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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."
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.
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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.
>"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.
You might want to look at the history of the idea before you start labeling it incorrectly, I think you'd be surprised.
So here's a solution that should be stable: unless you pay taxes or do something that will bring extra taxes in the future (education, maternity leave), you don't get to vote.
If left unchecked, the dolists would vote themselves extra benefits. "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." -- Ben Franklin (quote disputed). But if giving those handouts is the only way those who actually work can keep the political power, they need to keep the basic income high enough (or they'd be voted out again).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Any 10K per year would entirely replace food stamps and all other welfare measures. Why would you have UBI and still have a foodstamp system? It should also replace the tax threshholds. UBI + flat taxes + no other welfare. That's how you make it work, because it simplifies (abolishes) a whole pile of existing programs that are designed to be redistributive and massively simplifies the tax system.
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.
Aren't the rich the guys who pay most of the tax? They are in fact talking about using rich people's money.
The problem is one of scale. Even if the government took 100% of the wealth of the top 5% it still would be a drop in the bucket. By ny calculations to supply ~320M people $10K/year would cost $3,200,000,000,000 or $3.2 *trillion* dollars...every....single...year!
And, that number will only increase.
The *only* way this is even remotely feasible is if *all* other "social safety net" entitlement programs are halted. No more Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, food assistance, housing assistance, etc etc etc.
Basically it would be removing *all* government assistance in exchange for $10K/year per person. This would actually be a huge savings compared to existing entitlement programs, but at what human cost?
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Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
1. Many Republicans have long been supporters of EITC.
2. It is the Democrats who are generally opposed.
3. EITC is means tested, and requires people to work, so it is pretty much the opposite of UBI.
Expanding EITC has two big advantages over UBI:
1. It is politically realistic.
2. It addresses a real problem rather than an imaginary problem.
EITC addresses inequality, which is a real problem, by applying a negative income tax (subsidy) to people earning low incomes.
UBI addresses the problem of jobs disappearing completely, which is imaginary since there is no evidence that is actually happening.
You need food stamps because the people that receive them prove themselves to be incompetent to manage any money. You give them money and they still won't have food, hell most people that receive food stamps STILL manage to have their kids go hungry.
In my city we actually have a child hunger crisis, free breakfast and lunches in school and even during vacations. Why, BECAUSE corner and liquor stores accept EBT for cigarettes and alcohol all the while our food bank has curbside trucks (walk to the corner of the street and pick up free groceries) and tons of food rotting and spoiling in storage but the parents don't even bring their kids to the programs nor get the free food even though they're "unemployed", the programs are open 12h/day and the state pays their rent.
My significant other, when pregnant, actually managed to get $1200/month worth of groceries between food "checks" (which can be traded for specific items like eggs/milk, twice the trade value at farmers market and quadruple the value at food banks) and state and federal EBT. We actually got so much peanut butter, bread and cereal, they lasted about 6 months after benefits ended (she moved in with me and I make too much money).
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Downside of that solution is that in any society, if the non-voters get too pissed, they start a violent revolution. The benefit of democracy is to allow social change without violence.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If left unchecked, the dolists would vote themselves extra benefits. "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." -- Ben Franklin (quote disputed). But if giving those handouts is the only way those who actually work can keep the political power, they need to keep the basic income high enough (or they'd be voted out again).
I'm pretty sure lobbyists, Congresscritters and special-interest groups for rich people, corporations and banks already live by that creed. They routinely "vote themselves money" and get "handouts" - though they would never call them that. It's the less-rich who cannot afford to buy their representation that get screwed.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I have often thought it should be that way (or, similarly, if one is accepting public assistance, he/she can't vote).
I'm retired. My income consists of Social Security and compensation from the VA because I'm 30% disabled. (Service connected.) The compensation isn't considered income for tax purposes, and it's been at least a decade since I've even had to file a tax return. Does that mean that you think that I shouldn't be allowed to vote?
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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.
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you tell them they are only allowed to buy food
That's precisely not how UBI works. You don't tell them what to do with the money; you don't check up on them. There are no tests.
You just give them the money, and you save a whole bunch already because you no longer need a staggeringly inefficient bureaucracy to manage it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic." -- Ben Franklin (quote disputed)
Kinda seems like you were trying to rack that quote to justify your seemingly unfounded opinion.
Here's the real quote from the real author:
âoeThe American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.â
â Alexis de Tocqueville
The root of the problem is not the common people, it's how they are handled by the higher classes. They are just hungry and confused and not particularly conscious.
Of course they are going to act on base instinct. Obviously they aren't organizing and hatching plans to "steal" "free" stuff from "hard workers". That's what the upper classes do. They organize to get more stuff. But when they do it most people tickle their balls with compliments and say they "earned" it.
The immediate problem isn't even the elite, it's the middle class. They have access to both worlds, but are utterly complacent with this resources, refusing to look into things for themselves and direct their own educations. Until the middle class stands up and revolts against the elite, every evil of the world will continue to proliferate.
Then who pays for the national health ? The people out actualy working. Costing them more and those not working nothing. Im not sure i enjoy paying for other people.....