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Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca)
Reader epiphani writes: The Ontario Government will pilot universal basic income in a $50M program supporting 4,000 households over a 3 year period. While Slashdot has vigorously debated universal basic income in the past, and even Elon Musk has predicted it's necessity, experts continue to debate and gather data on the approach in the face of increasing automation. Ontario's plan will study three communities over three years, with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.
Automation has been going on since the industrial revolution, yet new jobs seem to keep on being created. My current job didn't really exist twenty years ago.
People keep predicting the obsolescence of humans but unemployment these days in most rich world economies is not that high. That said, it would be good if we had better ways of measuring employment beyond the binary employed/unemployed states. If someone's not claiming unemployment benefit and working then it's assumed that they're doing okay, but they might be working three minimum wage jobs and barely getting by. That should be as worrying to policy-makers as someone not working at all. Then we might be in a better position to see if we're at the point where we need a universal basic income.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I am pretty sure that penalizing people for becoming a "family" will have consequences.
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
start by lowering full time hours / making OT cost alot.
Why should jay have to work 60-80+ hours a week doing the work of 3 people for the pay of 1?
When we can fill that job with 3 people working about 30 hours each?
"with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families."
Q: So why are you filing for divorce?
A: Irreconcilable financial differences.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I've seen more vigorous debates amongst kids on tee-ball teams. Hoping for a vigorous debate on an issue like UBI in the conservative echo chamber that this place has become is as logical as picking up a crow feather on the street and hoping to use it to fly to the moon. There are so few commenters left here - and so little variation in thought and opinion - that I'm not sure we can even have a meaningful debate on emacs vs vi any more.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think that countries, states, or whatever geographic boundaries you prefer deciding to do something about massive unemployment/underemployment before chaos ensues is a good plan. Society falls apart around 20% unemployment and we're headed towards way more than that. I know some people are predicting that another massive shift will happen that allows people to continue to be employed, but I don't see it. The first time we didn't have something readily available to take up the slack that automation produced was the early 90s. During that time in the US, all the big companies went on a massive downsizing spree, dumping all the low-skilled clerical workers onto unemployment. We managed to get through this change, but now the pace of technology change that allows for fewer human workers is getting much faster. Now it's not just low-skill work, but mid-level knowledge work as well. After being told they'd never amount to anything unless they went to college, millions of corporate employees are going to be out on the street with no way to make money.
I think implementing basic income buys us time to let the age groups who've had to build their lives around wealth accumulation and a career ladder age out. The work-for-money-for-stuff way to run your life has been around for ages and I don't think most people know of any way to meaningfully contribute to society outside of that. Unless you want to propose how we kill money and wealth as a measure of success and buying power, this is the best way to solve a very difficult problem. If we don't do it, the divide between rich and poor is going to get to an unsustainable level, possibly at levels seen around the Gilded Age or French Revolution timeframes. That won't end well for anyone.
None of these studies really seem to study true universal basic income, in which everybody, rich or poor, regardless of how much money they make, receives the same basic amount.
All the current trials going on seem to be focused on giving money to people who have no jobs or make very little. We already have program in place that do this kind of thing already, so they probably won't find a whole lot of difference with the systems that we already have. They are basically making small changes to the welfare system in order to not cut off benefits as soon as you find a job. But other than that, there isn't much difference.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Therefore the data collected and the conclusions drawn from this scheme (and all the other UBI pilots that have come and gone) is incomplete. We need to gauge the effect it will have on populations not for a few years, but how will it affect generations? Will a child growing up in a UBI household have a different attitude towards the need to get a job or attend school? Is there even any point in getting an education if you know that the state will provide everything - and that there probably won't be any jobs for you anyway?
A three year experiment won't tell you about the long-term consequences.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Your problems are twofold.
1. You think libertarian is a synonym for conservative,
2. You believe that now that leftist voices don't drown out all others, that Slashdot is now a "conservative echo chamber." This is the response of people who are not used to having their ideas challenged.
Slashdot has always leaned left. Now it's centrist. And that bothers you. Ars Technica is leaning further left these days, so go hang there. They have a user moderation system that's dumber than Slashdot's, but at least you won't get the banhammer for irking any of the hired moderators on the articles anymore.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That's not a good thing. In fact, it's a form of theft that's much more dishonest than taxation. Taxes and budgets get voted on. Printing money is something that happens in smoke-filled back rooms by People Who Know Best. Disgusting. Wars have been fought over that sort of thing.
You have to read down just a bit, and then you see:
"Jaczek said that people in the program will be randomly contacted from each region's low-income population and invited to apply."
Basic income, in any iteration I've seen seriously applied, isn't just for poor people. Money for poor people is fucking welfare. We have that already. Welfare is the "provision of a minimal level of well-being and social support for citizens WITHOUT CURRENT MEANS to support basic needs" (capsemphasis mine).
The idea of basic income is that everyone gets it baseline, no drama, no forms, no qualifications, with the obvious caveat that this money has to come from somewhere, so one assumes a relatively large increase in income tax. The supposed benefits and risks of this are numerous, but what is definitely known is that to actually test this, you need to not JUST be giving the money to poor people. The big question about basic income is, what effects will it have on society. You can make economic models all day long, the whole point about doing a test is to figure this out.
You want to know: are people less motivated to work? Are they healthier? Are they happier? What does it do to families? (the model being tested, where two single people living together get 2*17,000 = 34,000 a year, while if they marry they get 24,000 a year, has a pretty obvious and glaring bias as regards marriage)... and these questions aren't just relevant for poor people. They are relevant for middle class, and rich people.
All of these tests seem to be set up to give a certain set of results. They are carefully crafted to avoid asking the questions that need to be asked. I really don't know what to think about this.
It's really hard to tell if UBI is a great idea, or a horrible one, but the biggest issue is that it's impossible to trial in this manner.
To actually test UBI, several things need to happen:
1) you make it truly universal, no means testing, no targeting to certain demographics, everyone gets it, from the millionaires, to the homeless.
2) you cover everyone in a reasonably large geographic area, no exceptions.
3) You also need to turn off all the other services it's supposed to replace (welfare, employment insurance, disability amounts, etc)
This is important because without 1 and 2 you end up with a distorted system. You don't get to see if everyone having extra money simply drives all prices up by that amount making it useless (if the poverty line moves up by the exact amount of the UBI, have you really helped anyone?), or if it actually allows people to live. You end up with simply a lottery where some lucky people have more money, while everyone else has the same.
While 3 also helps make sure you're looking at an undistorted system, it is also about being able to afford to do this at all. UBI can only be affordable if you use it to cut out massive amounts of government bureaucracy, if all the bureaucracy is left in place, you'll never find enough money to make it work.
These trials will be a success or a failure depending on what the agenda of the study really is, but neither outcome tells you anything at all about how the system would actually work if rolled out universally.
Just because people pay you for your services doesn't mean you create more than you consume. Perhaps you have some sort of serious illness, which means your health insurance provider may be paying you more than you are paying them. Perhaps you have enough write offs to heavily reduce your actual taxable income, meaning others are actually paying more tax than you.
But do you really pay enough money in taxes that it covers the building of the road past your house, pay for the wages and equipment of the firefighters who may have to put out your fire? There's an entire infrastructure out there that is paid for by the economic output of an entire society, and the idea that somehow anyone, even a billionaire, can claim responsibility for a significant fraction of it is absurd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If different people get different amounts based on disabilities or marital status then it's not universal.
If you get less depending on how much you make then it's not basic.
This is welfare. Try again, Canada.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Exactly. You have to either make it simple for people to come off of welfare or stop complaining about people on welfare. You can't both punish them for leaving it and being on it. Pick one.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
with participants receiving up to $17,000 annually if single, and $24,000 for families.
Discourage people from actually getting married by essentially paying them not to! Can't have those pesky independent families, with their ability to depend on each other rather than the state can we. Can't have people loyal to each other rather than our glorious government.
This is a seriously distressing policy.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You think libertarian is a synonym for conservative,
In many of the important ways, it is. Both want to let corporations to have the ultimate power over the people by destroying the parts of the government that interfere.
I would add - the comments section of typical left-leaning news sites have become absolutely fanatical if even one dissenting opinion is expressed. If you agree with 90% of a topic/idea and provide criticism of the other 10%, you are dismissed as a racist nazi and shunned from the group. Try it some time as an experiment, they swarm like flies to honey. With that type of environment you simply will never see disagreement, people have better things to do than shout at a wall. Since Slashdot has people with higher average IQ, and a marginally better moderation system, dissenting thought isn't punished and can be debated on it's merits (to a point).
There's also the simple fact that a percentage of people will naturally shift right as they get older. So, if slashdot's reader base has good retention without much "new blood" being injected into it, this change could manifest as a result.
I don't see minimum wage increasing jobs though. On the contrary, I think even economists that support an increase in minimum wage predict a small if negligible negative pressure on job numbers.
'Economists' are wrong very, very often (which is not in a small part because it's very hard to do conclusive research on economies). Their opinions aren't homogeneous either, so you can choose pretty much any point of view and support it by saying 'economists think so'..
The thing with income is that the first parts of it are spent very, very fast on essential goods and services. Supply side economics has clearly failed. It is time for demand side economics and UBI is the perfect tool for it.
Before anybody tries UBI, I'd like to see trapless welfare. I don't know how bad this is in Canada, but the USA has a lot of "welfare traps". That's a situation where people remain on public assistance rather than work because their real income falls when they start working. We do so many stupid things such as labeling people "low income" and making them wait a long time for "low income housing". Then their "low income status" actually becomes an asset!
Fix that first, then get back to us.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Apparently, being "at or just above the poverty line" is simply not enough for most people.
Or perhaps the words "three year experiment" are sufficient to suggest to people who would otherwise give up their jobs to live on the UBI that they ought to keep a job now to avoid having to find one again when the experiment is over and the free money stops coming in? Imagine if they are in a plight with a low paying job now, how much more trouble they will have finding a job in three years when other, younger people have snapped them up and businesses have downsized because the economy has shrunk.