruiter who wouldn't schedule a phone call. First contact is by email, then a phone call is scheduled in the next couple days. I always use my mobile, but I could use my land-line (if I could remember the number).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We can't pay everyone at the subsistence level SS pays out, unless we take the attitude of "we'll just print al the money we need, nothing can go wrong with that plan!".
We currently print money and give it to banks in order to increase inflation.
Instead of giving the money to banks, why not give it to the poor instead?
Just 'sayin.
The US already accepts different tax brackets, this is just another tax bracket at the low end, one where you get negative tax rather than zero tax as the lowest rate. The only other difference is that the IRS sends the "refund" check in 12 installments rather than one.
Only the poor or the mega rich would fall entirely into that bracket
Nullius in verba
That is Apple's certain decision after the court case relating to arbitrary corporate structuring, not anything close to business survival used in the original post I replied to. You are the one deflecting here.
LOL!
You would have been a huge failure not even 50 years ago.
For tens of thousands of years mankind has been able to socialize and entertain themselves without all that. There are millions of Americans that do now.
Not everyone is a mouth breathing, mother's basement dwelling, video game playing loser who can't live without Netflix and dressing up as a Jedi Night at the local theater.
Fuck dude, get a life. Shit, get a job, loser.
Not all the time but it happens a lot. I know because I have some of those in my family. I see them way more than I want to
I do see this.
What you don't see is that a universal basic income will be balanced against reductions in means-tested benefits and increases in taxation.
There will be an income level at which an ordinary taxpayer, with 2 children will balance out the UBI income against increased taxes.
There are other benefits: homeless people incur huge medical bills. In part because the only medical services available to them are those that are the most expensive to provide (emergency rooms). A UBI may reduce these huge bills.
Of course, the other big way to save money would be a single-payer healthcare system. The US doesn't have the best healthcare: it only has the most expensive healthcare.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So we can double federal taxes (and likely make them more progressive) and in return, nobody goes homeless or wonders where their next meal is coming from, or ends up indigent over medical bills again. Meanwhile, we can eliminate the minimum wage, food stamps, welfare, etc etc. and the massive bureaucracy behind them (and so, re-capturing some of the costs of the basic income).
Yes, your taxes will go up but you'll get a fair bit back and you can slash your health insurance costs. Given that (based on actual figures from other countries) the added bargaining power in healthxare can cut the total cost to 25% of what we pay on average now, you could even come out ahead.
So, you are saying the tax burden placed on entities has no effect if they are financially healthy. Do you really believe that?
Yeah, if you give people a lot more money than they have ever had, they will spend it recklessly. This isn't a poor people problem, but a people problem. Middle-income lottery winners usually blow most of it within a couple of years too. The only people who tend to handle such windfalls well are people who are already pretty comfortably off.
The thing about basic income is that rather than giving you, say, $10k at once, you get a couple of hundred each week. Sure, you can blow it all on day one, but next week, guess what? Fresh chance not to be a screwup.
And of course, the point is that a lot of the "poor" people who will get UC are already on welfare. They aren't getting "extra" money, they just aren't having to jump through as many hoops to get what the state has already decided they are due. The rest of us will, of course, end up paying slightly higher taxes on our earned income, making it a wash for us. Except we now know that if shit hits the fan, we aren't totally screwed. We can afford to take a year out and raise a kid/study/start a business, and know that we'll be able to cover our rent/mortgage without hours of tedious paperwork, pointless meetings and circular phonecalls with bureaucrats.
The reason why a lot of the political establishment think it isn't a viable idea is because of the puritan work ethic, and because the welfare state is itself a work program. In the UK, more people work administering our complicated tax and welfare system than in the entirety of our armed forces. We could put those resources to better use, sure, but unless we have another pointless programme to throw thousands of glorified call centre employees at, it means huge public-sector layoffs.
Having actually done the maths (for the UK, at any rate), I'm confident that implementing universal basic income would save the government (and thus the tax payer) money in the medium term. Sure, some lazy sods are going to just do nothing; but they do that now, and it costs us more trying to force them to work than it would just paying them to go away! Incentivising work by eliminating unemployment benefits and removing complex tax credit systems that reward low pay (effectively subsidising minimum wage employers) is a far better solution than forcing people to work pointless dead-end jobs just to stay alive.
Well at this point I am pretty sure the point that tax rates play a large part in business decisions is well established. What you or I are trying do, well that's something readers can draw their own conclusions on.
Actually, San Francisco used to have a cash payment program for General Assistance. Somebody noticed the city was employing a lot of bureaucrats to provide services, and that it would be far more efficient to hand out cash instead of housing vouchers and meal tickets. What the GP said is exactly what happened. People spent their assistance on booze and drugs and then begged for food. Gavin Newsom made his political bones replacing the cash program with something very similar to the one that preceded it.
You are an absolute fool, one sheltered from reality in a cocoon you likely inherited. You need to spend more time reading real humanities and studying history, at least once you finish up with your primary education in a few years.
E-mail eh? So how do you get that promptly? Once per day checking in library, with limited access to a 1-2 hour window per day? Beyond that, there are pre-interview testing (common in IT and professional services), multiple contacts requiring short-term scheduling, and without access to flexible transportation you have to schedule this days ahead of time.
wow man, you hit the nail on the head there.
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Yeah like the woman I saw with a cart full of sugary soda and empty carb chips and sweet snacks who paid with her EBT card then drove off in a fairly new Lincoln. Lots of people play the system.
You are so full of shit. Pre interview testing? Very rare. Limited access? Libraries do not limit you.
We get it. You feel guilty for whatever limited success you've had in life. You feel so guilty that you jumped right on the SJW bandwagon.
Ah, there's there overly entitled lack of awareness again. Try to catch yourself doing that next time, you might actually learn something. The libraries I've seen do have strict limit, and usually enforces it by ID check and throws you out at the end. Or bills you/your account if you have one there.
Yes it existed where people lived in small villages, kinda like the amish do now. I like your projecting though, its cute. Is your son the disappointing slacker in the basement or is it you? I mean all that pent up nerd rage over this. So are you subgesting that you walk to other peoples houses in other towns? Or are you suggesting that everything everyone needs in america is in walking distance?
Ignorant twat waffle...
You need to brush up on some vocabulary and ready my original post in this thread again.
I had a coworker that got laid off by Lockheed. He had a sizeable 401K program and withdrew it paying the penalty. 4 years later he finally ran out of money and decided to go back to work. When he hired on where I worked he had a paid for house already but almost no savings left. I remember thinking he was crazy but then his attitude was easy come easy go.
Business project decisions are driven by their internal returns vs cost of leveraged capital, not the tax rate.
Watch out for the obvious politically motivated mods; there is nothing "troll" about the parent post, welcome to meta-mod hell.
There's a whole lot that's stupid about the parent posts.
You are trying to argue that "the poor" need data plans for their smartphones so that they can be instantly available for every job they apply to.
What color is the sky in your world?
I raised two children without netflix, sat tv or cable. It can be done. We used to play games like monopoly and uno and go on trips to the library to borrow books. I have no problem feeding people, even people who wont work. There is no reason for people in the US to go hungry but as to all the other bullshit I say they can work for it. Free cell phones? Fuck that, we're damn near 20 trillion in debt with no real effort to do anything to even slow it down. Sooner or later it'll stop and when it does people will find out what poverty really is.
By the same token, my bucket will never fill in the desert.
50 years ago, people made a basic living wage. It was one of the golden eras when the suburbs were born. The world we live in today is the direct result of the consumerisim started in the 50's and 60's. You would meet your friends at the local malt shop, or A&W in north east ohio. I mean sure you would ride horses on the farm or go fishing with friends, but that shit all cost money you made. Wanna go back 100 internet tough guy?
So you do actually believe that tax policy has no effect. I'll just ignore you.
The cellphones are a red herring. All of all welfare takes up nothing in out budget compared to defense. So your kids hung out at their friends alot then... or did they not have many friends?
Yep especially in context of the prior post
To give money, you have to take it in the first place. And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something as well as consume. Instead you are taking money, taking a cut to support the bureaucracy that administers the money and basically you are paying somebody to not do anything at all. You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment. When you tax something, you get less of it. When you subsidize something you get more of it. It's pretty simple
50 years ago, most of the world was still rebuilding from being bombed into the stone age.
Guess which country had the luck of not needing to rebuild? Guess which country profited most from the rebuilding?
Times change. Maybe your argument should too.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Wonder what kind of vile human you are that you have to go to another town to visit friends.
In fact, There us a huge push by leftists to create places where everything you need can be found in walking distance. There is also public transportation.
The assertion that you need a Netflix account, xbox, movie money, etc. to fulfill your life and that other people should pay for it is utter and absolute Bullshit.
How many businesses do you operate? How many business owners do you talk to on a weekly basis?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Are you kidding? Wall street is flying high on wish money. It's the rest of us (who aren't allowed to wish money into existence) that can't make ends meet.
What owners may believe, especially in small firms, has little impact on what is truly executed, especially in the largest that matter.
I consult with several that you may use products from on a daily basis, depending on where you live. That has little impact on the issue here, which was a claim originally that business operations depended in a critical sense on tax rates. They don't, unless a firm is failing.
No, I'm arguing that in the environments where instant communication is not only expected but such a norm that deviance from it casts people out of the labor pool that smartphones and instant communications even in digital contexts is a crucial job search tool. Try again.
I see you justify with cherry picked circumstances, but if you are viewing this from the angle of an industrial country there is little evidence that the wealthy earned their wealth by their labor, or their business savvy. There are some partial exceptions like Bill Gates but he benefited from parents wealthy enough to bankroll his initial efforts - without that he would have been in the street like most drop outs; he was also admitted to Harvard, which is an advantage he retains from the qualifications required regardless of his time in the program. Cases where people "earned" abnormal concentrations of wealth are those of positioning (inherited advantage, etc.) or simple exploitation if not extortion or fraud.
50 years ago they were mostly recovered, it had been 20 years since the war. The swinging 60's where british culture was at an all time high. You act like America doesnt have deep pockets when it wants. The country isn't broke, just most of its people. I thought captialism was supposed to keep this from happening.
And I'm guessing that it will include drugs and sex too. I wonder how many would choose to be homeless and get "free" drug money than do the typical normal thing.
I also worry about the landlords increasing rent, so that almost all of that UBI is taken away right from the start.
I do want it to work, and it might be possible for some people, but I worry about it.
Nobody says that it never happens. But it does not happen enough for lost money to outweigh the amount of money you need to spend on checking that it does not happen. Your anecdotes do not help and you are suggesting that what you said in your anecdotal evidence is a problem, no matter how much you try to deny it. You are using exactly the same arguments every opponent of UBI is using: "Even one fraudster would be too much, we must not let those people steal, that would be the end of the world!" UBI might have drawbacks, but not what you are suggesting. We give them the money. If they don't buy food, they will be hungry. Next month their primary need will be food, not shopping. So they will go eat. If they keep getting the money, eventually they will learn to balance their spending on their needs.
Another point is that once you have a bunch of guys getting money on a regular basis, there is opportunity for someone to help them out, as the unreliability of those guys and the uncertainty of them being able to get the income is lifted. Maybe all they want to do is sit around and play console games. Fine, if 4 of them get together, they might have enough money to get an apartment, big TV, xbox and play games all day. I don't mind. Good for them. At least I don't have to work with some stupid unmotivated punk at my workplace that will just slow me down. And at least they are not in the streets stealing. It is a win win win. In few years some of them maybe get bored and learn some useful skill, do something productive. Who knows. It is a small price to pay for the other benefits.
For example in US mothers often go back to work as early as 2 weeks after giving birth. Can you imagine that? I cannot. How much better would those kids do in life if they could stay home with them on basic income for a year or two? Can you imagine how much smarter those kids will be in 20 years? How many problems that can lift in just one generation? What about the fathers? Not finding a job is no longer a reason to join gang, sell drugs, go to jail. So maybe you got almost no money and live on basic income, but you got now two people raising that kid.
What about veterans? What about disabled people? What about mentally sick? There will always be some punk like you arguing with that one kid that bought xbox. FFS. I've had enough of you guys.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Don't need a place to live either. You can just sponge yourself down in the McDonalds bathroom too.
Life is so cheap. Too bad the cost of living isn't.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You live within your means...
If everybody did that, the economy would completely collapse.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You're projecting and assuming I said a lot of things I never said, nor would say, nor even think. You're constructing straw men for people who are on your side. Are you drunk or something?
I have an acquaintance - an engineer with an engineering degree - who married a woman from a poor background. His big complaint? While he was working and saving, she'd (marginally employed) spend money continuously on idiotic trinkets. He tried to teach her the importance of saving and fiscal prudence but it was lost on her. They eventually divorced.
These people have no money yet they walk around with expensive cellphones..
That is not a problem limited to "the poor". 47% of Americans cannot come up with $400 to meet an unexpected expense.
I know many people like that. Some of my well paid co-workers will tell me they have to "wait until payday" for a purchase or even to go out to lunch. My sister, who makes $80k and owns a house, occasionally needs to borrow money from me for some minor expense, like fixing a flat tire on her car, because she has already spent her paycheck. She has zero savings, and no financial cushion whatsoever, yet she just got back from a Mediterranean cruise.
I couldn't live like that. The stress would drive me nuts. When I was 18, and got my first paycheck, I invested half of it in an index fund, and my savings have increased monotonically since then, even through college (I worked part time and had a military scholarship).
The idiots you went to high school with didn't suddenly get smart. People are quite dumb, on average.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
About those cell phones the poor have - they're "Obama-phones" - and I suppose we should be thankful because it does increase the market for our wares. I've seen this effect in person:
1) Snopes link
2) US News and World Report link
Most studies have conculded that $74000/year is required to comfortably live in america, and still have money for savings and a vacation.
Where in America? Cost of living is not a static metric across the country; you can live in most places for a tiny fraction of what it costs to live in say NYC or San Francisco.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
1) A "universal" basic income that is NOT UNIVERSAL is a contradiction in terms.
2) Starvation-level UBI is an insult.
The amount of homeless people is not an issue of just poverty, it's an issue of a lack of mental health programs. It is cheaper for the Government to dump people on the streets than own asylums. The US also has a huge amount of corruption so tended to get sued a lot when they ran asylums, because it was cheaper than inspections and accountability. You are conflating the amount of homeless to be similar to the rate of poverty I think, but it fails. Count the Homeless and people in Shelters in SF, then compare that to the institutionalized in some other city in Finland and you would have similar percentages.
TFA is reporting _BULLSHIT_, pure and simple crap. Replacing people's current unemployment with a check covered by a new name is NOT Basic Income. Giving EVERYONE a check every month is what Basic Income is. So the PILOT is a crock of shit meant to appease people who somehow think it's a good idea for the Government to hand out money they confiscate in taxes and print to appease a populace who lacks employment options. People will also say "See it works!" and demand more wealth confiscation and checks from the Government because "look"!
The dishonesty here is simple and open, and meets everything else about the claims promoting Basic Income. Sorry, but I have not seen any intellectual debate on the subject. I have read what I consider crap claiming the government should redistribute wealth in the US this way, but no sane economist agrees with this. Interestingly Milton Friedman is often cited as a source for BI, which neglects the majority of his arguments (that Welfare without immigration control will fail).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No, that's not the reason it won't work. Attitudes likes yours are why America is a cluster-farkle. I really really regret returning to this country; saving up to leave again.
The reason it won't work is our population. The US can't afford to even give this country poverty. $10k a year per adult (194 million people according to Wolfram Alpha) would be 1.9 trillion dollars. That's 1/6 of the US total expenditure per year, and that's no even providing basic income.
Also, "they'll just buy drugs and cellphones, and then we'll still have to feed and house them" ... do you not understand what minimum income is? Minimal income would need to pay for food and housing.
Ah and that's the issue isn't it? We life in a world that rewards people who are constantly spending and buying.
It's pathetic that some people like you think that netflix is a need. No wonder half the world hates us.
If everybody spent money they didn't have and bought homes they couldn't afford with loans no sane bank would provide (unless guaranteed by the fed) the economy would completely collapse.
In fact, that's pretty much exactly what happened in 2008.
I have no doubt the economy would contract quite a bit if everybody lived within their means -- but I doubt it would completely collapse.
" Unless you expect the poor person to be the moocher of the group. "
Or expect the poor person to attend more "$2 Tuesday" matinees. Or expect the poor person to get a bus pass.
this is a "replace unemployment benefit with one that we don't ask 1000 papers every month for".. a shame really(only those who are eligible for unemployment benefit are chosen for this tesy. and so those on social security dont get into this. and yes they are different and make this test a total joke aimed at securing jobs of burocrats who came up with it to make demand for universal income die out).
finland would be perfect for implementing universal income though, but because it would make the people deciding on which kind of money you get from government unemployed it is unlikely to pass.
(practically everyone is entitled in finland to some form of soc security but the burocrats for performance review reasons keep pushing people from one office to the next. also for the past decade they have been pushing people to higher education, because student benefits are much smaller than basic social security which again is smaller than unemployment benefits. the result is that alcies who can't take care of themselves get most cash.. as those get an appointed caretaker to sort it all out for them. if you dont smell like pee and booze they figure out that you don't need it and try to con you into not receiving your benefits)
So your whole argument is based on large corporate entities.
I work with small businesses as my clients. EVERYTHING that takes money from their bank account is cause for consideration of other business matters. Including the fees they pay me to keep their computers going. And also including taxes.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
And this, ladies & gents, is why you don't give people $10,000 in one go. A sum like that is - well, for a kid who's never had to manage money, it's hard to comprehend just how far it won't go.
If he'd got $200 per week for a year, the total amount would have been the same. And he wouldn't have blown it all at once.
Pre-interview, internet testing is not at all rare these days, and it's not at all only relegated to level white collar jobs.
My son was looking for jobs at spring time, and several of of the ones he applied to had tests, and we're not talking IT or professional level jobs. One entry level warehousing job for a plumbing and heating company had nearly an hour long test at the time of application! i.e. just the sort of job that someone can use to get off the streets, without heavy education requirements, requiring average intelligence and a bit of on the job experience.
When did the discussion get limited to only large corporations?
You want to self-select what businesses get considered here. No, that's not how this works.
What owners of small firms believe, in relation to their expenses, is definitely part of this argument.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Yes they did.
Do not want.
Read the section in Charles Murray's Losing Ground about the SIME/DIME experiments in guaranteed minimum income. They were colossal failures.
They might be less of a failure in Finland, due to greater cultural and ethnic uniformity. But that doesn't mean it won't fail, it just means it will take longer to fail.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I heartily agree with resurrecting the CCC and/or WPA. Unfortunately I see two major political obstacles to their return. The first would come from the private construction sector who would argue the government would effectively underbid them on all public construction projects and thereby force them out of that market. The second would be the http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm). I could easily see someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates claiming such programs were inherently racist, due to the kind of work being done.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
No you didn't. I call bullshit on your anecdote.
hence the universal in universal income.
Drugs would actually be really goddamn cheap if you stopped rubbing their noses in it. Just something to consider. No reason it has to be any more expensive than grocery store produce -- it's all plants and it takes a lot less weed to get me high than it takes spinach to get me full..
Again that's a space and time problem. If you want people to work you can't be picky about how or when they can be contacted for it.
What?
It cost nothing to receive a call. I have a prepaid plan that cost $10 every 3 months, and the device cost me $15 new.
Internet is free at the library, you only need to search and apply once a day then wait for someone to call back. So for precisely $25 you have 3 months worth of job searching capability. I'm speaking from first hand experience here.
fuck the debt clock. that debt is denominated in dollars, a fiat currency,, therefore that debt cannot be defaulted on.
Don't need a place to live either. You can just sponge yourself down in the McDonalds bathroom too.
Life is so cheap. Too bad the cost of living isn't.
I lived in a car for a year to see if I could do it. My work had a gym and shower/toilet so my only outgoings were fuel (not much since I slept in the car park) and food (also not much since I was trying out the meagre existence)
Yeah it wasn't great but was better than what most people living 150 years ago had. And you obviously need a car to start with and a job with 24hr access to a bathroom, but if you lower your expectations, the cost of living can be quite reasonable.
I could actually do this longer term but next time would get a van so I can stand up inside.
He's of the opinion that the poor are just as irresponsible with their spending as everyone else, and after giving them the handout they will still be without the essentials.
Are you talking all poor people or just some? Because it sounds like you're stereotyping to suit your argument...
I've always preferred the agenda-driven research and results interpretation myself. You know, the stuff that gave us Section 8 across the country. Obviously, the pre-screening process had absolutely nothing to do with the results of their trial runs, so they just took that part out of it when they pushed the program out for realz. How dare you screen people anyway, I'm sure that it was just racial profiling.
Four years ago we didn't lock our doors. This year, $35k of damage from vandalism in the neighborhood in one night, 3/16 houses on my street have been robbed, and we had a pit bull running loose in the neighborhood last week that killed a neighbor's dog a couple blocks away.
IMO, there's just nothing better than when government does things its own way. Outcome's always so damn rosy.
And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something as well as consume.
Taxes are paid on profits, not revenues. Want to pay fewer taxes? Reinvest those profits in to your business. Raise salaries, build new factories, increase inventories, etc.
Paying taxes doesn't take away anything actually used to actually expand the business.
I saw a post on Facebook saying how mean it was to shame people who live paycheck-to-paycheck about spending $5 a day on coffee.
Somebody commented you could easily save up $1000/year by not buying coffee and the original poster replied that it was a "quality of life" issue.
In other words, there are people who think that having a $5 coffee every day is more important than saving money.
They say, "Hey, we can't help it that we're poor. Stop denying us little pleasures like fancy coffee just because we're poor." What they don't realize is that spending $5 a day on coffee is the reason they're poor!
dom
> You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now.
No you don't. This is just moronic nonsense from the entitlement generation. Head hunters will leave messages and send email.
Perhaps you need to wade out of the shallow end of the talent pool if that's the kind of thing you're actually experiencing.
With "poor" people, these kinds of expectations are even more insane. This sounds like rich sheltered idiots just trying to imagine what it's like to be poor.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're an idiot trying to push an agenda. He's not stereotyping anyone except perhaps the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE.
Nearly everyone does the same stupid shit. It's just that when you have less, there's no margin to speak of. There's nothing extra to waste.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You've just described the average suburban housewife that grew up in the suburbs. It's not just the trailer trash that buy the stupid trinkets. It's nearly all of them. If you are frugal, then you're the freak. Don't out yourself, you might get burned at the stake by the 'danes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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No, you didn't.
Yep, and in the new, better, program, SF spent over $1200 per month to house people when the max cash benefit was around $400. Great value for money there.
With that said, what the change appeared to be effective in doing was reducing the number of homeless claiming the benefit. So, it may have been effective at reducing fraud.
That's not actually that much money. The US already spends $1tn/year on welfare (which would be replaced by the basic income), and if 125 million working adults contributed $7,200/year of tax into the fund you'd have the other $0.9tn/year. But how would all those people afford an extra $7200/year of tax, you ask? From the basic income. Duh.
(I'm sure the numbers in both of our posts are very approximate, but hopefully you get the idea.)
I can't see it flying either though. Somebody would call it communist and the whole idea would be finished. The US would prefer half their population on the streets before they do a basic income.
Living in a car potentially risks violating laws and getting a criminal record.
Well, he married a woman, what did he expect? Women are required to spend all the money they get their hands on and then some. It's cleary written in their genes, they can't help it.
Wonder how people managed to survive 100 years ago without Facebook, $250 tennis shoes, Xboxes, and a smart phone with unlimited data.
News flash! They didn't survive, they are all dead. Case closed.
Being able to work full time for a living ist already some type of entitlement. Be glad to be in that situation and not to have two or three McJobs instead!
Unfortunately sleeping in your car isn't legal everywhere, it's considered vagrancy in many areas if not done in specifically marked places (which, of course, are usually for-pay campgrounds).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I had a friend in university. We had the same major, took the same classes. At graduation time, he had over $50k in debt, but owned two sports cars and lived all four years in his own private apartment.
I OTOH owned a bike, no cars and had a minimum of three roommates throughout my entire career (foreigners at that because they seemed to be willing to deal with the inconvenience). I had less than $5k in debt. On top of that, my classmate's family largely supported his lifestyle.
As a matter of public interest, we need to house homeless people. Even those not responsible enough to rent housing when we give them money. Not that we're really doing it effectively right now, so UBI can't make it worse.
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You know, that's what the obamaphone program is for. Gives poor people inexpensive smartphones with free plans that do the job for that.
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What wonderful nonsense. Next time at least try to make a point when you try to be rude. You just whipped up a straw man or two and pathetically tried to cut them down, failing massively.
Do you really think poor people get calls from recruiters? That is professional levels of etiquette. Poor people wouldn't even recognize it.
You're just making stuff up out of thin air. The median income in 1970 was $7701, in 1979 it was $15,177. Adjusted for inflation (aka real cost of living, not the big screen TVs and trips to Jamaica somebody suddenly decides they need to be comfortable) that's $47,538 and $50,089. And 2014 was $53,013.
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74k is $6,166/month or $209/day
At $5,254/month, I could afford this monstrosity in Encinitas, CA. All 470m^2 of it.
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Est. Mortgage $5,254/mo
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The poor being irresponsible with their spending is critical for our economy.
The most valuable thing you can sell is manpower. Why? Because it's 100% fiat revenue. For revenue from agriculture products, you need arable land. For revenue from production, you need raw material. For services, all you need is people. And if there is one resource we have no shortage of, it's that.
Services, though, are a fickle thing to sell, because it's the first thing people cut back on when times get tough. If money's tight, do you get a haircut or do you get groceries? Do you get your dripping faucet fixed or do you buy fuel for your car so you can go to work?
So the poor having money to spend means the economy is running. They don't save, they spend. They consume. Consumption means selling, and selling means revenue. And that fuels our economy.
Our current economic problem is exactly that the poor don't have any money left to spend.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only problem is that "the rich" won't do it enough. "The rich" (today that pretty much already means "everyone who earns more than he needs for sustenance") don't want to spend, they want to invest. They won't go and spend their last 100 bucks on a vegan gluten free meal from a themed "experience" restaurant. They will cut back and save.
That's poison for the economy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's awesome! We now have to find out how to get the other 53% to be less of a burden to the economy and SPEND!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My wife is from a poor background and barely spends a penny. I know people earning good wages who spend more than they have. Without data they are just anecdotes
If you tax the 1% who do not pay taxes at all these days, you'd probably have more than enough to support the program.
What really would help would be if the government had the right to produce "positive" or "neutral" money. Now, central banks issue money as loans with the obligation of paying usury (the euphemism is "interest") and the money for this usury is never made. So in the end, central banks do not issue money, they only issue uncovered debt.
If a government could issue money (I know that is still possible in the USA, but not in the EU), they could inject it where it is needed and take it away again (through taxes, for example) where it is harmful. Current governments do exactly the opposite: the harmful accumulations are no longer taxed, and everyone else pays for it.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
People bleating about wages gaps always gloss over the study that found that 70% of domestic spending is done by women.
Saving $1000 a year isn't necessarily going to stop you being poor, although it might well help with emergency expenses and avoid people needing high interest rate unsecured loans and getting even poorer. One of the issues is that even a modest level of savings can disallow you from various assistance programs and you could end up worse off.
Investing the $5 a day in education rather than coffee would be a wise move but people are only likely to do this if they think that there will be a later pay off from it. Even then, in terms of professional training $1000 doesn't go very far. Better access to low cost training would be better, but the cost of getting to and from a government programme might exceed $5, so it's not trivial to address.
That's a rather academic view of the world.
Business project decisions are run by fear, ambition, good intent and politics.
If you've ever put together a business case you'll understand just how much the finances actually matter.
Why don't you buy a camper van instead?
Yep, because someone receiving a sudden $10,000 is comparable to someone receiving $700 per month in UBI.
Perhaps you need to wade out of the shallow end of the talent pool if that's the kind of thing you're actually experiencing.
So your solution is simply telling people they ought to be smarter?
Okey dokey. That's a solution. You do realise that a full half of the population is of below the average level of talent, right?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I'm on benefits. Due to illness. I get about £70 a week. I always have beer. I always have a wee bit of pot. I always have food (I am a keen chef and always cook from scratch). I am in the pub for a pint or 2 a couple of times a week. Being poor is a skill. It's been fascinating to learn it.
I like the idea of a basic income, but I don't know how it can be made to work without the government controlling a lot of other things. If you give everyone $600 extra I would bet that things like rental costs, utilities, etc. would just expand to take the extra money. We have seen how this works with the extra income with women entering the workforce. As soon as you have limited resources or monopolies the prices will increase as everyone will be able to spend more.
Unless you want to introduce rent controls, fair prices for utilities, etc. costs will just go up
E-mail eh? So how do you get that promptly? Once per day checking in library,
Yeah
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is in fact comparable. To some people, free money from the Gov is just that, free money to be spent however they want, not carefully managed to meet expenses and needs.
When I got out of prison, I tried to apply for a job as a dog bather at PetSmart. I have OK computer skills and it still took me 45 minutes to fill out the online application. Then the site forwarded me to an online personality assessment. Unfortunately, my session on the computer at the employment center expired before i could begin the assessment, so they refused to consider my application.
I could have gone back the following week but I told a guy the story and he made a phone call and got me a job as a dog bather at a different salon the next day. Kind of funny really.
I didn't really want to be a dog bather, but i need a job, and I'm not too proud for this.
A universal basic income might actually help here. With all the various government aid programs replaced with a single monthly payment (or maybe make it weekly?), it makes it a lot easier to say "Look, you fucked up. You'll have to wait until the next payment day.". When other nearby cities are still running those food aid programs it makes it a lot harder to resist the calls to run your own too.
Also there's two posts further up that I think are worth quoting here too:
A basic income that's universal and reliable (as in, something we maintain for generations rather than a few months or years) seems like it might work out differently.
Sweden and Finland have system that do not only favor giving monetary service, but a lot of it is in additional education, so this really might save them some cost, because the real benefits of their system lays elsewhere.
I can't speak for Sweden, but at least when it comes to Finland, the justification for this experiment is that the amount paid is what people on unemployment already eventually get. But this consists of several different benefits which add a lot of bureaucracy - not only time-consuming for the unemployed themselves (living on social security actually requires quite a bit of effort dealing with various forms and agencies), but also requires a lot of people to handle all the applications, who surely could be doing something more productive instead. Whether the experiment will work or not (and should it be extended to everyone, including those who work, how will it be paid for?) we will see, but that is the rationale for it.
(and it is Finns, fins is what you have on fish)
If they don't buy food, they will be hungry. Next month their primary need will be food, not shopping. So they will go eat. If they keep getting the money, eventually they will learn to balance their spending on their needs.
If people spending the money on the wrong thing is a concern, why pay them monthly?
Retail workers in Australia get paid every week, and office professionals every two. If you are spending irresponsibly its not that difficult to wait until pay day if that's only next week, where as if someone has a gambling problem and loses too much of their monthly UBI they don't have to somehow survive for a whole month until getting another cash injection.
Yes, and you'll earn a tiny fraction of the median income of NY or San Fran, as well.
There's nothing inherent in a system that taxes wealth to cause "the money they've saved is simply taken away from them until they're back down to having only what you have". That would only happen if a person stops being productive and so has no more income, so their wealth is monotonically depleted over time. All the system I'm proposing does is make it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to try and gain more wealth. Our current system just makes it less attractive for the significantly wealthy to have high incomes - which is nowhere near the same thing.
At one point I revised my proposal to tax income based on wealth percentile - so you could then "sit on your accumulated wealth" without having it taken away, and if you were poor and had an income windfall you wouldn't be dinged. But I think that if you're interested in a functioning society, you don't really want holders of large wealth to just sit there and hoard it - you do indeed want to tax it and encourage productive use of that wealth.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
As a EU inhabitant, it's not at all the general tax level that infuriates me. We indeed pay more taxes than the average citizen of the USA. However I, along with every other European I have spoken to, find the complexity and unfair advantages granted to be the biggest issue with being a taxpaying European.
I have no problem whatsoever with my contribution to social welfare. The level of contribution is worth the security I get from it.
We are on the whole a lot less happy though, about the way companies are taxed. They get way to many advantage (E;G.: in Belgium the 5 largest electricity consuming companies doe not pay any extra taxes while an apartment owner pays twice 100€ extra this year for the hookup + a hike of TAV to 22%.)
Also the complexity of tax law is getting beyond all understanding. Belgium this year again added approximately 300 new tax codes.
I'm not completely convinced that's the case, at least from your numbers.
You're already paying social security for 20% of the population, so that's 20% of the money covered right there. About 50% or so work and will thus essentially pay their own basic income via the basic income tax. Eliminating bureaucratic overhead in SS/M will also save a bunch of money. All of that accounts for about three quarters of the total amount needed to pay for the basic income.
Okay, sure, "three quarters" is very different from "all" and you'll still have to work out where the rest comes from. But that sounds a damn sight more doable than "we've covered a fifth, now what?".
5245 excluding utilities, maintenance, property taxes.
Plus $6000 a month is gross, not net of tax.
And what about healthcare and food?
Your argument relies on assumptions and assumptions on assumptions that the poor in society (any of them) are there due to some moral or character flaw which could have been prevented with a bit of ingenuity and work.
No, the GP's point was that many people are poor due to ignorance and that that can be helped via education. Then the GP wonders why this particular knowledge is not being taught in schools.
Governments are pushing socialism more than helping create jobs. This is a disturbing trend that portends an ever growing underclass that has little opportunity to advance in life.
In fact the economy would not collapse, but it would be impossible for companies to maintain the rate of return of 10% that investors demand (infinite growth is possible only in the imagination of CEOs).
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
For the very poor people in Northeast and North Brazil, the basic income policy worked VERY well. Marie Claire Brazil even has an article about it (in portuguese, sorry) http://revistamarieclaire.glob... And after a couple of years, people were even able to quit the program by themselves. They asked to quit because they were earning enough to not need the help anymore. This policy certainly worked because it provided for the minimum amount of money a person needs to survive. But after this point, would it be of any worth? Let's see. I just believe so.
Feel free to enlighten is on how you know this.
You are on drugs? The ability to give larger loans than the bank have in cash (wishing money) is the reason of the power of banks over the world!
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
You're an idiot trying to push an agenda.
That's a good discussion technique, I'll try that out next time I have nothing useful to say...
Unfortunately sleeping in your car isn't legal everywhere...
So are lots of things. But when push comes to shove you gotta do what you gotta do.
There are basocally two different kind of poor people. People who are poor becuase the don't have an income. Those are the poor people we are talking about.
People who can not handle their money. Those are the people who blow all their money. These wil be poor, even if Bill Gates gave them all his money.
So how do you deal with the second group? See that they don't get there. Educating them might be a solution. And some will always be a lost cause. help them the first time and let them go the second time.
And take a serious look at how these people get credit.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mobile data is not a luxury anymore. If that is your ONLY access to the internet, it is actually a symptom of poverty. I can get online for about $11 (device) with a $9 recurring fee with mobile. That is utterly impossible for a home connection. And don't tell me libraries are free because your time is not free. Travel to and from the library, unless you live next door, is not worth $9 a month of your time that you could be working.
I work at a gas station in a not-so-nice part of town. Every month on the 1st there is a line at the atm at midnight, people on government assistance pulling out all the money they can. 9 out of 10 immediately buy tobacco and alcohol. Many spend $50 or more right there in the gas station, on junk food, scratch tickets, etc.
It is soul crushing to watch. I have no hope for a basic income.
So what they are saying is a 45 year old, chronically unemployed, pot smoker, still living with his parents, is some how entitled to some portion of My salary? This kind of interference with natural selection is making our species weaker and less likely to survive.
You don't do it here, our police just LOVES to mess with people who they deem unable to defend themselves against them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It will be a human tidal wave if they implement UBI.
Dollar stopped being backed by gold in 70s, Walmart is not who is printing money, it's government with its "solutions"
You must live rent free with no amenities if you live that cheaply, probably and efficiency apartment on government subsidy with included utilities. That low of a wage is poverty level.
So quite where you think "many" do so, I don't know, unless it's a report from some rightwing or neoliberal site that these people exist.
Property taxes are included on the website and still fit within the budget. Utilities and maintenance are not, but a single roommate/spouse bringing in $1000/month rent (sweet deal for living in a half occupied mansion near the beach) will cover that with plenty to spare for food.
It's bitztream, the autism-hating Slashdot troll!
Paid off house, no rent, full amenities. It's difficult to build wealth while renting your existence. And so what if it is poverty level, I seem to be doing better than most commenters on this website.
To paraphrase George Carlin, imagine the intelligence of the average American. Now consider that half of America is dumber than that.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
Really? Even for jobs at McDonalds or Walgreens? A plain, voice line isn't sufficient for an entry level job?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Any form of government assistance is already UBI. UBI just creates yet another government office to handle yet another budget of debt. I'd be all for it if you got rid of ALL other assistance, because it would be cheaper for pretty much any government to get rid of the expensive programs (housing, food, work, unemployment and medical) and just give everyone that makes less than $100k/year an extra $1000/month. You could get rid of entire offices of expenditure, make government so much easier and allow people to migrate jobs much faster and force those that currently rely solely on assistance for decades to actually get off their asses.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You need a mobile with data plan to be in job search now. Recruiters don't wait, and neither do employers
Do you realize what the target demographic is in question? Recruiters don't recruit for McDonalds; all you do is as for an application over the counter and after you fill it out the shift manager will spend 10 minutes determining if you don't outright drool on yourself.
In reality, we haven't had tax cuts, either. In 2016, Federal, State, and Local Governments will combine to raise $23,523 per US citizen. In 1990, that revenue was $7751. In 1957, that revenue was $716 (and that was also the last year we ran an actual surplus, we did not add to the debt). When you adjust for inflation you'll find the various Governments are pulling about 3 times the tax revenue now, as they did in 1957, and close to double what they did in 1990, on a per-capita basis.
What happened was that tax rates were monkeyed with, but exemptions that used to be allowed were dropped or heavily modified, and the result was a massive increase in the effective tax rate - witnessed by the massive rise in inflation-adjusted revenues per capita. The Governments today are fed 3 times what they had in 1957, and even so they combine to add over $1.5 trillion in debt just this year (don't let the reports fool you; the Federal Government is running a $1.3 trillion deficit this year, based upon the increase in the national debt). So even with 3 times the amount of funds - spending has skyrocketed even faster, building up massive debts.
There have been no effective tax cuts - there have been effective tax increases. That's the sad reality - that so many buy into the claims of tax cuts, while at the same time believing our Federal Government is only running a deficit 1/4 of what it actually is.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yep, in the U.S. we have to shame and torture our poor folk and make sure their misery is so extreme that they will shit McJobs that numb the mind.
Federal spending on social services (pensions (driven by social security), health care, and welfare) and interest on the national debt already consume 69% of all Federal spending. Federal spending is about $4 trillion this year, so that spending is about $2.8 trillion. All the spending is also adding $1.4 trillion of that to the national debt, meaning we didn't have revenues to cover it - only the first $2.6 trillion.
So we're spending $2.8 trillion on pensions, healthcare, welfare and interest on the national debt, and that is more revenue than the Federal Government takes in. Completely eliminate - 100% - all military spending and you're still running a deficit. It's not military spending that is the problem - it's out-of-control social spending (which has far outstripped revenues and population on an inflation adjusted scale). And that's just the kind of spending that's easiest to buy votes and retain power...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
infinite growth is possible only in the imagination of CEOs
But that is the goal, elusive as it is. The economy, as it is set up, cannot survive without it. Without a fast growing population, serious problems start to emerge. So usury becomes the only way to keep it going. It is a form of extortion. The economy is held hostage by institutions that are too big to sanction for their unsavory and frequently illegal practices.
Increased mechanization can only be compensated for by lowering prices and eventually with UBI. But the sociopaths we put in power would rather have food thrown away in front of a starving man and ration money to maintain price stability for the sake of the economy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
...they make bad decisions with money and life.
Take anyone who is poor and you will find a string of bad decisions compounding to the point that they are permanently poor.
Not finishing school. Drugs. Crime. Out of wedlock births. Gangs. Attire (Those people lining up around the block for $250 tennis shoes are not middle income people.)
And list goes one. At every turn, THEY made a decision that resulted in them being in the situation they are on.
There is always exceptions, but they are few and far between.
I'm going to assume that since you posted AC you don't have the stones to use your Slashdot pseudonym when writing such comments. Yes the poor make bad decisions, but so do the middle and upper classes. The difference is that when the poor make bad decisions the consequences are likely to be worse than if a person of a higher class were to make the same mistake, because of circumstances (for example no financial safety net, to name just one). Even if a poor person were to make no bad decisions there is no guarantee that they will become as financially independent as people from a higher class, especially in a society where social mobility is low. You have to understand that not everyone will have the same opportunities in life, people wont always do what in their best interest and people don't always get what they deserve. I want to say more but i'm not wasting my energy attacking an AC.
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
I had a potluck roommate at my university who was of meager means. He wasn't sure if he'd be able to stay in school, but then a $10,000 federal loan came in for him to cover his schooling expenses.
Guess what he did, even before the money had hit his account?
Shopping spree. Bought a gaming console with a number of games, movies, new clothes, went out to a load of restaurants...you get the picture.
By no means am I suggesting he's the brush with which we can paint the entire low income population, but it is safe to say that some people will be foolish with those funds and we'll be faced with the question of how to deal with them then.
I don't think they give you a year's Basic Income in advance.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
'Some people could choose to live on the basic income and do work benefiting their community.'
Most in the US would simply drink up or shoot up the money, then get on CNN and cry about not eating.
US is NOT Finland....
And make money selling them drugs and cell phones and renting them apartments.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't know what the Goodwill stores are like in your area, but I have never seen a computer for sale at any Goodwill store around here (Indianapolis area), and I've gone to several every first Saturday of the month where everything is half off. That is if you aren't making this and everything else in your post up.
You need a data plan to respond to a phone call and e-mail with a resume.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
My goodwill has a variety of laptops, desktops, and low quality monitors. So does freegeek.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Some libraries actually have people waiting to get on the computers so they do limit you.
All of all welfare takes up nothing in out budget compared to defense.
Welfare is more than 60% of the US federal budget, and a significant part of state budgets. It's just disguised as other things, such as big categories like "social security", or "medi-care", or a zillion smaller categories, such as rich farming corporations getting water in the West at far below the cost of delivery (which does have the benefit of reducing the cost of food). It's even hidden in the cost of the road system - the big trucks do the most damage to the roads, but we tolerate that - and don't force the truck companies to pay corresponding charges - because it reduces the cost of getting food to the poor. Welfare spending dwarfs defense, and every other category of spending. It's also hidden in minimum wage laws, and rent control - both of which have non-trivial negative economic effects.
A well thought out basic income plan could re-direct many of those expenses to a simple plan with few bureaucrats, which would actually save money and provide people with better lives. But some categories such as medical or education would still need additional government support. Rent control could probably be thrown out entirely, after a phase-out period, but it would still make sense to not let landlords raise rent more than once in a ten year period - don't fix the price, but fix the frequency of change to prevent sociopaths from being abusive.
ding ding ding. we have a winner.
(AC so I don't lose my mod points)
You don't want to help out the poor now so they don't have to find out what it is to be poor later. Fine logic.
And then somehow they've convinced the common man that rationing money is a good idea .You get all these people who don't understand how economy works clamoring for going back to the gold standard.
As the AC said: all I'm saying is that ignorance causes poverty -- maybe there are other causes too, I'm not intending to address that in any way -- but ignorance causes poverty. And without curing that ignorance, you can't create wealth by giving people money (because by definition, wealth is investment, not money).
But we know how to fix ignorance. We have an entire government-funded school system to solve the problem of ignorance, and to help pass on culture from one generation to the next.
So, please, please explain why people resist teaching our children useful skills. I simply cannot understand the resistance here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
50 years ago, most of the world was still rebuilding from being bombed into the stone age.
Guess which country had the luck of not needing to rebuild? Guess which country profited most from the rebuilding?
Sweden?
I assume you're referring to European countries and Japan, since most of the world wasn't seriously affected by the war (in a negative sense - lots of positive things happened). I suppose we could consider the Soviet Union to be Asian as well as European - but the Asian parts weren't significantly bombed - the Germans didn't have a strategic bombardment arm, and what they could achieve with tactical air was very limited. The Japanese didn't mess with the Soviets either.
Sweden wasn't bombed at all, let alone into the stone age, and they seem to have benefited the most from WW2. Some 31% of Britain's ball bearing supply (critical components for anything with rotating parts, such as tanks, aircraft, machine tools to make weapons and ammunition, and so forth) came from Sweden, and some 58% of Germany's supply - all this at wartime profit rates. Raw Swedish iron was also critical to Germany's wartime economy.
Sweden came out of the war with lots of money, and they didn't have the misfortune of being occupied by the Soviets.
Britain did pretty well out of the war, also. The German bombing wasn't very effective - economically speaking -- especially once they switched to civilian targets in response to Churchill's bombing of Berlin. They certainly weren't "bombed into the stone age" - most of Britain was beyond the effective range of German bombers, which needed fighter escort to have any chance of survival - and the fighters were short ranged. The Brits were certainly "lucky" enough to not have to significantly rebuild. Unfortunately, the Brits threw away their strong post-war position with badly conceived social legislation - unlike Sweden, which managed things much better.
Switzerland would be another candidate, as another country that wasn't bombed, but they didn't profit as much from the war.
The USA, on the other hand, spend huge amounts of money - even before the Marshall Plan - in helping nations rebuild, both during the war, and for decades afterwards - something I don't recall Sweden doing. For that matter, huge amounts of industrial equipment, vehicles, trains, and other non-military equipment were shipped to the Soviet Union during the war - and none of it was returned - which vastly helped the Soviets in their post-war rebuilding. Any single Arctic convoy could represent a billion dollars in today's money - and the Arctic convoys were only a small part of the total aid.
WW1 was followed by a ghastly plague - that killed 28 million people around the world - and part of the reason there wasn't another plague after WW2 was US aid, so there were good reasons (aside from the economic ones) for the USA to help others. Nothing had been done to help certain nations rebuild after WW1 - the British naval blockade had created devastating famine - and that helped create a breeding ground for plague. Human beings CAN learn from the mistakes of the past.
The USA also had to spend huge amounts of money to counteract Soviet militarism in the years following the war. It adds up to a lot of money spent to help others, money that couldn't be spent at home - and it shows today, Sweden is a much happier country, despite the awful weather. So we can't consider the USA the country that got the most benefit from the war - the clear winner is Sweden.
If you're taxing back the UBI, it's not a UBI, it's something different. Maybe that could work, I don't know, but what percentage of people do you plan to tax this way? If you tax the upper half, you have to tax them twice the UBI, or around $50k/year in taxes. The median household income is only $60k, so obviously that wont work. The upper 10% can't pay $240K in taxes. The upper 1% can't pay $2.4 M in taxes. There's just no way I see that working.
There are other benefits: homeless people incur huge medical bills. In part because the only medical services available to them are those that are the most expensive to provide (emergency rooms). A UBI may reduce these huge bills.
Those "huge bills" are small on the scale of SS and Medi* (Medicaid covers many poor people, though the homeless often don't apply). Look, anywhere you think there will be savings you must first identify the existing government cost - where is it?
There's nothing you can cut in terms of government spending to "free up" more than 100% of the budget. Why is this so hard to understand?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
$600 per month in a modern western society is not enough to live on. I don't think we're going to get a real sense of the value of these basic income programs until the provide enough support to allow someone receiving *only* the UBI to live with a little dignity. A studio apartment with basic utilities (no Internet) in Helsinki is like 1,000 euros a month. No food, no clothes, etc.
You stop being an authoritarian control freak fascist and let them live freely and learn from experience. If you never let your kid ride a bike, because he fell once, he will never learn to ride a bike. It is that simple.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
The current SS benefits I baselined on about are precisely " a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country", and that UBI is still over 100% of current federal spending. Medicare is nobodies "gold-plated healthcare" and it's still a huge chunk of the budget - it's not going to get cheaper if we expand it to more people. (And, BTW, Medicare is more-or-less "subsistence medicine" unless you have supplemental insurance, which isn't cheap).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Set health care aside. Set how we come up with 50% of the budget to spend aside. Let just talk about the math, OK?
The total current federal budget is about $13000 each. For 50% of that budget we can pay a universal basic income of $6500.
$6500 is not a subsistence income. You could make that work in the 80s - I did - but that's a lot of inflation ago.
If you believe a $10/hour minimum wage is the minimum "living wage", then you want a $12000 UBI. That 's just under 100% of the federal budget. But there's a reason social security pays twice that. Most people with only social security already live with roommates, but it's expensive to be old. There's a constant stream of stuff you could do for yourself once, but now you simply can't, and have to pay someone to do - and it only gets worse over time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We've tried double taxes before in the past 100 years. Heck, we've tried just about everything imaginable. But under every plan we've never sustained federal revenue above 20% of GDP. That's about 10% more than we get now.
It's also worth pointing out that the "more progressive" you make taxes, the more the federal budget swings with the economy. For the middle class, a severe recession means 10% unemployment rather then 5%. That's a material difference in tax revenue, but doesn't cause the sort of eye-watering deficits we had recently. The upper 1% see major swings in income in recessions, as much more of their income comes from investment gains, and you don't really have those during a market crash. Sure, the "richest 100 families" may do OK, but good luck taxing them - they'll just take their income in Ireland or whatever.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We've tried double taxes before in the past 100 years. Heck, we've tried just about everything imaginable. But under every plan we've never sustained federal revenue above 20% of GDP. That's about 10% more than we get now.
That's only numerically possible if you leave loopholes to let the richest dodge their taxes. Think about it. Solution: don't do that.
If this comes to the United States: I will REFUSE to pay for it, and so will so many other people that it just won't work. In fact I'll become an outspoken political activist AGAINST such bullshit as this because I REFUSE TO HAVE MY TAX DOLLARS GO TO PEOPLE BEING LAZY. Why, you ask? Because I can guarantee you they will work it so that I'm getting more of my hard-earned pay taxed to pay for it; I and others who still believe that work is good and necessary will get SCREWED so fat lazy people can fuck off all day every day and WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS. So forget it. We'll fight against this tooth and nail.
Don't even bother trying to argue with me about this. It's a deal-breaker issue, and I WILL NOT BUDGE ON IT, NOT ONE NANOMETER.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Ship BLM idiots to Finland
In the budget you mention, lot of things are simply not counted. For example we pay standard deduction to everyone to make taxes progressive. Those are not counted so for 75%+ of the people you would not be paying. The cost of collecting the revenue is not counted in it: "The IRS reports it spends 41 cents per $100 to collect taxes, but the true cost is closer to $45 per $100, or $978 billion, when those factors are accounted for, according to research compiled by Mastromarco." Basic Income would actually simplify the tax code. Another thing not counted are productivity gains from people not wanting to work not being in the workforce, standing in the way. Now, since you have so many people on basic income, the cost of labor goes down for day to day expenses. Since you only tax what people earn, not the UBI, there does not need to be any minimum wage, the UBI covers it. So in poor communities the cost can go further down. A lot of things can be done on barter basis in rural areas. You will find that those dollars go much further in such economy than when you have to pay for everything. Also, with the UBI you are no longer absolutely tied to population center to be near job. You can have population spread much more and lower the cost of living, by reducing scarcity of living area due to overpopulation of certain places.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
This is why I always use to have a pickup truck with a shell. I could cover the windows. An eight foot bed of four inch thick foam is very comfortable. Still always best to live as far south as possible under such circumstances though.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Maybe that's why you are unemployed. You need to apply for more than one job per day you lazy fick. Or is that the minimum for unemployment. Stop giving crap advice. Other idiots may follow it.
Oh, but these are 30-40 year old people. Not children. They are developed. You can figure out the rest.
You need a data plan to respond to a phone call and e-mail with a resume.
No you don't. You can use Wifi, which is usually available for free somewhere nearby.
For years, I had no data plan on my phone. I never needed it. I have it now, because it is free with my wife's family plan, but I almost never use it.
I seen this too.
In my country our "helpful" police would certainly start knocking on your truck at least thrice an hour to see if everything is all right with you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have you tried therapy?
Yeah socialism! Isn't it a wonderful program in which people get something for doing nothing, and yes I understand that some people have disabilities and can't contribute, but those aren't the people I'm talking about. I understand if your trying to get a job and can't do so, but there are plenty of people in this world who don't and are just leeches on the system.
We'd be less in debt if the Republicans hadn't sent us to a war that cost more than WW2 while at the same time dramatically lowering tax rates on the people who actually have all of the money in this country. It's like quitting your $90k year job to go work at Burger King right before buying a Tesla Model S and then wondering why you can't seem to pull yourself out of debt. All they can come up with is screwing over the most vulnerable people in the country by cutting social services. Raising taxes on the people who have 90% of the countries money is the only way we are going to be able to lower the national debt. But we've had 8 years of a party who's only goal in life is standing in the way of the Democrats, even if it means hurting this country.
And that makes it trolling?
my lying eyes that show the rampant drug and alcohol use in the blighted areas where everyone is on welfare
Ahh the eyes. What do eyes see? Do they see inside the penthouses? The rooms of the rich and wealthy? The campuses of Ivy League schools? Or just the streets you walk around in?
Drug use is far more prevalent among the wealthy and hard drugs are the drug of choice for the business and banking sector more than any other demographic. But when all you do is look at welfare cases all you will see is welfare cases.
Your eyes are literally the least reliable source for a study on a general population or demographic.
Cost of living is cheap so long as you don't insist on living in deep urban centers. I live far better off in the outskirts of Phoenix than people in Oakland for probably half what their monthly costs are.
But this whole premise that money can solve any problem is stupid to begin with. What sets apart rich and poor is what you own, not your income. Money is just a medium of exchange. If you give money to people for nothing, they'll probably value it less.
He didn't say "recent" or even "decent" laptop. On the other hand, if you know your way around computers, there's a lot of old laptops that can still work fine for basic web search. Nobody's going to pay for old G3/G4, Pentium 2/3/4/M laptops but they still work fine. Upgrading the hard drive and RAM of those old laptops is extremely cheap since it's old technology that nobody wants anymore.
I found an old G4 Apple laptop for free a few weeks ago. The battery still keeps its charge, the screen, keyboard and trackpad still work fine and it even has built-in WiFi. It was in the trash along with old beige tower PCs. I was lucky to even spot it, its white casing saved it.
Yeah, who the hell can afford those 25 cents hamburgers anymore?
No, it's not something different. It's a UBI. You are pushing a strawman here: your own definition of a UBI that no one is proposing (except you and a few other people who can't or more likely, won't understand).
That person earning $60k: one can expect that he/she would receive the UBI, but his/her taxes would increase by an equivalent amount, so no net gain or loss for either him/her or the government.
You also ignored my point about a UBI making a number of means-tested benefits unnecessary. Also, it would be quite reasonable to offset a UBI against social security payments.
I realize that the ideas proposed by me go against your idea of a UBI, but no one is seriously proposing that your idea should be implemented.
I'm done arguing against your strawman.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, almost - the devil is in the details. At any given point in time, for goods, the rate of consumption plus the rate of change of goods in storage is equal to the rate of production. For services, the rate of consumption is always the rate of production ( you cannot store a service ).
So you can "borrow" against storage to have a really high short-term consumption rate - but as soon as that storage is exhausted, then you get consumption of goods must equal supply of goods.
The "problems" with our economy are wholly social - that is, they are rarely based in "physical economics*". They are wholly based on the social systems we have put in place governing the allowed use of resources. So if everyone "lived within their means" - what would that look like? In terms of production and consumption - nothing would have to change. People are already producing things and consuming things - so what is structurally different "the day after" a financial meltdown? Nothing - It's wholly social - and that's the crazy thing. It's all about allocation. If the system just said "nope, sorry, you're not allowed to change things that drastically from yesterday to today" then crashes (or booms!) might not happen - things could be slow and steady. But that is a bit different system than we have today - and it would necessarily look markedly different in terms of how ownership is assigned and changed.
*Sometimes there are physical events, like disasters, droughts, etc. that adversely (or beneficially!) affect production, but those usually don't result in the kinds of nonsense that is the result of our financial laws.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
IMO It makes a lot of sense. It has the possibility to end homelessness and food insecurity. I would be for it in USA. First I want to see how the experiment works for the other countries. If people get enough money to keep them afloat, it shouldn't encourage dead beats. Some people might be satisfied with just enough to get by but many more will choose to work for more material goods and status.
I actually do own a small business. I would say I talk to several on a weekly basis. We have coffee every Monday morning.
In the USA, this would mean MORE administration and MORE bureaucrats. Higher Taxes too! I would be surprised if this would reduce the size of government in any country. In our state, the USA Federal Government wanted the state to start using Medicaid and the state pay the Feds for the extra Medicaid. It was discovered that the state could buy the same insurance policy that the state's employees had for every prospective Medicaid recipient for LESS $$$! The insurance plan was much better than Medicaid and the savings was very notifiable. The USA Federal Government would not permit the state to buy policies for each of the "poor" people and forced the state into a much more expensive plan. This created Federal employees to monitor the state program and state employees to administer the state program. Big win for the Federal Government. Big lose for the "poor" people.
If you can find a 25 cent burger, please let us know! While you're at it, see if you can find a 10 cent cup of coffee, and a 5 cent Coke.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi... ..."
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In Australia I live 10 mins walk from a capital city center, work 15 hours a week. The trick for me is to not buy into consumerism, wasting money on useless shiny things. I do waste money, have a custom built desktop with 4k monitor for developing, xbox one, surface pro, macbook air, kindle... But even with all that I only need my $1,500-$2,000 a month to survive and thrive. That also includes a very good private health cover too, private room in a private hospital if required. But slowly the corporations are doing their work, seducing and corrupting our politicians to take away our socialism in the name of ever more profits and wealth hording.. We're fighting an investigation into the banks, the right is of course stopping it after gaining a large grip on us, but their power was brief and it has declined considerably since the Abbott started this mess in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will oppose it
Casteism
No, but there isn't an "Utterly Stupid Argument" mod.
Same here. Are you in one of those BNI groups? I just dropped from one whose meetings were biweekly.
When I'm talking with my clients, I don't go into details of their finances. But when they are remodeling the office/warehouse, talking about opening another site, or just talking about how it's going on any given day, their concerns for the future is evident. Money is always part of that concern, and it doesn't matter where that money is going, it's still a big concern.
That's why I can't understand Jzanu's argument, that only large successful companies care about taxes in relation to their business decisions.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Really? They walk by every 20 minutes banging on all the cars with their billy clubs? Sounds like they creating a disturbance.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I own a small, highly specialized machine shop in a small town. I just have coffee every week to shoot the shit with other local small business guys. Taxes and regulations are a frequent topic of conversation.
The article didn't say how welfare and universal basic income differ. How does getting the dole under a different name create an incentive to work?
I am over 40, I am not nearly done learning. You can figure the rest.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
AH, so you want a different sort of welfare - basically what was pushed as "negative income tax" mumbly years ago when I was young. While I've always like the idea, it's a very hard sell as a replacement for all other programs.
Meanwhile, isn't Finland actually just mailing everyone a check for X? Or am I confusing that with some different Scandi plan?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Basic Income would actually simplify the tax code.
Basic income in the US is pretty much a fantasy to begin with, but simplifying the tax code? I'll believe that after we fix spelling and the calendar, and make electrons positive.
Another thing not counted are productivity gains from people not wanting to work not being in the workforce, standing in the way
I don't get how fewer people working boosts the GDP. Sure, it might help productivity, but a net gain (meaning more tax revenue)? I don't see it.
Since you only tax what people earn, not the UBI, there does not need to be any minimum wage, the UBI covers it.
You couldn't be more wrong. Federal service union worker income is a contractual multiple of minimum wage, That's the only reason minimum wage is ever taken seriously as a political topic - it's a pay raise for a very large union. No one buying influence actually cares about the poor people earning minimum wage, that's just theater. It's all about the wages for one big union. UBI will be twisted into a reason to raise the min wage even further, somehow.
Also, with the UBI you are no longer absolutely tied to population center to be near job. You can have population spread much more and lower the cost of living, by reducing scarcity of living area due to overpopulation of certain places.
The dynamic is mostly the reverse these days. People like living in dense city centers. They want drunken nightlife within staggering distance. The jobs are going where the people are these days, as least for in-demand skilled work (and all the service jobs attached to those jobs). People are crazy.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sure, just don't let the government that makes the actual detailed tax law be corrupted by the most rich and powerful people. I can't think of a single time in history that has happened, except for brief interludes when revolutions have killed off the rich, and only until the newly powerful became rich. Since I don't think political violence has any place in democracy, I'm not liking that approach.
But, sure, yeah, just handwave away human nature and the lessons of history, and all sorts of Utopias could work. No argument there.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not necessarily free to get to the library. If you are rural poor it could easily be 20 miles away and the bus might not run such that you can get there and back in a single day or every day, and the cumulative cost of bus fares might exceed the cost of a data plan.
If you're going to assume nothing will be effective because corruption, we should skip the soap ballot and jury boxes and break out the ammo boxes now. Why wait if no government or other social action can be effective?
After all, if no amount of voting for the solution can cause the solution, it isn't a democracy anyway.
You are assuming that everyone is capable of acting rationally. Psychological experiments to test attitudes to money show that people lie on a spectrum of rational behaviour towards money but only a very small minority are totally rational and many assume they behave more rationally than they actually do. Those who have problems with regard to money may not be equipped to learn to behave as rationally as you think they should, either because they cannot delay gratification, don't understand compound interest, or maybe have discalculia.
The difficult moral choice is what assistance you should give to those that cannot manage their finances, or whether you should give none. I don't know the answer to that one but I do recognise the underlying complexity of the issue.
Well lets see. Since this replaces all other benefits... Medical insurance. Well, there goes the whole wad there. Insurance industry wins again. Food: Nothing left Housing: Nothing left Communications: Nothing left So the question is; if you're unemployed you are very screwed, same as before. Except before they had benefits so they didn't have to starve or sell everything they own, give up their children for medical experiments. :)
Not sure how this is going to work if the individual is initially unemployed and maybe gets ill...
If you are at home and your neighbour doesn't run an open network (which likely breaks the T&Cs of their connection) you need to go somewhere to find the free WiFi which will potentially include actual costs (bus fares) and/or opportunity costs related to the time required. If you are a single mother then leaving home might be quite complicated. Thus a data plan may well be a cheaper option for some people.
If you cannot reply immediately you may find the job has gone to someone else. There is often stiff competition for even minimum wage jobs disregarding that someone might not be applying for minimum wage job.
You could feed the homeless to the hungry
In general poor people (and most poor people work) have to manage their money more carefully than most else they don't eat or make the rent. Not all have the skills to do it, of course, and a relatively minor issue can end up with them taking a high interest loan which ultimately exacerbates the problem, but if the alternative is eviction then such a loan might be the only alternative in the short term, but I think more widespread use of credit unions are likely to be a better solution but they don't seem to advertise widely.
Trucks are not allowed to be parked roadside. So they have to assume you have a breakdown, because you would not park illegally there, and of course they will come to your assistance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
this assumes you have a library, that it provides internet, and that it is free.
those are slowly disappearing too.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
-Europe is not "most of the world".
-50 years ago was 1966, by which time the majority of rebuilding had been complete for nearly a decade.
-the profits from the rebuilding were largely local and fueled local economies, not the US's
maybe your argument should include some facts.
(PS: even at that time, Europes pay and cost of living were comparable to the US's)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
youre just reinforcing his point
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
most people cant afford to spend 90% of their income on housing.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Actually yes, universal health care DOES change the amount that health care costs.
the US spends on average 4x as much for the same health care as other nations with UHC.
what medicare pays is very close to cost, which btw makes it the most efficient sector of the healthcare industry, whereas private insurance pays far above cost, because everyone is profit motivated.
and no you don't need to print money to make it happen.
rather, obviously, its paid for by the money that used to go to premiums/deductibles.
only because of greater efficiencies and economies of scale, where the average person currently pays 15-20% of their income for private healthcare premiums (not including deductibles, which can raise the total to 50% if you actually do get sick and seek treatment), under UHC those costs shrink to 7-10% of income, paid as taxes. taxes go up, yet the wallet of the average person is left holding an additional 7-10% more money in it, and healthcare goes from being a crapshoot of approvals and authorizations and coverage limits and limited access to "everyone is covered. period. done".
there is no downside to UHC.
none.
as for SS, its underfunded, particularly due to the income cap that means thath billionaires contribute as much as people earning ~120k/yr. without the cap it would be funded in perpetuity and benefits could increase.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
and part of the reason for Medicare's costs is that a)required to pay some profit (so not just limited to at cost as it is in many other UHC systems) and b) it has to operate within a space defined and controlled by for-profit industry. with those factors removed, medicare costs would much more resemble that of other nation's UHC. and the ironic thing, even so, medicare is the most efficient sector of the US healthcare system, paying much closer to cost than private insurance does.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It is something useful to say, those who have wealth generally like to pretend it's because they are superior with their increased wealth as the evidence. Because that sounds too obviously arrogant they frame it as the poor being irresponsible with their lack of relative wealth being the evidence. Pointing out everyone is equally irresponsible despite how much wealth they happen to have and that disparity of wealth as a consequence of personal superiority is an oddity rather than typical argues for a level field of judgement.
Another thing not counted are productivity gains from people not wanting to work not being in the workforce, standing in the way
I don't get how fewer people working boosts the GDP. Sure, it might help productivity, but a net gain (meaning more tax revenue)? I don't see it.
Let's simplify the example and say payroll tax and corporate tax are both 25%. Maybe it is small business. Anyway you and your lazy coworker make stuff that is worth X and your employer pays each of you Y in salary. Let's say there are no other costs. Your employer pays (X-2Y)*0.25 in tax. You both pay Y*0.25 in tax so in the IRS gets X*0.25 in tax. Now let's say your lazy coworker quits and you still make X, since he was doing like 1/4 of what you did and your productivity goes up 25% with him not around it is a wash. Now your employer pays (X-Y)*.25 in taxes and you pay Y*0.25 in taxes so the IRS still gets X*0.25 in revenue.Yay! But now your employer has extra Y*0.75 to spend and I am pretty sure it gets taxed somehow down the road again.
Since you only tax what people earn, not the UBI, there does not need to be any minimum wage, the UBI covers it.
You couldn't be more wrong. Federal service union worker income is a contractual multiple of minimum wage, That's the only reason minimum wage is ever taken seriously as a political topic - it's a pay raise for a very large union. No one buying influence actually cares about the poor people earning minimum wage, that's just theater. It's all about the wages for one big union. UBI will be twisted into a reason to raise the min wage even further, somehow.
Maybe politically there is a reason for someone to lobby for it. But the main purpose of minimum wage is satisfied by UBI and so there is no economical reason for it in a rational world. As you said, no way UBI could work in USA where people are insane and people in power are more so.
The dynamic is mostly the reverse these days. People like living in dense city centers. They want drunken nightlife within staggering distance. The jobs are going where the people are these days, as least for in-demand skilled work (and all the service jobs attached to those jobs). People are crazy.
Some young people of means like to do so. And they are welcome to get high paying job to pay for their lifestyle if they work for it. There is no "need" for it, but desire? Sure. I would like a private jet... Of course professionals will still tend to live in cities when young and in suburbs when they start families.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Whole heartedly agree, I couldn't live like that either.
I started my first job (post 5 years in the USAF), back in '82 when I was 23 yrs old. I lived paycheck to paycheck, but managed to save up $600, and invested it in a high dividend utility stock, and reinvested those dividends. I eventually sold the original 60 shares, but what I had left over is worth about $25k today, though that's taxable. I continued to add more money to other investments as well...constantly saving a little bit. I'd encourage everyone who has any "disposable" income to pay themselves first, buy putting a fixed amount into some type of long term investment...look at the 10 year returns over time on the S&P 500 for example. You don't need to know a lot about investing to do it.
Just another day in Paradise
We're nearly there IMO, but not there yet. We're just seeing the start of the demos rising to take the kratos. Trump ousted the billionaire-supported candidates on the right (which sort-of counts, for all he's one of the billionaires, he's not in that social crowd). Bernie failed on the left, though he had some play. Brexit was approved by the people of Britain. Right-wing parties are on the rise across Europe, as they're the only ones actually listening to the people, instead of calling them dumb racists. It's never pretty when the people rise up, but were on the cusp of it, and no reason to think it will take a violent shape here, beyond a few protests.
But that's the problem in front of us. Corruption festers where the government has disdain for the people, and the "intellectuals" have disdain for real-world concerns. But it's meta-stable at best, and getting harder and harder shoves. Until we get a reset on the corruption, we're not fixing anything piecemeal (hopefully we can do it without an assassinated president this time, though I do think Trump would have been).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You are quite the idiot, aren't you:
Do you see that? "It would replace part of Finland's social security net."
What you are confusing is your own imagination for facts. Perhaps you should stop treating Fox news as an authoritative source?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They lived in the world of 100 years ago where everyone else was not using Facebook and a smart phone and therefore those were not mandatory for interacting with society.
Not having a cell phone is a good way to get fired from a low end job and not having a facebook profile is a good way to get rejected during the background check for a good job.
Responding to my own with this....
Albert Einstein - "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it...he who doesn't...pays it."
" Fuck that, we're damn near 20 trillion in debt with no real effort to do anything to even slow it down."
Do you know why? It has very little to do with social programs for the poor. The vast majority of our debt is domestic. The reason we have it is that money begins with the federal reserve, which is a private bank. Oh the treasury prints paper money, we used to be able to track what the fed did by their purchase of paper currency but the fed can generate bits on it's own all day and that paper money it purchases not at face value but at printing cost so a hundred dollar bill is purchased for a few cents. The fed loans that money to smaller banks who are required to have holdings of small fraction of what they can borrow and the interest is next to nothing. The rate is lower than inflation so the banks could just keep the money and make a profit. Our government then issues treasury bonds which pay a higher rate than the fed rate, banks then purchase those bonds which creates our national debt, to our own banks, with money that comes from devaluing the money already in your wallet. So all the interest on that national debt? Welfare paid directly to the wealthiest. It doesn't come from tax funds but ALL the interest paid on bank loans is welfare to the rich in the same system because we charitably gave them the money we borrowed back! Even better for them, that money goes into bank holdings so banks actually have effectively unlimited borrowing capacity and the fractional reserve thing is just a dog and pony show.
Now we do need a small interest rate at the top, it doesn't need to go to shareholders in a private bank but we need that rate to function as a valve which can slow new money generation and keep inflation in control (there should always be inflation with fiat currency which is what we have) but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be borrowing directly at that rate for national debt, infrasctructure, student loans, mortgages, sba loans, a basic income or insert anything else of obvious positive impact to our economy. Those things are obvious good investments and we don't need a private bank to determine that. Whatever impact that has on the rate at the top and the free flow of credit through the banking system so be it.
Did you think about the idea that 'giving them enough to stay afloat' will devalue the currency. Look at Venezuela, please.
Netflix? No. Something like Netflix? Yes. The something actually has to be as many different somethings as possible that a group of people can gather around, discuss, have in common (including among those who are not poor), and otherwise socialize with and relax in their free time.
50 years ago that would have been different than today. 100 years ago something else altogether. Today netflix is an extremely low cost option for that, it provides a great deal of variety for a very low rate. It's certainly cheaper than going out and trying to do anything in the world. So few people go out into the world and the companies that provide options there are used to revenue from when people did meaning that prices are through the roof.
If you want to keep the populace content you need to give them bread AND circuses. I know it feels like a lot to give to the slaves who mine the salt, after you, who initial to sign off on the shipment of tons of salt to pay the armies are obviously far more valuable and deserving of entertainment than a slave who mines a couple pounds a day but if you don't give them something to keep them distracted you will find you need that army pretty quickly.
Social security and medicare are not welfare. The primary reason there is debt associated with these things is because the federal government raids the programs to pay for other things like defense.
" It's even hidden in the cost of the road system - the big trucks do the most damage to the roads, but we tolerate that - and don't force the truck companies to pay corresponding charges - because it reduces the cost of getting food to the poor."
I love how you pretend it is all about the poor. It has nothing to do with all the rest of the goods and services. It isn't as if pretty much every item in your home was transported on a truck at some point and every service you've utilized hasn't required goods transported on trucks. If businesses had to pay directly for all the road wear they cause (including that of the workers they require to operate commuting) I don't think it would be the poor you'd hear scream first.
Ah, so Finland is just mailing everyone a check for X then. Will be an interesting experiment.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People are quite dumb, on average.
Actually, people are quite average...on average.
Just another day in Paradise
Wait, you know me and my ex-wife?
Just another day in Paradise
Sure about that? People who don't know how to handle money are commonplace...
In fact, about 70 percent of people who win a lottery or get a big windfall actually end up broke in a few years, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Just another day in Paradise
OK, you are just trolling now. Goodbye.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'm reading lots of kneejerk comments here, which is to be expected on /. But, let's talk about what's working...not much right now. So, it doesn't hurt anything to let these kind of experiments go on, and produce data for us to analyze, and learn if UBI is feasible. As a fiscal conservative, I have my doubts. But, I read an interesting article on fivethirtyeight.com about this not long ago, and it opened my eyes to the possibility that it could work. As computers take away more jobs from humans, we're going to go through a paradigm shift in the workforce, and something needs to be done. So, get off of your soapboxes, and let's let the experiments show us what's right and wrong.
Just another day in Paradise
"To give money, you have to take it in the first place."
Of course you do and I've defined where we take it. "it should come out of the fed tap"
"And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something"
That isn't neccesarily true. In this case it means money MIGHT be slightly more expensive but only if net inflation actually increases which isn't a given. People having more money means less need of credit so demand for credit from banks might be reduced and there might not be net inflation at all. Even if money is more expensive that translates into greater risk not reduced opportunity.
That is all very general though. The current situation is that the fed rate is currently nearly zero and the fed is likely to hike it simply because it has sat there for so long it feels like we should with the economy seeming to be okay. If anything we running dangerously close to risk of deflation which would be even more catostraphic than out of control inflation.
"You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment."
We already do that now, the money is already being given away and it primarily goes to passive investors who sit at the top 1% by wealth mostly in the US. In the current system they serve a purpose putting pressure that results in increased productivity among the rest. This is simply starting to shift that concept to the global scale where the US population becomes the new 1% that exists to drive the productivity of the new labor forces in India and China. By the time those nations are approaching the point we are and there is nowhere else to shift to it is likely there won't be very many "employment" and "productivity" positions for humans to occupy.
As an automations engineer I assure you, the crazy sci-fi books that talk about an ideal future where humans don't need to work anymore because machines do everything. We are there, except it doesn't happen all at once, at a more and more rapid rate we are replacing humans and there are not more educated positions for them to move up to. In fact we are automating some of the highest paid and most educated positions. In some places labor is still cheaper or we haven't yet gotten to automating for those things the US could never compete with the massive labor pools in India and China. The US built the companies that are expanding to take advantage of that, the US developed the technology that is improving those places and bringing them up to even better standards than we have here. Why should the US not invest to make sure it's middle class owns and continues to own the companies increasing their profits and otherwise shifting interests away from the US?
"Or expect the poor person to get a bus pass."
I've lived all over the country. That is an effective way to travel in maybe 3 places. Especially for the poor who have to manage shifts be reachable and available on demand at three jobs.
"Or expect the poor person to attend more "$2 Tuesday" matinees."
Right because their friends are likely to be at those matinees during work hours on Tuesday, or are you suggesting they should only interact with others like themselves and with the same schedules? How is this superior to a smart phone with ulimited content via netflix? Getting and keeping any job is going to require them to have a cellphone and social media profile these days anyway.
Whatever the poor have it needs to be reasonably in common with what everyone else is doing.
"I agree that there should be a baseline existence that we don't let fellow citizens fall beneath, but where we draw that line is the difference between creating an idle, trouble prone permanent dependent underclass that bankrupts the country"
But you are completely good with creating an idle trouble prone permanent dependent upperclass that bankrupts the country as we do now right?
For the most part, BAD CHOICES.
This is for the most part (apart from a few outliers) absolutely true but even taking all that as a given, you still have poor people to deal with. The question then is how best to provide for them or incentivize them to participate productively in society.
No idea where you're getting this crazy 150%-200% from, but keep in mind the large amount of money saved from eliminating the massively bloated bureaucratic overhead would help to fund UBI a lot. Also keep in mind what many people have already forgotten: the Panama Papers. If we collected ALL of the taxes that are rightfully owed to the public, we would have way more than enough to fund UBI. What we really need to be doing is going after the mega rich and dirty corporations that are playing games with their money so as to avoid paying as much tax as possible.
The US pays for most of the world's medical research. We do have some waste, of course mostly around the ridiculous situation where N insurance companies each have their own claim forms, often with different definitions of technical terms. Estimates of this cost vary, but it seems to be around 25% of medical costs. You know, there's a place where the government could step in wholly within it's legitimate role of standardizing trade.
Medicare does much better, but they have a fraud cost which is about the same as their reduction in paperwork costs. That might be easier to deal with if everyone was on Medicare, though. The real problem with Medicare right now is: it doesn't cover enough, and most seniors need to pay for supplemental plans to get affordable care. However, if you add in the cost of those plans, I can totally believe we provide universal (really, single-payer) care to the elderly for similar costs, and everyone else is a lot cheaper than the elderly.
But keep in mind that Medicare is massively underfunded for the coming demographics shift as the Boomers retire - it's 2x the problem as the SS underfunding.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well, in a world where advertisement is banned, this could be true...
Like I said. Wishing money into existence is a pointless exercise where benefits don't live up to the expectations.
And I stand by my premise. It's a fragile power that comes crashing down every ten years or so.
Then let's just have a 100% tax rate on businesses. If like you say, they can just invest the profits away and it won't have any effect, and then corporate tax revenues will be zero. Somehow I don't think the world works like you claim.
Yes, you said it, but Wall Street suggests otherwise. Since I doubt we'll ever pry it from their hands, the next best is to provide it to the masses and declare the people of the United States to be too big to fail.
No idea where you're getting this crazy 150%-200% from
The federal budget is $13000 per person per year. Where would you set the UBI? Then add at least 25% for healthcare (more if you're providing for more than Medicare), and at least 10% for roads and courts and whatnot.
If we collected ALL of the taxes that are rightfully owed to the public, we would have way more than enough to fund UBI
Important rule for life: don't spent today what you think you're rightfully owed. Spend today what you're making today, and work on that other thing in parallel.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I didn't know that Japan was in Europe. I guess we learn something new every day.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Sorry, don't believe you.
When I was a little kid, my 90 year old grandfather would give me 50 cents and say "don't spend it all in one place". Any chance you're also 90 years old?
Or maybe you live in a seriously 3rd-world economy? 'Cuz you can't even get a bowl of pho from a street vendor in Vietnam for $0.25, much less a burger in a developed country. Just sayin'.
The first step at least in some countries isn't so much the income, it is curtailing the industries that actively target the poorest sector of individuals for profit through debt. At least in the US. The whole housing crisis was based on lending large amounts of money to people that could never afford to pay it back and large institutions making money off of the selling of bad debt. This is also done through college mills encouraging the poor to get federal student loans that don't go away even with bankruptcy for a meaningless degree. The latest is sub-prime car loans where they sell a car at well over cost with prohibitive interest rates, make money off the debt, repossess the car, sell it again, and again, and again... Never mind how the pharmaceutical and insurance companies literally create whole new classes of poor when a catastrophic health event occurs... Giving someone a couple hundred bucks a month in Universal Income isn't going to address any of those things. The predatory nature of many of these industries towards the poor with little or no consumer protection is a much larger issue than the relatively simple income/welfare problem. Even the way banks (and payday loans) handle daily transactions all geared around the poor not being able to make good on payments and loans in the US is at issue. Basically when so many groups are actively targeting you for your debt, it's pretty hard to get ahead I would think.
Pretty simple, and 100% wrong. Carry on though :)
What I'd like, here in the real world, is a system that discourages concentration of wealth and/or power across generations of the same families, without sabotaging fundamental freedoms
Welcome to socialism! It is tried and true, just not on a large enough scale to stop the trillions in economic warfare the US has subjected every single socialist country on earth to in order to keep capitalism viable in the public eye.
If you have a savings account for your kids college that they put their summer job paychecks in that you keep plundering to buy guns and drugs with, you don't get to consider that part of "your" revenue. You're stealing from your kids. That's what government plundering SS is like. it funds itself as long as the plutocrats keep their hands out.
You poor, reality deprived soul. One day you'll grow up and get to join us in adulthood :)
What a load of crap.
I was born in USSR and the linked article is pure propaganda.
just shifting notes alone is not enough , in the us constitution it states " only gold and silver is to be used as legal tender " they did this so that the buying power is not lost due to inflation ! productifity should also be rewarded , the way money is manipulated at present is not the best way to grow ! nor is exploiting others . it is not nessisary , so finding better ways of rewarding is worthwhile . J NASH got the NOBEL because he proved that dog eat dog is not the best economic system ! in a very real way people borrowing to much become slaves , however most people in capitalist countries are not tought in school how to live under the system . do what they see on ads , and have problems , ie get thrown out of a house . finding a better way of doing things is worthwhile .
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL