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eBay Founder Pledges $500,000 To Test Universal Basic Income Program In Kenya (mashable.com)
"Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar is the latest tech bigwig to get behind the concept [of universal basic income]," reports Mashable. "His philanthropic investment firm, the Omidyar Network, announced Wednesday that it will give nearly half a million dollars to a group testing the policy in Kenya." The money will come from the Omidyar Network and be doled out to people living in Kenya through a program called GiveDirectly. Mashable reports: Universal basic income is the notion that a government should guarantee every citizen a yearly sum of money, no strings attached. The thinking is that such a program would relieve economic stress as automation technology severely reduces the demand for labor. Theories along these lines have existed for centuries, but their proponents have never had much luck convincing governments to give them a shot. Thus, the only data on real-world effects come from a few scattered experiments throughout the years. GiveDirectly is looking to add to that knowledge with one of the biggest trials of a basic income system in history. The group recently launched a 12-year pilot program in which it plans to give 6,000 Kenyans regular stipends for the entire duration. Around 20,000 more will receive at least some form of cash transfer. The Omidyar Network is hoping the study will help advance the debate around basic income from broad theoretical terms to more practical considerations. "While the discussion has generated a lot of heat, it hasn't produced very much light," wrote the Omidyar Network's Mike Kubzansky and Tracy Williams in a blog post announcing the pledge. "There is very little research and empirical evidence on how and when UBI could best be used."
This idiot should be funding birth control in Kenya
Nobody really wants other people to have to work. What they want is to not have to work themselves. If the most efficient way of getting what they want without having to work for it themselves is making other people work, then that's what they'll want. But if they can more easily have robots provide them with everything, and not have to pay some ugly bags of mostly water to do it instead, all the best from their perspective. The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
So work as a justification for dessert becomes a convenient narrative, an easy excuse to say why they don't have to give anyone anything: you didn't work hard enough to deserve it. Never mind that as automation displaces human labor there increasingly comes a point where there's no such thing as "hard enough" because humans are simply incapable of providing the same value as robots; work remains the justification for why the haves get to keep having it all and don't have to share at all with the have-nots.
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
No, if there is more money the money loses it's value.
If it's merely distributed differently, it retains the same value.
If you printed new money to fund the basic income, that would cause rampant inflation.
If you take the money from the rich to give it to the poor, all you do is boost economic activity (as the poor immediately spend all that money).
Oh and you know, also decrease human suffering. That too.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Because automation is a real threat to the economy in Africa...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Nope. You have to feed and shelter slaves. Try that on a single low-level income in the US.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They want to force us to accept a lessor amount in UBI than we would get from working.
I'm not clear what exactly you mean by this. Under any sane UBI, you always get more from working than you do from not working. Whether the UBI is a too-little-to-live-on $500/mo or a luxurious $2000/mo, taking that plus even a half-time minimum wage job is still better than taking just the UBI. (The $500/mo would require a tax of about 12% to fund, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $552/mo atop the UBI after that tax; the $2000/mo scenario would require about a 48% tax, so that half-time minimum-wage job would still give you an additional $326/mo atop the UBI after that tax).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Because cost?
They're trying to fund 6000 people for 12 years. That's 864k months. If you tried to give everyone a thousand bucks a month, this project would need a billion to be funded.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That logic makes no sense. That is like saying if you make $2000 a month at your job you have no reason to work a side job on the weekends because it only pays $500. It's still $500 more than you had before. Every dollar has the same value it did, unless you are printing money to pay for your basic income. Almost everyone owns a television, does that mean televisions are no longer worth anything?
How did you jump from not wanting to have to work to not deserving to live? I think that is a horrible revelation of your mind and nothing else. (See what I did there?)
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.
Kenya doesn't need any help in literally fucking itself to death. The population has quintupled since 1960.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
The whole point of all technology is to lessen the need for human work, because if you need human work then you need other people and if you need them they've got leverage to demand things from you.
That's an incredibly cynical point of view. It's also completely and frankly rather obviously bullshit. The increase of technology and the rise of human civilization has done nothing but vastly increase the dependency each human has on each other. It used to be every couple fed themselves and their children. Then humans banded into tribes and the hunter/gatherers did the feeding, and the others took care of the children/old/weak. Then we made cities, and one farmer fed three or four. Now we have combine harvesters, and one farmer feeds a hundred. There is maybe a few dozen humans alive today in the US who are truly self-sufficient, who do and could continue to survive with the help of no others, while even a few hundred years ago half or more of the human population could do so (at least for a few years). Technology has made specialization a requirement, and with that has come a level of interdependence unrivaled in human history, and that interdependence is if anything getting stronger (now entire countries rely on other countries, in a hundred years that could become entire planets).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Unless done in a pants-on-head retarded way, an UBI always preserves the benefit of working. You always get more from working than you do from not working. The net effect it has is to bring all incomes (after the UBI and the tax that funds it) closer to the mean income. Hardly anyone is going to want to just barely survive for free if they've got the means and opportunity to (much more easily thanks to the UBI head start) live a luxurious life with all their favorite toys and joys in exchange for a little work. It creates a center-ward pressure on incomes, giving people with the lowest incomes a boost up closer to mean income, barely affecting people near that mean income, at the expense of making it harder for people extremely far above the mean income to continue moving even further above it.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Either way, the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves, and we've already seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.) Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods.
Where I think UBI is really going to sting (if implemented) is housing costs. San Francisco is a perfect example of how increasing the money supply in a given area doesn't actually solve homelessness, and instead just makes it that much harder and more costly to find a place to live, including for those that already have a place to live and have an actual job. The reason why is because if you suddenly give people more money, they'll start to outbid one another for the same real estate, and no amount of automation will solve that.
The same will also happen for less finite material goods, though it will be a little less obvious how this occurs. If everything really was automated and you eliminated labor from the equation from common goods (which UBI proponents assume will eventually happen,) then it will ultimately come down to who can pay the most for given raw materials (i.e. iron, gold, etc.)
Replacement parts are made by robots. From raw materials mined by robots, from mines owned by the same people who own the robots. And robots will put hackers out of a job sooner or later too, just like everyone else.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Reducing full time will help the underemployed
Reducing full time employment does NOT help the underemployed. That is the Lump of Labor Fallacy. There is not a fixed amount of labor to be divvied up. Real economies just don't work that way. When someone is employed, they spend their earnings on goods and services, thus creating demand for more labor.
When France reduced standard working hours to 35 hours per week, proponents of the change were sure it would reduce France's persistently high unemployment. That didn't happen. Economists were not surprised.
This is why I often say it would be incredibly useful to have a crazy radical left, as crazy (and thereby wrong) as the radical right we've got. To renormalize where "moderate" really is. Not saying that I want such a radical left to actually win, but to have them there as a threat and a contrast to more moderate left positions, in the way that the Black Panthers, though wrong in their position, were useful in helping Martin Luther King Jr. seem more reasonable to those who might have otherwise considered him radical, if not for the Panthers' contrast.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If you are being given enough to survive, why would you want to work a weekend job?
Because there's more to living than just surviving.
If you already make the median income of around $25k/yr, which must surely be enough to survive, why would you ever take any steps to try to earn any more than that? Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
Where do you think the money will come from to implement UBI?
Where does any money the government ever spends come from? Taxes. Around the mean income the tax and the UBI cancel out, so average people see no different. But at every other income level, the post-tax-and-UBI incomes shift closer to that mean income level, by the same percentage but a greater total dollar value the greater the distance from the mean income you start from. So people making way below the mean income get a big hand up. People making way above it pay for that hand up. People making a little below it get a little hand up, and people a little above it pay for that. People around the average couldn't care less because it barely affects them.
And everyone's still better off working than not working, both the rich and the poor and everyone in between.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now* ...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of processing information were replaced by computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't have the statistics on that handy, but it was somewhere around half of middle class jobs - what a single computer does today used to take a room full of people.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of fear and debate about the issues you mentioned. You mentioned the book Manna - another book titled Manna was written in 1984, also a dystopian view of the industrial revolution. Because the change happened in the 1960s-1980s, today we get to actually see what the results were, we don't have to predict. What happened is that as people no longer needed to work on farms, food costs fell and they instead worked making Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters, and they spend their money on Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters. Most likely, you are employed in a job that didn't exist in 1960, or at least didn't exist in the same form. My job didn't exist in 1960. My grandfather was a bookkeeper - his position has been replaced by a computer. That computer needs to be secured, which created a new position for me making three times as much money as my grandfather made (inflation adjusted).
You're predicting the past. Spoiler because I've already seen it - it turns out pretty good.
Nobody's talking about increasing the money supply, they're talking about shuffling it around. And as the money is representative of material goods, that's equivalent to shuffling the material goods around too, which is the entire point of the exercise.
It's still increasing the money supply just the same.
Think about it: If you were strapped for cash, would you be more inclined to move to a more expensive house? Of course not, you'd be more inclined to either stay where you are, or find a less expensive house. Now, suppose we decide to take a billion dollars away from Bill Gates and distribute it to one thousand people in San Francisco, giving them an additional $100,000 over what they might already have in their possession. Bill Gates isn't likely to sell any of the properties he owns as a result of that, however now we have a lot more people in SF that might decide they want to upgrade their living conditions. The price of housing has now gone up because a lot more potential consumers now have more money.
Now imagine doing this with everybody in SF. And indeed, this isn't just going to happen with houses; this will also happen with more everyday things like the price of food. The fact is, you're more likely to buy more stuff when you have more money, and when the demand for goods increases, the price tends to go up with it. Meanwhile, the few wealthier people that you're taking this money away from probably aren't going to be consuming less, so it isn't balancing out somewhere else. This is primarily because wealthy people tend to sit on a lot of cash, and when somebody sits on cash, that cash isn't circulating and isn't being spent.
A perfect analogy is how the value of gold dropped when the conquistadors brought it over to Europe.
Turning have-nots into haves is by no means the goal of UBI. Cannot even sensibly be achieved by a program that aims at providing a basic general income because that basic income can by its very definition not be higher than what is absolutely necessary to enable someone to survive. That's the fundamental flaw in your train of thought. You think about accumulation of wealth when essentially, all that will enable is consumption.
Your assumption seems to be that everyone just gets, say, 1000 bucks and that everything else will stay the same. This is most likely not going to be the case, and it would not make sense if it did. Instead, what will most likely happen, is that companies will get away with offering WAY less money as compensation for work. Work would probably be for the lower income bracket something they do if they plan to make some kind of purchase, a new TV, a bed, a fridge. Today, they can maybe put 50 or 100 bucks aside for this per month. So if an employer offered 200 for a month of work, this would be enough. It's more than they can put aside now, and it's way, way less than the employer would have to pay a worker now.
People will probably also have a very different attitude towards working. It will for some probably be something they do when they want to afford something special, and only for the time necessary to get that.
As for the argument for "finite material goods": Please. Our current main problem is certainly not a shortage of goods or services. Our problem is that nobody has the money to buy that shit. If anything, UBI would solve that problem rather than compound it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What happens to the spent money? Does it end up in some garbage dump? Some sort of used money disposal facility?
Just handing money to people is the best form of charity because they spend it and then some of it winds up in their community, paying wages. And if you have UBI then you not only don't need welfare or food stamps or social security but you also don't need a minimum wage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This may come as a shock to you, but not everyone wants to live in San Francisco.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's only a problem for people who already live there and don't want things to change. Sadly, things will always change, you can't avoid it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Trying it in kenya seems strange.
But, the idea of universal income is that you can do away with all the other social security mechanisms and give people enough that they can survive. This means that then you CAN take extra jobs for a little less money.
Basically in Finland now you CAN NOT take a job that pays under a certain amount in the month because then you will be out of other benefits and you can't survive! but if you would have universal income then you COULD do another job for even 5 bucks / hour, making a lot more jobs viable.
the thing in finland is that the government is obliged ALREADY to provide basic social security to everyone through one way or another but the burocracy for that is very heavy. If you would roll up all the benefits into one, including housing benefits, and just give that to everyone it would be cheaper, easier and enable you to work at the same time.
also it would put pressure to provide housing in which you could live with that.
it would be feasible to take jobs like mowing your neighbors lawn for couple of bucks - right now it really isn't if you're unemployed as you would get kicked out of unemployment status(potentially, or get a quarantine).
Basically it enables a lot of smaller jobs to be done vs. just putting everyone in the social security/unemployment benefits which deny the possibility to take low paying jobs for couple of days every now and then.
as such it would enable manufacturing and service jobs that are not feasible right now, but more importantly you could just fire most of the burocrats out of a cannon into the moon.
why isn't this already being done fullscale in Finland? well duh the buros don't want to lose their jobs too(also in some cities the waiting time to get a social security hearing is longer than even legally allowed.. ).
it would be rather simple to implement too. just make the progressive taxing that finland has just a little bit more progressive, so that people earning (pre tax) 2700e / month or so would be sitting at the same income level of money to the hand (universal basic income would be given to _everyone_ - even those who have good jobs and don't need it. thats what makes it UNIVERSAL and makes it unnecessary to have the burocracy around it).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What, you contend there's an actual radical left that emerged these past four years?
Say, a big block of people who advocate the absolution of all property (even your toothbrush isn't yours), or a total command economy (the state says who you must work for and how much you must accept for it)?
That's a radical left. And they're wrong; I don't want those people to win.
But their existence would highlight how what you're probably thinking of as a "radical" left -- like people who want a higher minimum wage, or subsidized health care, or ordinary things like that that aren't even a question in most modern Western countries -- are really, really moderate, and actually slightly right-wing even without the really radical left to compare them to by the standards of most of the civilized world.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Without being too cynical (although one has to be given the long history of mankind):
- For the vast majority of people and during the majority of human history, work is a burden, not a pleasure
- People tend to love the output production of work more than work itself
- Humans working for other humans is a way of enjoying the output without the burden of working by yourself, if you are potent enough to afford that
- Everyone want to be at that position where you get the benefit without doing much for it, that's why human workers keep asking for higher wages
- Automation is a way to enjoy an increased output compared to human work, without the burden of having to share part of it with human workers
- Every automation that removes some humans lessen the part that you have to share with other humans, and is thus highly beneficial
Like the OP said, when technology has arrived to the point where there is no need for human work anymore, then 99% are just useless parasites and can safely be eliminated. The remaining society will resemble the utopia in The Dancers at the End of Time by M. Moorcock, which is good if you ask me. Now the problem is, you and I will probably not be part of it, unless your assets put you in the top 1%ers.
Thing also is, it wont be an on/off switch. Changes are gradual and the more technology progress, the more people tend to have zero value on the work market. In 5 to 10 years, the large majority of people working in transportation will be useless. In 10 to 20 years, the majority of people processing information (secretary, accountant, ...) will be useless. Depending on the field, people working in commercial fields will be useless in a shorter or longer time frame, starting with asset managers who are easier to replace. The question is not whether it exists some work that cannot be automated, be rather when you job will be automated. And believe me, it will be you our lifetime.
You have a ticking clock above your head and must enter the top 1%er before its final tick. If you don't, you will see what it was like 200 years ago and like you said, you don't have the knowledge to be self sufficient.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Only the poor will notice a net benefit. The rest will have to pay into the scheme.
In other words, you take money from the rich and give it to the poor.
That is exactly what UBI is. It is redistribution of wealth. In a world where the rich are getting richer, and goods and services will (supposedly) get cheaper and cheaper to produce because of robots and AI, yet require less and less labor, them some sort of redistribution will likely be needed to maintain social harmony.
India is probably most serious about UBI. They already have a huge welfare system that is badly corrupted, so they would benefit from just wiping it out and replacing it with something simpler.
UBI would be much harder to implement in America. There is little political support for redistribution, and there would be enormous resistance from people currently receiving entitlements that would be drastically reduced under any plausible UBI system.
1. Lowering birth rates doesn't make anyone of those who are already born less poor.
2. Kenya's birthrate is still significantly above average, but steadily decreasing since the nineteen-seventies.
3. Higher civilization standards correlate with lower birth rates. To increase civilization standards is the best way to lower birth rates.
3. Enabling more people to do other things than just struggling to get their food for the day is the best way, in the long run, to help increasing civilization standards, together with education and infrastructure, to which to contribute is one of the things more people will be enabled to through a basic income, too.
"Birth control instead of money" is just racist hogwash. "More money leads to more births, so give them even less money" may seem logical for some, but is a completely unsubstantiated assumption. In the long run, the facts give much reason to assume the exact opposite.
Well no, not at least in the models currently being tested/speculated about. It depends on how the BI is arranged. I wrote about the BI experiment going on here in Finland in an earlier story here, quoting the relevant part:
Because in most models of BI the income is essentially created as a negative tax-bracket it means that not everyone will get a blank increase of X dollars which would lower wages. For me example under such a model my tax-rate would go down 5 %. meaning my pay could be cut by that amount without it affecting my level of income at all. Cutting any more than that would start to reduce the net income I get.
No, it wouldn't. If I was offered 200 instead of my current pay, my net income would drop 63 % under this model. People are not going to go "oh cool, you want me to keep doing what I've always been doing and get less than half the money I used to because they tweaked the taxation system slightly, I'm fine with this."
Besides, doing this would destroy the consumer base entirely. If the net incomes of the vast majority of people drop by over half, domestic consumption would come crashing down, in turn causing major issues for companies,
BIs are at their core tax-reforms which are meant to ensure people can accept part time and short-term jobs more flexibly without having to worry about the problems that causes for their benefits and the hassle of re-applying for them and in the process losing any source of income for the time that their application is reprocessed. The current bI models being discussed in western economies are not such that they could be used for massive pay-cuts. The models assume that pays stay the same, as the BI itself requires heavy taxation of income to be funded. Cut pays across the board and the tax-revenue will collapse, making the system immediately unsustainable.
In the long term, if and when automation proceeds to a stage in which nearly everyone is on BI, then the situation is different and the amount of BI will have to be increased to maintain domestic demand, but in that scenario, since nearly no-one will be generating income tax-revenue, the money for the higher BI will need to come from somewhere, which means corporate taxes and capital gains taxes will have to be tweaked to fund the higher BI.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The point is that it should be enough to live with dignity, i.e. a roof over your head and enough food to eat, but if you want to take vacations or not share an apartment with two other roo,mates then you have to work to get extra money. That is why it is called basic income, it provides for the basic necessities but not much more.
I don't know why we can't blend UBI with some kind of large-scale project that would roll in some kind of jobs tied to a larger purpose or project, sort of like the Civilian Conservation Corps or the WPA organizations.
Maybe it's a bad example, but couldn't something like the space program be greatly expanded with the idea that low level labor positions could be UBI-program jobs? It would be more than just providing an income, it would be a productive long-range project.
And a lot of the people who would potentially qualify for UBI wouldn't be just the stereotype of the uneducated urban ghetto dweller, they would be people who have educations and a desire to work but face an economy not offering livable jobs.
So you wouldn't just be stuck with a work force capable of only the most basic and unreliable labor, you would have people who presumably have some level of initiative and interest who could potentially obtain even more skills.
And society would end up with some kind of useful work product -- and I just used the space program as an example, maybe there's other kinds of initiatives that could benefit.
Because you want to fucking live better, that's why! People will always want more.
For some people, better = sitting on the couch.
Yes, but those people are already not exactly going to be doctors, engineers or billionaire entrepreneurs, so what does it matter unless you have some philosophical/ethical objection to laziness?
I'm sure you could survive now by working 15 hours a week at minimum wage, never going out and eating cold baked beans out of a can in some shitty little room every night, most people want a bit more out of life than that, and that doesn't mean buying Ferraris.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As someone who's mother is also on welfare, please provide instructions for how she can leverage that into getting a nice car instead of just barely surviving.
There are several ways to do it. A common method is to use a fake address, but actually live in a household with a combined income above the threshold. Then if you want to work, do it under the table for cash, or have the paycheck made out to someone else. Another method, is when granny dies, just bury her out in the backyard, and continue to cash her checks.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Appalachia, so I learned a lot about welfare cheating from my relatives.
I think OP meant "how can my non-criminal mother on welfare get a nice car". Otherwise, you might just as well say "become a crystal meth dealer".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
San Francisco is a bad example. The municipality constantly denies new housing permits. The only reason your logic works is because in this case the number of available housing stays the same, when it shouldn't.
We can do it without taking more money from the rich than now, though.
In total, welfare services cost 55% of all income tax taken. That 39.6% the richest of rich pay? 21.78% of that is welfare. Do note that the welfare services procedurally account for their sources differently; if we pile all of the money together and take a count of what pays for those services, it amounts to 55% of all taxes taken as income taxes. That means if we change the accounting--if we get rid of those other procedural sources and source from income--then we can cut off 55% of the income taxes and do our manipulation from there.
In the end, the amount of money moving down in a Universal Social Security system (a particular type of UBI) is $1 trillion lower than the amount of money moving down today, yet more-effective at achieving the welfare goals of all current welfare services.
Do note that, as you observe, we are still taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Current system may take $18,000 from you and give it to poor people; USS may take $13,000 from you instead. The mechanism is fiddly, too: my Universal Social Security is designed to pay bi-weekly or semi-monthly--on the IRS terms for collection--and tends to take $20,000 from you and give back $7,000, so you end up with a net-tax-burden of $13,000. It's designed that way to tie it mathematically to productivity and per-capita purchasing power, meaning it never needs fiddling once set--it's agnostic to inflation and automatically adjusts fairly for standard-of-living.
Taking $13,000 rather than $18,000 is still taking. It's less, but it's still a thing.
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Good luck wiping out the corruption.
Corruption is not something that "just happens". Corrupt systems are usually designed to be corruptible. In America, when I go to the city to pay my business license, I do it at a counter in full view of other customers. When I did the same in Shanghai, I was always escorted to a private office, where various "facilitation fees" were discussed.
Those most corrupt tend to be the ones in power who stand to lose the most by wiping out said corruption.
This is not always true. In America, most corruption is at the top, with the revolving door system between government and corporations, and lobbyists funding campaigns. But in many other countries, including India, local corruption is a much bigger problem. India's current welfare system is mostly "in kind", so instead of getting money to buy rice, the government actually gives you a bag of rice. That requires a complicated system to buy, store, and distribute the supplies, with "leakage" at every step. If that is wiped out, and replaced with a single transfer of money to a debit card with a clear audit trail, it will be a far less corruptible system.
The only key to boost economy is to LOWER TAXES, not give handouts.
Lowering taxes has never boosted the economy by a measurable amount.
High taxes = less money in the hands of people, regardless of who they are, and as a result they buy less goods and do fewer investments.
Actually, that's wrong. What do think happens to money collected as taxes? The government spends it on people. They either give it to people or pay other people to do things for the government. So, usually high taxes (assuming a graduated system) means more money in the hands of a lot of people and less money in the hands of a few people. Generally, this results in a net gain for the economy because people with less wealth almost always spend more of their income than people with more wealth.
People buying more stuff = more jobs, more goods, happier society.
Generally true, but the approach you want to take is counter productive and results in fewer people buying stuff, fewer jobs, fewer goods, and an unhappy society.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is absolutely useless.
Actually, it's sound fiscally policy which is why every developed country in the world does it.
hey'll blow through all that money in a day, get alcohol poisoning and taxpayers will have to pay for their therapy.
If that were true, that money is then going to the liquor store clerk or bartenders, the brewers, the delivery truck driver, the hospital, the janitors, the doctors and the nurses. Plus lots of other people in a web of economic activity so vast I can't list all of the beneficiaries.
Fanatically anti-fanatical