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Support For a Universal Basic Income Is Inching Up In Europe (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Finland and the Netherlands are running modest pilots, and others are being considered by governments in France, Switzerland, and the UK, and by a host of nonprofits. To gauge public enthusiasm for the idea, Dalia Research, a Berlin-based market research firm, has been surveying Europeans' attitudes toward basic income since 2016. They've found a warm welcome. In a March survey, 68% of Europeans said they would vote yes in a basic-income referendum, up from 64% last year. The survey was put to 11,000 citizens in 28 European Union states and has a 1.1% margin of error. But not everyone is ready to see it implemented right away -- 48% said they wanted to test the policy first, while 31% advocated for adopting it as soon as possible. The 24% of respondents who opposed a UBI in both years were most concerned about the economic impact, including the expense, the risk of reducing the motivation to work, and the possibility foreigners would take exploit it. Those in favor of a UBI were most convinced by the promise of increased security and freedom, namely a reduced financial anxiety over meeting basic needs, more equality in opportunities, and the prospect of greater financial independence and self-reliance.
I suppose, it depends on how the question is phrased:
Would you like to be given money even if you do not work? Hell yah! Would you like to pay higher taxes so that some of it will be given to others even if they do not work? Hell no!In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We expect people to work here if they are able, and contribute to the country. People that don't work are generally looked down upon. If you think trying to implement universal health care is a cluster, just try UBI. Conservatives need people working and generating revenue so they can skim their % from the top to support their lifestyle.
Except nothing is free, and the rich are going to leave the country with their money.
Good luck! This sounds great on paper, but if you can't get the rich to play ball, it's doomed from the start.
We are talking about that here in Canada as well.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Are Europeans suffering rising wealth distribution inequity as much as the US? It seems possible to me that as more people fall into lower wealth percentiles, they become more likely to have a positive view of UBI. Is this a real attitude shift, or merely people feeling they are being left behind? Or, are those even two different things?
For the record, as a convicted felon trying to make a new start making $8/hr, I have a very positive view of UBI, but I'm not very sanguine about the economics of it.
Although you could put in a minimal volunteer requirement.
In particular, some studies have shown that sole income providers do not significantly reduce their work even after getting a basic income, although people do reduce hours for second jobs - whether they be 2nd jobs done after normal working hours or second jobs done by a mother whose husband provides the main income while she takes care of the child.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Let me first point out that I'm in favor of experimentation with UBI because I think that in a decade or two the coming wave of automation will make it both necessary and affordable. But I still find it bizarre that people would say they favor UBI in order to have "greater financial independence and self-reliance". What? In what way does UBI give you greater financial independence or self-reliance? Relying on government payouts, funded by taxes collected from others, is not independence except in the narrowest possible sense and it is pretty much the opposite of "self-reliance".
As I said, I think UBI will be necessary, and I think it's a much less invasive, condescending and economically distortive form of public safety net than more traditional means testing. But self-reliance it is most definitely not.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Reversing any welfare type action has been hard/impossible for countries. What is the exit path for this if it starts to fail? Greece?
Nothing is free. Someone has to pay for the basic income. Considering that the EU has a lot of debt and countries are operating with deficits, you don't have the money to distribute a basic income. Enjoy the debt that will come from implementing a basic income. This will drive rampant inflation while significantly adding to your debt. When your debt gets high, your interest rates will rise and it will become harder to borrow. You'll also have to spend more money servicing your debt rather than directing it to other pressing needs. And that is how too much debt causes a downward spiral. Ultimately, that will destroy the EU. Have fun.
Most European countries already have systems in place to make sure that people without income doesn't end up starving or homeless.
The cost is already there. The point of UBI is to reduce the administrative overhead.
Instead of figuring out who needs the extra support you give it to everyone wether they need it or not.
For those who didn't need it it will seem redundant that they are first taxed and then have the money given back to them, but in the end nothing much happened.
UBI isn't as radical as some people make it out to be.
Cardinal rule: If something is given away for free, it either has no value or YOU are the product.
Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
What I find seriously disconcerting is that only 48% wanted to pilot-test the nationwide gamechanging life-altering economy-revamping policy before implementing it!
Well... yes, of course everyone generally wants free money, right? Of course they're going to vote for it.
But someone please correct my thought experiment here to understand who will pay for it:
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
What am I missing? The role of corporations? The internet? What makes this different from just another kind of tax and welfare system, or somehow magically paid for because of today's economic dynamics? Scale it to a country's population size, and all we're doing is saying that the very wealthiest at the top can afford to pay this tax, and they're a very small portion of the population, right? (this tax is all the more affordable to the general population, the more the income inequality curve is distorted from a flat distribution - in fact in a flat distribution you cannot afford to pay a basic income)
Or am I missing something?
I mean, if it's not universal, than it's not a Universal Basic Income.
I could see doing it on a regional basis -- but you'd have to be kind of a hard-ass about it and be fairly committed to it.
Restrict it to only residents of the region at the time it started. Actually dismantle that region's regular welfare system, so you know exactly what cost savings you are gaining. I don't see either of those as being easy or palatable.
Which seems to be the major problem with a UBI -- you can model the shit out of it and say it makes sense, but until you do it -- and make it Universal -- you don't know.
And it still leaves a lot of uncomfortable questions -- what about immigrants? How long are they there until they're eligible? Diverse welfare payments are easier in that situation, because you can say "well, immigrants should get housing and job training, but not actual unemployment payments" or however you slice it.
FWIW, I think a negative income tax type of UBI makes sense, especially if it allows for marginal, low-wage employment without completely eliminating UBI payments (they should get zeroed out by taxes, but only once income rises above some level greater than UBI itself). I think providing people an incentive to work, even at low wage jobs (ie, more total income) makes sense, and would have a lot of positive impacts on working conditions. Low wage employers wouldn't be able to treat workers like slaves because homelessness and starvation wouldn't be the alternatives.
The pilots are stupid, basically they are giving unemployed or lowly paid people free money, and then ask if they like that. Yes, they do (surprise). Actually, most people want free money. The problem is that the free money has to come from somewhere, and then it turns out (surprise) that the middle class has to pay the bulk. That's basically a game over.
and big data media control...
Here comes another planted piece...
Socialism for teh world!
Don't look at Venezuela behind the curtain! That wasn't REAL socialism!
When you spend all your money being the world's cop, there's nothing left over. Make all these countries pay for their own militaries and their 'UBI well' will run dry in a week.
And while this might look like "OMG socialism run for the hills" this the lowest cost option for providing an agile work force so it is also a good step toward corporatism.
Where that free lunch would come from, given that most of European states (with notable exception of Germany) cannot even provide a decent pensions for their elderly? Perhaps, they should have been reminded that voting for free lunches for everyone does not magically makes it happen.
One one hand you have unemployment, which depending on your situation is 1,000 - 1,600 euro per month.
If you don't qualify for unemployment, you can still get a "living wage", which is 870 euro if you're single (570 if single and living together) and 1,150 euro if you have kids.
....greater financial independence and self-reliance.
Dependent on a government check every month? How is that more self-reliant?
It's a good step in the right direction.
Need to get a maximum wage implemented as well.
The poverty threshold, poverty limit or poverty line is the minimum level of income deemed adequate to cover total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. In the US, this is presented as an income level based on household size (number of dependents). For a single person household, the poverty line is $12,060 (2017).
Perhaps worth noting is that a single person household working a full-time minimum-wage job exceeds the poverty line (50 weeks time 40 hours times $7.25 is $14,500), so by definition a full-time minimum wage worker is not living in poverty. But if that same person has a child, then both are living in poverty, as the poverty line for a two-person household is $16,240. In a very real albeit statistical sense, children cause poverty.
An assumption of a UBI is that it provides sufficient income to survive on, so let's use the poverty line as the basis for the UBI. That is, a single person household would receive a UBI of $12,060; A two-person household would receive a UBI of $16,240; and so on. Note that even this basic assumption leads to perverse outcomes (e.g. two adults living separately would get $12,060 each, but if they live together they "lose" $7,880 in UBI), so at least some will avoid getting married, or even living together (or lie about living together, thereby defrauding the system) just to maximize their free money.
Using census data, there are 124.5 million households. The average household size is 2.54 people. Let's interpolate the poverty table to get an average expected UBI of about $18,497. Multiplying that out we can get the tab for providing UBI based on these assumptions, a total of about $2.303 trillion.
Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the amount of money we currently spend on all social welfare benefits programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, foodstamps, etc. A reasonable idea--indeed, this was put forward in a WSJ essay by Charles Murray--would be to eliminate all those programs in favor of the UBI. Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Exploring the notion of replacing the most basic welfare programs, e.g. foodstamps, section 8 housing, while not disrupting the SS and Medicare that the elderly view as an earned right. After all, the UBI based on poverty level should by definition cover those sorts of expenses. There will still be screams from people concerned about drug addicts not buying food for their kids and that sort of thing. So it seems unlikely that the overhead of those programs, let alone the programs, would be completely done away with.
So it seems almost a certainty that a UBI would be adjacent to at least SS/Medicare. Those totaled about $1.473T of the welfare expenditures, so add the $2.303 to the SS/Medicare $1.473T for a total cost of $3.776T. Perhaps the UBI reduces SS income dollar-for-dollar in an either-or situation reduces this a bit.
A worst-case cost would be adding UBI on top of all the existing programs, for a total cost of about $5T. Or perhaps the UBI in lieu of all other programs can actually be rammed through so that the cost remains a minimum of $2.303T.
Total federal revenues collected from all sources (taxes, royalties, etc.) in 2014 (last year available) was $3.27 trillion. So UBI would consume somewhere north of 70% of all federal revenues. And the math here assumes that no one receive UBI drops out of the workforce or reduces their taxable income at all--i.e., that revenues stay constant.
I'd be happy if the paupers receiving public assistance were not allowed to vote while at it... But somehow this is anathema to most people.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"If we were to give you free money, would you be ok with that?"
UBI will only work if it is combined with something that cuts the balls off the political elite. Otherwise, UBI becomes a vote buying scheme for leftist, all the way up until the collapse of the country.
For instance, Fair Tax, which is a libertarian tax proposal for the United States has a form of UBI. The Fair Tax eliminates all taxes in favor of 1 single sales tax of around 20%. This removes politicians ability to "hide" taxes from people behind payroll taxes, corporate taxes, etc. At the same time, the Fair Tax provides a UBI to everyone equivalent to what the standard of living would pay in taxes due to the fair tax. (Memory serves me it was around $350/mnt in 2010.)
Remember, the majority of the population (if you're on /. you're probably not the majority) has no idea how much taxes they pay. You ask someone on April 15th how much they paid in taxes and they'll reply, "I didn't, I got money back!" That's the entire reason payroll taxes remained after WW2. But if someone is reminded everyday when they buy something how much taxes they're spending. They'll be less inclined to vote people who tax the shit out of them in the first place.
Fuck yes. There are thousands of people here in Scioto County who are doing exactly that. See, cost of living varies across the country, and here we can work under the table for spending money, still our own shine, and live pretty on a "barely scraping by" salary for the big cities. The "war on poverty" was clearly a vote buying exercise, and it worked until it was obvious that Obama's "war on coal" was actually part of the progressive's rolling genocide against our culture. You did it pretty dirty with welfare, but destroying the rest of the economy was dirty and transparent.
Until it runs out.... See Greece and Venezuela if you don't believe me.
OR...
Those who rob Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Peter....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Every time the US government subsidizes something like student loans, the cost of going to university goes up accordingly. Now its so expensive to go to school that most are in a crushing level of debt before they even graduate or before they have their first job.
This too can be expected for universal wadges. The amount of money they receive will never be enough because their wadges will constantly be behind the increasing costs of living. As costs go out of control, more may be forced into the system as the middle class is decimated.
The wealthy of course will be in a position to be shielded from all this and will only get wealthier as they charge more for everything to make up for increased taxes... and the clueless will whine about income inequality without understanding what happened.
What do you do when, say, 50 or 60 percent of the workforce is only capable of doing jobs that aren't profitable to pay people to do anymore? I don't think that you're going to be able to instantly break the cycle of "work--earn--consume" that has driven life since forever. Telling people who have spent their lives saving for retirement or amassing wealth that their money is no longer useful in the way it once was isn't going to go well.
In my opinion, most people who say people who want a universal income in place are lazy freeloaders who just want to sit around all day haven't worked with a large cross-section of humanity. They work as IT people, or developers/engineers, or doctors, or some other profession that requires a lot of education and are surrounded by smart people all day long. Out in the rest of the world, there exist people who can't handle anything more than a menial job. You don't just turn paper filers and customer service people into data scientists and biochemists. The job-replacement train ran out of gas a while back. It worked well when it was farming, then factory work, then corporate factory-style work like clerical/secretary work, then service jobs. Once those service jobs are gone, what high-salary, low-requirement job replaces them? Economies are built around consumers having a good job, taking on debt, spending, and keeping that cycle going. Universal income would allow this cycle to continue for a little longer, allowing employers to pay people less but keep them employed if they wished to earn beyond the minimum income. It basically buys us time to figure out how to deal with what could end up being massive unemployment and poverty for a formerly stable portion of the first-world workforce.
It's always so much easier to decide how to employ other peoples labour
Much of the discussion of UBI glosses over the need for secure borders and mandatory birth control. Without those two things, UBI is doomed to fail.
* Border control to limit outsiders with no attachment to the country offering UBI. I don't see how any UBI scheme can handle tens, or even hundreds, of millions of additional people above and beyond the current population of a particular country.
* Mandatory Birth control to limit payouts, as well as preserve resources. Without tight, strict rules, what's to stop people from breeding out of boredom and/or seeking to gain additional UBI payouts. It's already an issue with various government welfare programs. UBI for all would, presumably, amplify the problem.
Work for this pay or die in the streets.
THAT is why UBI will engender a greater sense of freedom and self reliance. Because instead of HAVING to take whatever pay they offer you, you can decide if the work demanded is sufficiently paid for by the offer.
If you turn down a job on unemployment, you lose your benefits (if you got it in the first place). Doesn't matter that the job demanded on-call zero hours 24-hours a day signup to remain in contact and sober to start work at minimum wage. If you turned down a really bad offer, you lose your benefits.
Therefore you go as supplicant to a job interview. You have to sell yourself to them. They don't have to sell the job position to you unless the market is so buoyant for your work that you can afford to turn down an offer for a better one.
UBI means EVERYONE gets the freedom to approach the job interview as a peer rather than supplicant, rather than the wealthy.
Be specific. Then we'll figure out how much those programs cost, and weigh that against the cost of a UBI--I guarantee those numbers will not add up. Ready to play?
We lack the willpower to let those who mismanage their UBI payments die in the streets. Lots of people are poor because they lack the capacity to plan ahead. Not all, of course, but many. Those people are going to waste their UBI payments, and we will not be willing to let them starve or die of exposure. So, we will either add a new government program to spend their money wisely instead of letting them waste it, or we'll recreate the same old system of free housing and food stamps that we have now, just this time with higher taxes.
See that "Preview" button?
> you know that at least part of your income will be steady
Until the next election following implementation of UBI. Then you'll be scrambling looking for a job [along with several million other people] while you have "smoked pot in Mom's basement" on your resume for the previous 4 years. Good luck with that.
There are places in the US where you would make less money working than you would on welfare. And since basically any kind of income can disqualify you from welfare, not only is work discouraged buyt working your way up is discouraged as well. Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.
UBI would be abused. For sure. But if you’re not at risk of losing the income, then plenty of people will get part time jobs just to deal with the boredom.
Maybe a bunch of the rest of them will spend their free time making more minecraft videos for youtube. (Did you know that there are a lot of people who make a comfortable living just playing video games and recording them for youtube? Amazing. This one guy Mumbo owns a Merc!)
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks. Compare that to the admin overhead of just issuing everyone a check. Of course, different places have different costs of living, and that complicates things too, because it’s hard to work out what’s fair and equal.
Profit is what makes things happen.
No, it is not the despicable "profit" — it is because government can't do anything well. Take a look at the VA hospital system — do you really want the same thing in all of the nation's hospitals?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
> This is intended as a REPLACEMENT for other programs, like job insurance, retirement programs, family income programs, etc
To the first order, $0 is spent on "job insurance" and "family income programs". So you are basically talking about taking the budget from social security and redistributing that to all people regardless of age. The budget for Social Security is about $900B per year.
$900B / 325M people == ~$2800/year.
Should be easy to live off that, right? BTW, the average recipient of SS currently receives ~$14K/year, I'm sure it's totally easy for them to live off 20% of that.
Even if you try to fire all of them, you'll still be paying them with UBI. In reality, what will happen is a power grab at every level of government, and the same useless fucks will merely be moved to different government agencies.
When you say "Military (the only government expenditure explicitly authorized by the Constitution)", what bit of the constitution says this? Because a standing army is singularly and specifically forbidden in the constitution, the millitia is supposed to be a state level thing.
And, no, getting the budget approved on the nod every two years does not turn your standing army into a temporary wartime force for defence. Doubly so when you're using them in offensive actions abroad.
Oh, and the military: it is meant to kill people. Welfare meant to keep them alive, medical spending to fix them. Both of those ALSO required for military, else you have no soldiers.
Burn the economy down before the refugee invaders can possess anything
Except when you are paying them for it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Let the loss of the human spirit start phase two. They will be ripe for conversion to Islam. They won't have a choice. Any overt opposition will be hate speech and you will not be eligible for welfare.
Call it what it is. Welfare for the lazy. All of recorded human history, people have worked to survive. Maybe fund business instead of socialism and you'll get jobs.
Russia a and the USA and Asian countries will be the only countries standing in 2 generations. Then those European welfare states will want to immigrate to the surviving countries. There will bE more riots. Even violent civil wars. Someone smart will give them guns.
Yeah. We've already seen this. People forget.
Very simplistic description. Summing these up as one liners doesn't make it accurate. It clouds the complexity.
There are not single one liner answers. These are massive systems. They change slowly.
And welfare is good? Maybe for the elderly. But it is not beneficial for our society to create multi generational welfare recipients. I have known some. They use all the scam to get more money. Its thier full time job. Have one more baby?
3 is the sweet spot for the most benefits and less risk to loose them.
Welfare states are socialism/communism. Why in the world would you even work if you don't have to? Why even go to school? Why even study in high school? No reason.
And if you aren't lazy. Why try hard? Your hard work just goes to support even one else that now expects you to support them.
Have you seen the riots when the EBT welfare system didn't work? They were trashing stores. They think its thier right to get free money.
We want this as a society on a massive scale?
Anything rewarding or worth while has always required effort. That is where pride comes from.
You want a welfare society where people know what they do doesn't matter? Just do what the government says? Or else.
Its not easy to come back from that. We have the data. Its multi generational welfare. It destroys people. They stop caring and stop trying.
The program that is presently being tested in Canada is not UBI. It incorporates means-testing, graduated payouts, and classing, none of which are components of UBI.
Because of this, the results will reveal absolutely nothing about UBI. They will provide information about a standard welfare system.
Any claim that this is a UBI trial and that the results reveal information about UBI is roughly equivalent to feeding people bananas, asking them what they think, and declaring that the results describe people's opinions on watermelon.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03...
No, they can't.
Wherever the problem is, we do know something that does work — free market. It is beautiful not only because it happens to work, but also because you simply can not have a free country, if you prohibit people from selling goods and/or services to each other.
But it also works. So well, China and Russia — neither valuing personal freedom very much — have adopted it and watched their economies take off. While Venezuela, which abolished it, descended into a verifiable shit hole in less than two decades — despite being among the world's top oil-exporters.
Unfortunately, the US had no free market in the health-services industry for decades. Nor in the health-insurance industry either...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Excellent idea - I guess they will create a kickstarter to fund it, right?
Are there going to be any restrictions on what the money can be spent on? (use technology to restrict purchases on the UBI card - think WIC program on steroids)
Because without any, this is a colossal waste of money.
Way, way too many people currently spend what little money they either earn outright or is given to them via social programs on booze, cigs, lottery tickets etc. crap that no person of poor financial means should be buying. These folks have no financial fortitude and is mostly the reason they are where they are to begin with.
Do this with a taxpayer funded UBI program, these people will be no better off than before except the taxpayer will be holding a massive bill in his hands.
I find it interesting that support is "inching" up.
Come to think of it have you ever heard of anything "centimetering" up? (Or, more accurately 2.54 centimetering up?)
The Slashdot of Today basically comes across as a communist propaganda machine what with so many postings along the lines of "capitalism is bad, robots are taking your job, universal basic income is what everyone wants." Seriously, scroll through today's lists and that's literally what's there.
I say this as the headline leaves out the fact that Switzerland already had a referendum on this topic which lead to a defeat of the proposal. 76.9% were for it, 23.1% were against it. https://www.admin.ch/ch/d/pore...
I look forward to a solid UBI in the USA so I can quit my job and work on personal projects all day long.
... and so the government must compel the rest at gun-point — which is how all taxes are collected. Yep.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you make me a high enough offer, you can decide how to employ my labor.
Free markets are great, aren't they?
Farm work is around $20/hr, mostly under the table, so you get all 20. That's not "low wages". And you still really want me to believe that McDonalds is a career. It's not. It's a college job. It's a first job. It's a step that demonstrates that you're employable with low risk. We've fucked a second generation of blacks by destroying those jobs in the city, and now the poverty cycle is pretty damn stuck. Go ahead with the UBI and tell them that they deserve to steal from the working class. What could possibly go wrong.
Why make up supposed questions when the people who did the survey make the questions and data available here?
It's almost like someone has an agenda and isn't willing to even look at anything that might conflict with it.
Maybe we European taxpayers should just start paying salary to all the worlds people? NO MORE POVERTY! YAY!
Assume a section of the population that believes in breeding massively and spreading their way of life. You can insert hysteria about Muslim refugees, or Mormons, or whatever you like, or not: the details don't matter, and you don't need a scapegoat for the thought experiment.
Such a group will, if it exists ANYWHERE or at ANY TIME, FUTURE OR PRESENT, go to where free money is, engage in that behavior, and eventually, since you are a democracy, repurpose your entire government to serve them. The laws they pass to accomplish this can be clever and pro-nativist (blah blah extra rewards for extra kids), religiously keyed (extra resources for churches, more rewards for clergymen), or outright racist (extra rewards for white/nonwhite, no rewards.for nonwhite/white).
How do you solve this? Again, you don't need to even have a present group in mind. You get more of what you pay for. If you set up a fragile system waiting for an exploitative philosphy to take root and exploit you, then that WILL occur. If no such philosophy exists within your borders, it will move there. If no man has that philosophy, one will arise.
That's socialism.
From what I understood, implementing UBI will go together with removing many other social benefits.
One major selling point of UBI is that everyone will get the same thing. It means you won't have to justify anything, and there will be no need for processing applications and fighting against fraud. Which, by the way, will kill a lot of administrative jobs.
Minimum wage, unemployment, housing, family, etc... All these benefits will have to go.
The result is that some people currently getting a lot of social benefits (for good or bad reasons) may find themselves with much less. It will make the transition difficult. I expect the actual implementation of a UBI to be a joke, with complex rules making the end result the same as what we have now.
The Finland experiment has nothing to do with a true UBI. The amount is not enough to live decently in Finland without further help and only unemployed people are selected.
Pay people a reasonable wage to attend university or job training instead. If their particular skills aren't needed in the labor market, they can either develop new ones or use their skills to benefit society through research or the arts. Yes, this would require creating new schools and universities.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
Call it socialism, communism, or whatever you want; the fact remains that technology is changing economic realities for large swaths of people and that means we need to rethink ideas about how wealth should be distributed. As an economist I can tell you that commonly accepted economic theory puts great weight in the significance of Labor. Those models break down when Labor is being done by machines, and not workers. When a farm that once employed 100 farmers now only employs 10, and some machines - what are the 90 unemployed farmers reasonably Supposed to do. Changing your livelihood is easier said than done, and many jobs that they might be eligible for are suffering from the same problem. Should they just commit suicide? Is that really morally acceptable? Or, should the farm that now produces as much if not more with fewer laborers, have some sort of obligation to support those they have turned away? Some day, 95% of all human labor will be completely automated. Not today. Not tomorrow. But when that's our new reality, and billions of people cannot work through no fault of their own, do you just tell them to all commit suicide? Or, will we redistribute. I dont know about you, but redistribution seems like the right call to me. I dont love the idea of "freeloading", but I don't think that it should be thought of that way - everything that is produced will be so from the earth, and by the creations of man - at that point, it's only natural that the whole of mankind share in the common heritage of man.
Let me know when one appears.
*someone* still has to pay for it, the money has to come from somewhere, millennials. The government are not your parents, and I am not going to pay for your lazy asses in taxes. You need to grow up, and stat.
yes, eliminate those salaries and put them on UBI instead.
So instead of them doing work, they're at home doing nothing.
Won't save a dime.
I've always liked the efficiency of the living wage as a mean to combat job loss through automation and to some degree social inequality. The problem is that humans suck at sitting around doing nothing. We will not behave ourselves and we will not learn and grow if someone just pays us to sit around.
At some point a living wage could become fast track to even more idiocracy. Humans are adaptive problem solvers and without work or other challenges, they turn on themselves. You also have the simple fact that have eventually hundreds of millions of people on a living wage means a lot of people will have very limited life skills.
The best of us rise to life's challenges, most of us simply do what we are told, but how would those masses of people with 100 IQ or less deal with sitting home. Would they learn and further their life? Would social evolution go on with negative stimulus? I highly doubt it.
A living wage works for the minority of people who can take assistance and make a better life out of it, but for the masses, they will dumb their lives down to what they can get. Without jobs and challenges made for them, they will stagnate and get as dumb as humans can get, but unlike 1000 years ago, there will be 10+ billion of us.
Humanity is not ready for the Star Trek utopia of just sitting on their butts and becoming better people. They will not become better people, they will become worse. Most people aren't smart or well behaved and they never have been. That's why we have to pay billions per year in law enforcement just to kind of keep them in check.
So.. it all sound good, until you think about the long term consequences of breeding a world of unskilled people detached from any reality other than their government check. Paying people a minimal amount is also no way to run an economy and million upon millions will be losing their jobs over the next few years, and then millions more and the pattern repeats with every wave of new technology. We've been able to ignore those lob losses, but they are reaching terminal velocity these days and people will respond by getting more violent, less generous, less intellectual and more intolerant.
That's what happens when you squeeze the standard of living out of people for corporate profits and tax breaks, they become frustrated, angry, hateful and eventually useless because they have no skills AND can't get along with people since they don't really have to in order to get their living wage. Part of how society and civilization works is that we have a shared liability. If people have no jobs and just collect money, where is the shared liability?
What to these people have to loss by being uneducated? They can still vote, but they will have no anchor to reality and little grasp of responsibility or repercussion.
In the distant future we will have a living wage, but in the mean time we need to plan the transition to work with existing human behavior, which means keep them busy and working for the most part. People who can handle education can benefit from a living wage and still be productive members of society. Those who do not take the opportunity to better themselves will just drag society down with them.
If they can't have prosperity, nobody can! We are at a point were capitalism and Democracy are at each others throats and people don't die off fast enough to make this work. We will breed millions of ignorant people because we don't really need them anymore to make society work, but they will still keep existing, keep voting, keep breaking laws and keep spouting their ignorance and hate as a passionate ideology, even to the point they fully convince themselves.
It''s not as if all this isn't happening already.
Despite what the summary says, there's no UBI pilot in the Netherlands. Some local governments have suggested they'd start a UBI pilot, only to then learn this is actually outside their responsibilities. As UBI would be considered a form of social security, it is the sole responsibility of the national government. And seeing that the social-democrats just were wiped off the map in the latest election (3/4 of seats lost, unprecedented in Dutch politics), UBI won't come back any time soon.
No surprise either - Dutch debts have seen a significant rise since the introduction of the euro, from about 50% GDP to now 75%. That's not an acute crisis, but welfare is more likely to be limited than expanded.
The thing is, $1000 here in rural Montana and $1000 in silicon valley or urban New Jersey are completely different levels of support.
I am all for the idea of UBI, but the fact of the gross imbalance of actual cost of living across the country tells me that there's a lot more to fix before it could even remotely achieve its goals.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Finland, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the UK already has systems in place to make sure that people doesn't starve or end up homeless.
Yes, they all have social welfare.
But nope, unlike Netherland and Finland who are or were actually running pilot experiment, Switzerland voted against.
Note that Switzerland practice direct democracy. i.e.: no mattter what, the population has always the final say on everything.
And in this case, democracy has spoken against UBI: apparently the population was indeed genuinely afraid of rise costs.
The cost is already there. Switching to UBI doesn't necessarily require higher taxes. Especially since you no longer need government workers investigating who is entitled to extra support.
That is the general idea behind UBI :
- keep giving out money as before, under welfare programs.
- except now you give out the money indiscriminately to absoluetely everyone.
- because you blanked give money to everyone, you don't need to pay that many people to take care of the minute details.
- saved money = extra money to redistribute.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No. It's not. For example, you buy food, you pay the costs - that includes the salaries of the people at the grocery store, the produce truck driver, the service people involved at every stage, the land taxes, the fuel taxes... everything that food costs is in the price. Including, and this is the critical fact, the taxes on every factor. You're poor, the cucumber costs you $1. You're rich, the cucumber costs you $1. Both pay in equal share into the (huge) taxation that underlies the cost of that food item, and every other food item, and fuel, and etc. The cucumber, or more accurately, all purchased food in general, has a huge tax load added to its cost. Which no one gets out of.
The actual difference in who gets taxed what is basically in income tax and a few other taxes. But a very large amount of taxation is hidden in payment transfer for almost all goods and services.
Say you pay a plumber $100. He's in a 30% tax bracket. You're in what you've been told is the "0% tax bracket." You think you're going to get $100 worth of plumbing work? No. You're not. You're going to get, at best, $70 worth of plumbing work, because the plumber is only going to get to keep $70. Your other $30 went right to the government.
You see? There is no "poor people pay no taxes." That's just nonsense for the math-impaired (most everyone, near as I can tell.) Poor people pay taxes all the time - that is, the things they have to buy are taxed at a distance - but it's just the same in actual dollar effects as if you took the money right out of their pockets.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nope. The top 10% hold 76% of the wealth. And the top 10% are nowhere near being "middle class."
Try again. This time with numbers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A review of our current economical situation is needed for how we need to move on for the near future. Advanced in robotica and A.I. are enormous and will only make bigger leaps, which will mean a lot of people will loose their jobs (yes even office-people) and there won't be any new jobs created. So we have to figure out how to get around this and how people are gonnan 'pay' for stuff. Maybe we need to move to a system were one does not 'pay' anymore. It's a very difficult subject and it will be hard to figure out how to solve (as humans still want power and fortune, that's just the nature of us)..
Yes. Hell for the poor, the unskilled, the handicapped, the classed to the bottom by social or governmental ostracism, the simply unlucky.
Proud of it, are you?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Let's be real here, this is nothing more than a government program to pay a living income for people not to work. Is it any different then any other welfare? Its also one step closer to government making the determination on how much a person should make. Used to be the motivation of people to work for a better wage was to obtain skills and education to do so. Now I guess who cares, I'll make this much no matter what I do.
The difference versus 'getting it back' is that you have a monthly pay check.
In other words, if you are e.g. close to broke on a vacation, you get money soon again.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A small scale pilot will always work.
The problem with a full rollout is that pesky thing called inflation.
If you basically give everyone a bunch of money with no expectation they do anything in return, this devalues what money is worth and of course we all know this results in inflation.
So basically the money you put into everyones pockets temporarily makes them wealthy, but as soon as they go to buy anything with it, the value of it is reduced and all of sudden they need more and more just to survive.
This is the death spiral of an economy. Take a look at any country that has experienced rampant inflation to see how well it turns out. Zimbabwe, Indonesia etc etc etc.
You end up needing wheelbarrow loads of cash just to buy a loaf of bread.
UBI's sound good but in practice it would never work on a large scale.
I really hope these trials continue and expand. A UBI would (I think) solve so many problems with market-based economies. If people have the genuine option of not working, then they will be more able to do things that will improve their productivity in the long run, such as pursuing more education. The chronically-ill can also be supported without having to continually prove to the government that they are chronically-ill. Employers who are abusive to their employees will very rapidly find themselves without employees. And for people with good jobs already, they'll have the security of knowing that they'll be able to manage if the shit hits the fan and they find themselves out of work, even if unemployment benefits are limited.
More interesting to me, if they do something simple like fund the UBI with a flat percentage tax on income, then more than half of the population will end up with more money with the UBI than without (e.g. in the US, you'd need to make more than ~$70,000/year or so to end up with less money, and way more than that to end up with noticeably less, though the precise number depends upon the structure of the tax and the structure of the benefits).
Switzerland held a referendum on a UBI and they voted 75% against it. Proponents of a UBI in Finland and Utrecht have managed to launch not trials on the UBI but small scale trials with a matched control group on a simplified unemployment benefit that is not income, asset or activity tested to if the savings in administration and forced compliance costs out weight the disincentive to taking a job.
An opinion poll poll that shows that the majority of people would like more money from the government paid for by taxes on other people is not exactly new, or meaningful. And it also shows that half those who support it want it properly trialed and proven before they tear down the existing economy. So lets see what these trials reveal and then design some others for find out more before getting carried away with the idea.
The assertion that robots will take all our jobs is also completely unproven. So far automation is creating about the same number of jobs as it makes disappear, as it has done for the last few hundred years, while generating wealth. The catch is that it creates a small number highly paying jobs, compared to a lot of part time service industry work in wealthy inner city areas, while the lower skilled jobs elsewhere are replaced by imports bought with the wealth. This creates winner and losers. Self driving cars and automation of legal and accounting work may change that, but it is far from being a known certainty.
Atlas Shrugged
Remember the Bernie Sanders' paradise of Venezuela ? Ever wonder why he doesn't speak of it any more?
With Venezuela it was more of a case of them being too reliant on oil than anything else. A number of oil reliant capitalist countries in the middle east were also getting to the point of being seriously in trouble, ultimately they had enough cash reserves to ride it out though.
As for Greece, they were going crazy with their money, even wasting a huge amount on the Olympics. It was more stupidity than socialism. The fact they were part of the euro severely curtailed their options though, e.g. being unable to devalue their currency.
People are self interested, and socialism fails to account for that
You can't really just say Socialism. It all depends on the figures. You can tax enough so that you can keep the poor healthy and at least keep a roof over their heads or you can go crazy and tax so much that their is little to be gained from anyone putting the effort in to anything. Then again you can tax so little that only the rich can afford health care and shelter and let the poor rot. The argument is all about where you fall on that axis.
Also, the idea of socialist countries being crazy borrowers (like Greece) isn't always the case. In the UK the conservatives (capitalists) have spent more than Labour, it's just that they like to spend it on big stupid projects where their corporate friends get rich rather than helping out the poor.
Average SS recipient gets about $14K annually. How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?: $7K?
Answer me this: If this scheme saves $1T in federal tax revenue, what was that money being used on before? Are we really expected to believe that out of maybe $1.5T in total funding for the programs you are displacing, that $1T of that was waste?
As robotics increase and so does production and profit, an increasing universal basic income is a very Logical Choice
The point of UBI is to reduce the administrative overhead.
So it increases unemployment and provides fewer government jobs. What is in it for the politicians?
How about making this optional?
Anyone in need of the UBI opts in, anyone who doesn't need it opts out.
Also, make some criteria like anyone whose income is less the XXXX is eligible to recieve UBI.
I don't think this will have a negative effect.
You look to Venezuela for what happens when there are no longer enough resources from the rich to provide for the entitled masses.
Venezuela basically did universal basic income with oil profits.
But then those dried up.
Because the rest of the world figured out that they could sell oil for a lower price than some goofy country that put the entire citizenship as worthless middlemen collecting a profit but providing no value.
And that fixed the glitch. The middlemen are out of the market.
In Alaska and other places there are profits given to the citizens. But nothing that would allow you to stop working. Because that would require the price of oil be substantially higher than other producers could sell their oil for.
And you'd have to be a socialist to not see the problem with inflated prices to support middlemen no one needs.
Work Safe Porn
It's happening in France at least. There are relatively many zillionnaires, though obviously a very small part of the population, and the same global capitalism as anywhere else that makes their income or wealth (whatever) increase rapidly. I say "whatever" jokingly as I don't know exactly the difference between income and wealth increase.
But let's say you have 50 millions and this number increases 8% a year even if you don't do anything then yes wealth distribution inequity rises and rises inevitably.
There's also been rather massive media concentration roughly since the change of century and so perceptions might be evolving as it's too blatant to not be noticed.
At the same time, the country is a lot more right-wing that you would expect if following the caricature of it. But there's a left-wing support for UBI, a left that does not support UBI (because it's a trap for gutting unemployment benefits, pensions, stable employment), liberals in the right-wing European meaning of liberal who support UBI, a right that doesn't support UBI (because it's free money for lazy ass bums, demeans the value of work), and the "extreme centre" we seem to be electing doesn't deal with the idea or does not want it.
So I think I'd rather have UBI but while it got a leg in public discourse we're a bit far from it yet.
I can only talk about my country. The wealth distribution inequity has been lowered a lot since the government invented an extra tax for the extreme rich. All extreme rich left the country and the capital is now more even distributed. Before they left the country the top 10% had 80% of the capital. Today the top 10% only has 73% of the capital. Note this was not a redistribution, because the total capital in our country has dropped significantly. The big advantage however is that there is no more private ownership of the many large castles. The envy towards the castle owner is gone because there are no longer castle owners. The socialists can be happy that the castles will soon turn to ruins after which they can be destroyed and replaced with social houses around a Mosque.
Most of the extreme rich have moved to the US. But they cause a problem there. There is even a larger wealth distribution inequity with the many billionaires that migrated with their capital to the US. That makes many people angry who envy rich people. So it is about time that the US also invents taxes that punish the extreme rich. Let's see who will have the last laugh! Haha, just think about it. Bill Gates who moves with his capital to some exotic paradise where the weather is always nice and everybody is rich. He will be sad because there are no non extreme rich who will envy him.
You need to figure out how to answer a simple question in fewer than 2000 words.
>> Average SS recipient gets about $14K annually. How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?: $7K?
Your answer (as best I can tell): They get $7K. But they received the USS for their entire life [even while they were working]--so they should have saved some of that money and set up their own retirement account.
>> If this scheme saves $1T in federal tax revenue, what was that money being used on before? Are we really expected to believe that out of maybe $1.5T in total funding for the programs you are displacing, that $1T of that was waste?
Your answer (as best I can tell): Unicorns.
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I genuinely do appreciate your responses--they were thoughtful and informative. For example, I now know that at least some of the push for UBI comes from closet libertarians trying to masquerade as fiscally responsible social progressives.
Exterminate those smelly shitty islamists indo-chimps before starting socialism. Medieval chimps are a cancer on Earth
Why not just work for it?!
How about a requirement to actually put in some minimum of hours on some qualified work in order to qualify for the income?
It could be some part time position that allows an individual to continue seeking more gainful employment.
Then, when we have mastered having robots do nearly all our work, we can just sit back and wait for judgement day!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.