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Silicon Valley Continues To Explore Universal Basic Incomes (siliconvalley.com)
A Silicon Valley Congressman "is pushing for a plan that has been described as a first step toward universal basic income...a long-shot $1 trillion expansion to the earned income tax credit that is already available to low-income families." An anonymous reader quotes the Mecury News:
Stanford University also has created a Basic Income Lab to study the idea, and the San Francisco city treasurer's office has said it's designing pilot tests -- though the department told this news organization it has no updates on the status of that project... The problem is that giving all Americans a $10,000 annual income would cost upwards of $3 trillion a year -- more than three-fourths of the federal budget, said Bob Greenstein, president of Washington, D.C.-based Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Some proponents advocate funding the move by cutting programs like food stamps and Medicaid. But that approach would take money set aside for low-income families and redistribute it upward, exacerbating poverty and inequality, Greenstein said... Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, is skeptical that basic income can do much lasting good in Oakland. What the city needs is more high-paying jobs and affordable housing, she said... The idea, [Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator] said at the Commonwealth Club, tackles the question not enough people are asking: "What do we as the tech industry do to solve the problem that we're helping to create?"
This summer Y Combinator is expected to announce a larger Universal Basic Income program, though the article also describes "small pilot studies" in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada and in several U.S. states including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa and Indiana, where "Some studies showed improvements in participants' physical and mental health, and found children performed better in school or stayed in school longer. But some also showed that people receiving a basic income were inclined to spend fewer hours working."
This summer Y Combinator is expected to announce a larger Universal Basic Income program, though the article also describes "small pilot studies" in the 1960s and 1970s in Canada and in several U.S. states including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Iowa and Indiana, where "Some studies showed improvements in participants' physical and mental health, and found children performed better in school or stayed in school longer. But some also showed that people receiving a basic income were inclined to spend fewer hours working."
This won't work. It's a ridiculous waste of effort and capital.
allow this to happen since they want to force everyone to work, which is slavery.
I'm not gonna quit my jobs, just stash it in a retirement account. Now where do i sign up?
us imaginary semi-chosens never saw us coming? same banks, pr firms & WMD on credit cabals who supplied hitler are still in operation? here? egads, no wonder the don't ask don't tell symbol is so important? today we're going to interview (in absentia) the WMD cabalists & zion itself. try to ask questions that are on topic, as many as you like to hear lies about
...That will work flawlessly.
.
Right up until they run out of other people's money.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
This is true, it would be a net loss for the poor.
Personally I'd vote for a Logans Run society, myself. I know that won't go over well here since 95% of Slashdot would have to die (including myself) but I think being old sucks.
The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.
The real problem is jobs being replaced by machines, A.I., etc. This should decrease the costs of those goods and services. But instead, it's making the rich richer and the poor unable to afford those goods and services because they're out of work.
#DeleteFacebook
Seems like a PR exercise to avoid a populist backlash.
Lots of us got tired of self-involved Billionaires trying to tell us they're the good guys while locating their offices in places where only multi-millionaires can have a decent lifestyle. And then claiming they can't find the talent they need when people don't want to go there and work 70-hour weeks and rent a shabby 1-bedroom apartment for $2500.
"Universal Basic Income" is just another trendy name for socialist policies, *unless* you're talking about redistributing income that's not generated by the labor of a human being in the first place.
In a futuristic, post-Capitalist economy, yes - a UBI could absolutely work. In that scenario, you're talking about technological advances getting all of us to the point where basic needs and wants are handled by automation. And the robots or machines doing the work are capable of repairing themselves too. Once that happens? Sure, you could come up with proposals like central governments utilizing excess capacity of the machinery used to supply food, clothing or energy to citizens, in order to create luxury items which get exported to other countries in exchange for currency. Then, those proceeds are redistributed to the citizenry as a UBI.
Essentially, currency would only be used for the extras in life - and those living in more successful nations would get the side benefit of more currency to spend on those luxuries.
But in the current economic environment? A UBI is just another mandated tax and wealth redistribution.
The price is so volatile it will be worth less than "real" money when people try to cash out, reducing costs for everyone.
The people of Alpha Centauri were happy to hear about this.
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Welfare is dysgenic. You're turning a genetic algorithm into a random search.
Universal basic income is welfare.
RIP any human population that tries this shit.
Okay this universal basic income is too generalized for what needs to be taken care of. It needs to be a specialized approach to be economically viable.
You can't just give money away, and let people spend it on ipads.
What you need is to take care of the most abundant things in the world, that tend to be the most lacking, that are the most essential and cover those.
Universal food program. Everyone is entitled to a certain amount of food per month.
Universal housing program. North america, massive land space, utilization is low, but somehow you can't find a place to live.
Universal transit - Public transit shouldn't have execs making huge bonuses, it should be a non profit system run by the government. Need it for work and getting around with huge stores pushing out stores to be spread instead of small towns having everything close by.
Universal utilities - Basic amount of energy and water allowed to people at no cost.
I give you - Universal essentials. Besides the transit, land is huge and cheap, food is tons, cheap, and tons thrown out, and renewables are driving down utility prices.
This works out way better as it puts in more effort at reducing the cost of these items, so the government doesn't have to spend a ton of money for someone to have the essentials while a company rakes in the profit. Maybe costs + 10% or something for items part of the program.
Want to do business in north america? Your company in these sectors will have to offer at cost prices for the basic amount for individuals. It won't take money from you. Your profit is on non essential items, premium items. People who choose to purchase beyond their basic allotted amounts.
Companies will go "Fuck you I'll go elsewhere since I won't make as much and you'll have no food etc!"
Go ahead, the more companies that leave, the more business for the ones that stay, so they'll still be quite profitable.
They should assuage their conscience the old-fashioned way, by becoming Catholic and going to confession. Much easier than figuring out how to create jobs in your own country. And when the pitchforks pierce your vital organs, you get to go to heaven!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
>"Some proponents advocate funding the move by cutting programs like food stamps and Medicaid. But that approach would take money set aside for low-income families and redistribute it"
If it does not *replace* all the other social income and welfare programs, then what is the purpose? That is the only way it could even remotely be affordable; and even then, it is still questionable. Basic income is not based on need, it is based on equality- that everyone would get an amount of subsistence money, regardless of what they choose to earn or already have. A program with zero red tape, almost no overhead, and without trying to create standards for who supposedly "deserves" money. Otherwise, all we would be doing is starting another absolutely massive, unaffordable, unsustainable, unfair, corruptive social welfare program to add to the dozens that already exist.
We need to stop telling the rich to pay their fair share and start telling the freeloaders to pull their fair share.
Unless there is a mechanism to keep non-workers out of neighborhoods where workers live, there will be massive crime. We'll have a population of people who have the basics met, but who won't have extra money for luxuries (or whatever is a step up from basic) and who will also have all the time in the world on their hands. Resentment will build, boredom will take over, and workers will regularly come home to find their homes looted, with cops who will care less about it than even now. Sounds fun, man.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
Thinking UBI is even remotely possible, feasible or a good idea on any level makes you a fucking moron. Period. End of discussion. Take your utopian bullshit and shove it up your fucking ass.
Greenstein misses the point, while a UBI does pay out to everyone, and you do get some back from eliminating newly redundant programs (not health, though, that needs to be expanded separately, not as part of a UBI), you also increase taxes as well.
If you make it a straight flat tax increase you can adjust the level of the UBI and the tax increase to set the income level where it's break even. The UBI for people above that level is just a tax refund.
Figure out, for example, what the effective and marginal tax rate is at various income levels with a flat tax of 50% and a UBI of $2000/month.
Every bit of individual wealth, including stock/option ownership, from $100M and higher is taken over by the government and redistributed as money and social programs. Moving wealth outside the country to protect it means no longer doing business in the US. Besides, Europe might join in on this idea so this restriction could be well managed.
What does Silicon Valley think of this idea?
I finished reading "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez. The author and his two engineers leave the startup they worked at to create a startup at Y Combinator to create a better version of the Digg toolbar (remember toolbars?) for Google advertisers in 2010. He sold his company and engineers to Twitter and jumped ship to Facebook in a three-way deal. The funny thing is that his engineers made out better than him in the end. As for Y Combinator, I've heard mixed things about their success rate.
Money = work. Make people work to earn it. Universal basic work. IE you can always get a job even if we have to hire people to do something silly like rebuild our infrastructure. All money should represent work. Giving it away devalues it and it has to come from somewhere (taxes) and that is theft.
If we're going to pay people for doing nothing, we need to continue allowing immigration (legal or otherwise)... ... why?
"It is amusing that all of these rich people proposing this are not talking about using their own money..."
I see a comment like this pop up in every UBI discussion on slashdot and there's no truth to it at all. Any wealthy person talking about this is talking about using their own money by default because they pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. On top of that, given that these people are generally not dumb people, they probably realize that their taxes will have to go up to make UBI work.
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Providing everybody with income for life seems shortsighted to me, and likely to create a dependence/poverty trap...
Suppose we made small payments to individuals during the first 16-18 years of life, such that by the time they were 18-20 years old, they would have accumulated a sum approaching 20k, or so?
This would mean that nobody is starting from literally nothing, thereby alleviating the worst of poverty, without "wasting" money, by giving it to people who don't really need it.
This would not eliminate the need for Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, Unemployment, Housing assistance, Health insurance, or require a drastic re-engineering of the entire economic system.
Productivity has been sky rocketing for decades. Wages have not. That's to be expected. As workers produce more demand for their services declines. Massive changes in technology and society might fix that, but even when they do they take decades to happen. In the mean time the vast majority of people live in abject poverty for no other reason that greed and lust for power.
All that said, don't abandon you're poor. If you do, somebody like Trump (or Mussolini) will show up and mobilize them against you. They'll use them to take what you have from you. Socialists will keep you from owning 3 Olympic swimming pools and a pair of private jets. A fascist will keep you from owning bread.
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it's about taking the rich's ability to decide who lives and who dies away from them. And make no mistake, anyone that controls your access to food, shelter, health care, transportation and education decides whether you live or if you die.
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if they got behind HR 676 (aka Medicare for all). UBI is still a complete pipe dream. If they care about the working class there's plenty they could do right now. Me thinks they don't because like Trump and other false populists they don't really care. It's easy to promise something that in the current political climate is basically impossible.
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But as I am getting older I realize that giving people money isn't enough - you also have to give them purpose - a job.
UBI will be put into place but a lot of people are going to be jobless and homeless long before politicians get the message. The funny thing is, it's the people who are currently against UBI that are going to be the ones that are going to start calling for it because they have lost their jobs to automation. The only alternative outcome is a conflict on par with a civil war. Not even "make work" jobs are going to be able to stop UBI from happening because of the sheet amount of people that are going to be put out of a job.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Don't let the poor be more than 50% or you are screwed in democracy, duh.
America has nowhere near 50% 'poor'. Guess you should redefine 'poor' again.
Historically, 2 out of 3 undisputed, self described fascist governments (Spain, Italy, Germany) were openly socialist, the third was Catholic religious and hostile to capitalism. You're going to have to distinguish more clearly.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm quite sure my comment included the word "overhead" before the end.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think pilot studies are worth much, because people will act drastically differently when given a guaranteed income for a few years, compared to a guaranteed income for life.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Add a couple zeroes, chief
I was a desperate poor single young man wisely not having kids or getting married while I was shit poor, and I never qualified for EITC.
My equally poor divorced father stopped qualifying for it as soon as I moved out to go to college.
Mom is on disability so doesn't file taxes but I doubt a single woman not supporting a kid would qualify for it either.
There's a "family" of three desperately poor people not filing taxes together because we don't live together and none of us see a lick of this EITC.
A first step toward making a universal basic income would just be making EITC universal. Make poor people, not poor families, get the credit. Then, yeah, expand it from there and it makes a great start. Give every single taxpayer a tax credit of a fixed amount, tax every single taxpayer a fixed percent to fund it (a percent equal to the credit amount over the mean income would make it immediately revenue-neutral), and there you go, you have a universal basic income. Then make tax refunds paid out monthly instead of all at once (and allow tax payments to be made monthly too, to be fair about it) so people don't blow their whole basic income at once right after tax season.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Silicon Valley has a problem, the problem is that California is full of socialists. San Jose is a beautiful place, really, I walked from Castro street to Google HQ and from Google HQ to Castro street two weeks ago, it is nice, nobody else was walking interestingly enough. I have been all over the world, California is similar to many other southern vacation destinations, more or less clean, green, sunny. Unfortunately it is also choke full of people who are under the impression they both know it best how other people should live and they are willing to impose their ideology upon others. This of-course inevitably means and requires more government (centralized) oppression of everybody. The authoritarians within the the collectivists are so transparent, they are practically their only defining feature. Can these people come up with ideas that do not require mass oppression and repression or is this completely impossible?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Productivity has been sky rocketing for decades. Wages have not. That's to be expected. As workers produce more demand for their services declines. Massive changes in technology and society might fix that, but even when they do they take decades to happen.
It doesn't take massive changes, it can be done incrementally. We might eventually get to a UBI but we are not ready for it. There is a much smoother transition. As you state, the reason that jobs are declining is because the supply of labor is greater than the demand for labor. The solution is not to put the people out of work on welfare. That really doesn't reduce the supply of labor as people still want good paying job. Instead of jumping straight from full employment to full idleness, it would be better to evenly distribute both the employment and the idleness. This can easily be done by reducing the work week. If we slowly reduced the workweek by say 5 hours a week per decade then as automation takes over, the number of hours each person works slowly drops to take up the slack. Eventually, we might get to the point where everyone only works 5 hours per week or noone works and everyone gets a UBI but we would have done it without creating two classes of people, the class that works and the class that lives on only what UBI provides instead everyone would still get the benefit of still working and everyone would still get the benefit of more leisure. This is a much smoother transition that trying to force UBI on people with the hope that it somehow magically solves poverty. It won't. But reducing the hours worked at high paying jobs by 5% should instantly create 5% more high paying jobs as those hours presumably still have to be filled by someone.
I suspect some will push a wrong flavor of UBI to better kill the idea.
I see two ways to do it badly: first, an UBI too low to live on it, which makes sure people still have to beg for any job that can pay the bills. In the end, employers will even be able to pay them less because they already have UBI. Such an UBI is a social subsidy for employers.
The other way to get it wrong is to make something without proper funding, and kill it as too expensive to be generalized.
Surely the point of an UBI is that the UBI is "enough" and that anything beyond that point should be taxed? Say 40% flat.
Earn $0, get $10k/year (UBI).
Earn $10k, get $16k/year ($4k taxes, $10k UBI = $6k net) = -60%
Earn $20k, get $22k/year ($8k taxes, $10k UBI = $2k net) = -10%
Earn $30k, get $28k/year ($12k taxes, $10k UBI = $2k tax) = 6 2/3%
Earn $50k, get $40k/year ($20k taxes, $10k UBI = $10k tax) = 20%
Earn $100k, get $70k/year ($40k taxes, $10k UBI = $30k tax) = 30%
Earn $200k, get $130k/year ($80k taxes, $10k UBI = $70k tax) = 35%
So the break-even in this example would be $25k. But it's not like most under $25k will burden the full amount, if you're working minimum wage you'll be paying over half of it yourself. Those who really cost money are those with no income, but they're probably on some program today, where you could for starters say that the first $10k of any program today is 100% taxed towards your UBI. That is if you get $30k disability pension today, tomorrow you get $20k disability pension, $10k UBI and keep adjusting the system from there. Every dollar you make, you keep 60 cents no funny limits or drops or brackets etc.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I could be a bit grumpy about having to work to pay for somebody else's leisure time.
It seems to me that it should come with some accountability as to what the folks did with the time.
One thing I think is for certain.. a lot of the people complaining about people who will take UBI instead of trying to work, will probably be taking UBI to not work.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Why don't we start with food as a UBI instead? Just make a certain basket of foods, the basics - fruits, veggies, grains, etc., free to all.
We already massively subsidize farms. With the savings from eliminating SNAP and other related programs, we might not even need to taxes to do it.
That's a good idea, but that incurs overhead, which is what UBI is supposed to eliminate. Doesn't take a lot of administrators to have a machine cut checks to people.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
So much for the people claiming that a UBI would replace our current inefficient and demeaning welfare system.
I'm not sure why Sam Altman is using the term "we" there. As far as I can tell, Sam Altman has not actually "created" much of anything: if you can even call Loopt a "technical contribution", it was so pointless that it didn't put anybody out of work.
Silicon Valley is a bubble that doesn't reflect the needs or values of the rest of the world, and that they have their arrogant heads shoved so far up their asses they will never realize it.
technology can be a wonderful thing, allowing for much greater productivity with much less effort however it will displace many jobs eventually perhaps nearly all jobs so it is only right and fair that the people who now cannot make their own income because of this technology should be supported by it. large companies who use technology and as a byproduct displace many smaller companies should be willing to pay large amounts of tax to help support the nation's people, in fact as the workforce decreases and wages perhaps decrease as well and small businesses get displaced, the large monopolies maybe one of the few sources left of enough tax to support a country.
The tech industry should hold a challenge for the best indexation scheme. Indexation links everyone's incomes automatically to prices so that everyone's real income purchasing power remains the same no matter how high nominal prices go.
Since indexation eliminates inflation, because you can start thinking of the price of everything in terms of units of your real income purchasing power which is guaranteed to be maintained, we can then put a basic income entirely on the Fed's balance sheet at zero cost to taxpayers.
The Fed would be creating, say, $6 trillion a year in deposit accounts, at the Fed. $6 trillion is a fraction of what the private financial sector creates each year, according to a Bain & Company report (seev A World Awash in Money).
some people are on disability just for the healthcare part and if they work to much then they lose there healthcare covage. Also others don't want take the risk of taking a job and then having it not work out and then having to work the system for 6mo-2 years to get back on.
Silicon Valley is one of the most expensive places in the US to live. That's not so much because it has to be expensive, but more because of stifling regulations about who can build what where. The rich in Silicon Valley don't want the poor living among them. They want them at arm's length, just close enough to do their work, just far enough to be out of sight. How about relaxing some of those regulations so people can actually afford to live there, instead of just handing out "free money"! (After all, we know that money grows on trees, right?)
The problem with UBI is that it's a big new income redistribution and as such a huge political problem. To cover the costs you need to raise taxes that creates a new big transfer of income from the rich to poor. Also since UBI is such a big change in the system, it’s likely to introduce a new set of problems (e.g. scenarios which it can’t handle or where can be abused). And there is no middle ground, you have to go all in to be able to get the benefits.
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Amazing that so many people on Slashdot are super-paranoid about power grabs in tech, but don't see that the essential problem with UBI or other socialistic / communist policies is that... whoever gives you the money / benefits, has the power.
Because when you start blowing the UBI on hookers and cocaine, they will decide that you just can't be trusted to make your own decisions, and they will make the decisions for you. Then it will be yoga and oatmeal for you!
Crybabies to the fore. Just another scam to separate the fool from his money. There's a sucker born every minute, and it doesn't take much longer than that to fleece them.
Eventually they'll realize that the only way for this system to work is to limit the population, and being too afraid to enforce Euthanasia for people who don't match the most favorable gene mixes, they'll have to come up with a way to weed out people after they've reached their full potential. Expect a Logan's Run scenario where at 30, you're set free into the wilderness to fend for yourself.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Your wages came from your employer, someone else. Your employer got it from their customers, someone else. Their customers got if from THEIR employers, someone else.
So how is it not someone else's money?
Just because you're a clueless idiot who is against it for ideological reasons therefore your ignorance and stupidity is the result of deliberate intent, it is still stupidity.
1. Expect a huge increase in illegal immigration. This alone would kill the program.
2. Expect demands that the basic income by increased to a "living income." $10,000 is not even close.
3. Expect an increase in alcoholism and drug addiction.
4. Expect a revolt from retirees. A middle class worker who contributes to SS for 35-40 years can currently expect $20-30,000/yr in benefits at retirement. Will that be reduced? If not, add that to the cost of UBI.
5. Removes motivation for a large segment of society.
6. I could go on all day.
COE
Truly rich people - the ones with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars - pay very little percentage wise in taxes. This is because they have a small army of accountants and lawyers that can set up everything as funds, trusts, businesses, capital gain and loss offsets, charitable donations, offshoring, etc.
Warren Buffet is an excellent example of how the rich avoid paying taxes - he has almost no 'income'. He has capital gains, but he abuses the charitable donations to accumulate billions in tax credits while actually only spending a few million to do it. Then he complains the taxes should be higher (but not HIS taxes, of course. They should be lower).
No, the disparity is due to tax cuts under the fiction of trickle down economics.
Obamacare reduced the increases in healthcare insurance. They grew FASTER before Obamacare came in and reduced afterward. If Obamacare is a horrible thing for increasing insurance costs, what was the further depths of horror that was the system before?!?!?
You can't say it will do that unless you have reason to believe it will. For example, YOU would demand that government step in and keep the other programs, and everyone you know (or the large majority) would would be some reason for you to think that.
But, no, you don't think that, you just fear it therefore insist it must be so, because for the rightwing, anything that can be bad must be feared as going to be bad.
It requires a lot of changes, but picture this scenario:
1. Everyone get X dollars per month, regardless of income.
2. All other welfare programs (unemployment, medicaid, social security, food stamps, etc) stop, and all attendant bureacracies are closed.
3. Minimum wage is repealed.
In other words - we all get this allotment from the government, and that's it. No need to means-test. No work requirements. You want to blow it on candy bars - you go with your bad self.
The other side is - every penny you work for is worth same. It's not like unemployment where getting work decreases your benefits, so there is a certain swath of jobs where it is more benefical NOT to work. All the perverse incentives are gone. And, as close to 100% of the money you spend on social welfare as possible actually GOES to social welfare.
Employers have made it clear that they don't want to pay a living wage, so we make the government do it. Now, if you want to hire peopel at 25 cents an hour, and you can find people to do it, go for it. Labor costs fall through the floor.
Now you are in the range where this might make some sense.
Show me a quote where he says his taxes should be lower.
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more useful on-topic commentary by the heavy cream. "here is a weird book i read - pay attention to me - mom - mom - mooooom - moooooooom!!!! pay attention to me"
throw me the ball! why won't you include me in your game???? i'm gonna spew garbage till y'all are only talking about ME!!
Oh look, it's the drunken brigade. If you don't like my posts you are free to go to another site. I am here to discuss my life and things I read include my life. If you don't like reading about being content with hardships, go to a Website for Nerds and discuss your nerd stuff there. Now off with you, I have to refactor some amateur page scraper. I just learned that word and I need to use it in a sentence many times to remember it.
The UBI would be great news for Silicon Valley and businesses everywhere: They could slash their wages by the same amount as the UBI, turning it into a massive business subsidy.
UBI is a horrible and cruel idea. Money is not a natural resource like air, water, or dirt. It's the product of man made effort. *Somebody* has to work in order to create wealth.
Besides, the politicians will never go for this. They create welfare programs in order to control people!
We get the behavior we incentivize. If we pay women to have babies they can't otherwise afford, and then pay those babies not to work their entire lives, we end up with a society full of tribbles who do nothing but consume and reproduce, expecting it all to be paid for by someone else. That won't work folks, as the people who do work and pay the taxes to support all the tribbles will either give up and become tribbles themselves, or vote with their feet and escape. Either way, eventually the country will be a grain bin full of dead tribbles.....
I think Silicon Valley officials need to check the water supply for lead contamination, because obviously this Congresscritter is suffering froma severe lead-poisoning-induced cognitive deficit; either that or he's in the back pocket of some foreign national that would like to destroy the U.S. economy. So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will not work on anything other than a tiny scale! Anyone with a 4-banger pocket calculator from a dollar store can figure out in about 10 seconds why it won't! Why can't people get this simple concept through their thick heads? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH, DAMNIT!
remarkably stupid.
If they're going to insist on some retarded-ass 'pilot program', then SIGN ME UP, I'd love to live for FREE and just spend my days training on my bike and in the gym for road racing, not having to go to an actual JOB five days a week. After all I guess I'm a Special Snowflake and deserve to not be required to earn a living, right? Besides which being Gen-Y I won't live long enough to see the inevitable economic collapse UBI will cause so why should I give a damn? It's the Millennials' problem not mine, right?</sarcasm>
Show me a quote where he says his taxes should be lower.
I think it is implied when he hires an accounting firm to do his taxes.
So, why does he not just take a pile of his money and fund it himself for Silicon Vally for a year and show the work the results? Or is it a little expensive when he does not have my money too? (As opposed to Bill Gates who wanted to fix education and then wrote a check.)
He plays in the system that currently exist for everybody. One billionaire paying more in taxes isnt going to make a meaningful difference in US tax revenue so why be the one person who pays more.
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Because that would cost him a shit ton more money then if his taxes went up.
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No, they couldn't. Did you forget that people who are working will be using their UBI to pay the UBI tax?
In a capitalist system, dollars are ration units for most people (workers, not owners) -- and those ration units are used to get what the person needs or wants from the market. Given difficulties in centralized planning processes, it is unlikely to be more efficient in meeting most people's needs for the government to decide in advance what to make rather than let market forces meet those needs (assuming the market is regulated for externalities and risks). Maybe that may change someday as governments become more responsive and better planners via networked computing, but it does not seem where the USA is now.
That said, a real society is made up of a mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned interactions (as well as some theft that is hopefully minimized). Every society is going to decide on the balance of those five types of transactions based on its unique history and culture. So it is not wrong to think about how government planning could be done better -- as long as we think about how planning fits into that larger mix.
I discuss that in more detail on my website and in this video:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Remember the Axis of Evil? For some odd reason Venezuela was put on that list.
The USA has been trying to cause Venezuela to fail. And they're succeeding. The failure is not their socialism, since the interference of the USA is the simpler and more direct explanation.
So the mantra is that progressive taxation disincentivises working harder because earning more is taxed more.
But that presumes that the job is harder the more you earn, otherwise it isn't a detriment to get 50c off the dollar extra your hard work earned. But tell me how much harder the work of a CEO who gets 7 million a year is over a steelworker earning 100k?
And if you're talking lower down, where you get promoted from team leader to department head and the scope of the management increases, two things
1) It's not THAT much harder than your earlier work. It's mostly the same thing done but with a bigger impact if you fuck up.
2) That job still needs to be filled. So if a promotion to that post is taxed on the difference enough to make insufficient people apply for that job, it has to be filled and the wages for the job will increase until someone thinks the extra responsiblity (not really work, though it does lead to stress if you're conscientious) is worth the pay, despite the tax.
So until there's no extra work needed or it's taxed at 100%, there's no disincentive to earn more if you want more money to spend.
But to get back to the hidden context of the meme: "more pay means it's a harder job", please tell me how share dividends indicate hard work. So they should be taxed higher? How much extra hard work is done if you inherit? 100% tax there is no disincentive to inherit. Indeed it would remove the possible desire to kill someone to get the inheritance early, a trope of many a murder mystery. And the extra work is irrelevant when you get higher up the worker food chain, it's just the same work at a different salary. So taxes should be made on how far from the low level you are, not the pay?
was that it was generally the male earning, and usually even then the man earned more than the woman and for longer (men not getting pregnant and all that), but women still needing one house and one person's meals, therefore if it had at the time been set at the same rate as men, women would have starved. And the later time is because older women would be less likely to earn a wage and when they do get a lower one. If women (or, indeed men) could be counted on getting employed at 58 if they'd been unemployed for a few years before, and remaining employed longer than men, then the retirement age could be increased and some extra payment for state pension could be accrued.
But if you are less likely to be rehired, more likely to be "let go" and will earn less from 60 to 65, it makes no difference if the retirement age is moved from 60 to 65, it only means that instead of state pension you get unemployement benefit.
Which is no net change for the government welfare at all.
Some proponents advocate funding the move by cutting programs like food stamps and Medicaid. But that approach would take money set aside for low-income families and redistribute it upward, exacerbating poverty and inequality, Greenstein said.
Both programs would see reduced costs because the sudden infusion of an additional $10K/yr would bump a significant number of food stamp, Medicaid receipients income to high, knocking them out of the programs...
Oh, I'm sorry, are we NOT going to consider UBI as 'income' for government assistance programs?
Ken
320 Million people is the entire population of USA. I bet 1/3 of this population is under 18, which should not get the UBI. Roughly 2.2T.
When these fucking liberal asshats wanna take YOUR tax money to fund more lazy ass, useless people? Not ONE of these morons understand basic human nature: if you take care of people like that, the LARGE MAJORITY of them will never work. However, if they are starving, that's another story.
I'm not funding another fucking mooch with my tax dollars. If SV wants to use their profits for this, then by all means. Otherwise, STFU, sit the fuck down and let the adults fix all the shit you liberal twatwaffles have fucked up.
Pax Vobiscum
Because that would cost him a shit ton more money then if his taxes went up.
Which was my point. The rich guy needs more of my money to make his plan work. No.
He's free to donate more if he's so inclined.
You make me laugh. Odds are you make fuck all compared to him.
Furthermore, everyone has to pay taxes that goes towards things they don't like, from the far left to the far right. You not being happy paying your fair share for a social program doesnt mean a thing beyond what your prefer.
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Alright, since you're dense I'll repeat myself.
"One billionaire paying more in taxes isnt going to make a meaningful difference in US tax revenue so why be the one person who pays more."
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