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Is Finland's Universal Basic Income Trial Too Good To Be True? (theguardian.com)
It was one year ago that Finland began giving money to 2,000 unemployed people -- roughly $652 a month (€560 or £475). But have we learned anything about universal basic incomes? An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
Amid this unprecedented media attention, the experts who devised the scheme are concerned it is being misrepresented. "It's not really what people are portraying it as," said Markus Kanerva, an applied social and behavioural sciences specialist working in the prime minister's office in Helsinki. "A full-scale universal income trial would need to study different target groups, not just the unemployed. It would have to test different basic income levels, look at local factors. This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people."
While UBI tends often to be associated with progressive politics, Finland's trial was launched -- at a cost of around €20m (£17.7m or $24.3 million) -- by a centre-right, austerity-focused government interested primarily in spending less on social security and bringing down Finland's stubborn 8%-plus unemployment rate. It has a very clear purpose: to see whether an unconditional income might incentivise people to take up paid work. Authorities believe it will shed light on whether unemployed Finns, as experts believe, are put off taking up a job by the fear that a higher marginal tax rate may leave them worse off. Many are also deterred by having to reapply for benefits after every casual or short-term contract... According to Kanerva, the core data the government is seeking -- on whether, and how, the job take-up of the 2,000 unemployed people in the trial differs from a 175,000-strong control group -- will be "robust, and usable in future economic modelling" when it is published in 2019.
Although the experiment may be impacted by all the hype it's generating, according to the Guardian. "One participant who hoped to start his own business with the help of the unconditional monthly payment complained that, after speaking to 140 TV crews and reporters from as far afield as Japan and Korea, he has simply not been able to find the time."
While UBI tends often to be associated with progressive politics, Finland's trial was launched -- at a cost of around €20m (£17.7m or $24.3 million) -- by a centre-right, austerity-focused government interested primarily in spending less on social security and bringing down Finland's stubborn 8%-plus unemployment rate. It has a very clear purpose: to see whether an unconditional income might incentivise people to take up paid work. Authorities believe it will shed light on whether unemployed Finns, as experts believe, are put off taking up a job by the fear that a higher marginal tax rate may leave them worse off. Many are also deterred by having to reapply for benefits after every casual or short-term contract... According to Kanerva, the core data the government is seeking -- on whether, and how, the job take-up of the 2,000 unemployed people in the trial differs from a 175,000-strong control group -- will be "robust, and usable in future economic modelling" when it is published in 2019.
Although the experiment may be impacted by all the hype it's generating, according to the Guardian. "One participant who hoped to start his own business with the help of the unconditional monthly payment complained that, after speaking to 140 TV crews and reporters from as far afield as Japan and Korea, he has simply not been able to find the time."
This program is neither universal or basic.
It's simply another welfare program.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Raised our taxes?
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns.
And I'm not some billionaire.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...the answer is "no".
This bit of libertarian free market horseshit clickbait is all about what they "hope to learn", not what they've actually learned.
The one bit of factual data shown in this story is as follows:
This is what passes for compelling data in right-wing neo-liberal economic circles..."one participant".
Finland is a great country. You know why you don't see people lining up to move to the US from Finland? Because they have hot blondes, great black metal bands and excellent vodka. Also, education and health care are free and both spouses get at least six months of paid parental leave when they have a kid. Socialism, and more economic liberty and mobility than the U.S.of A. The only downside is that it gets dark for a big part of the year. But that's what the hot blondes and vodka and black metal are for.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
Do we actually know that?
I think it's good of them to try it out in small scale just to be sure.
What is so bad about doing nothing? Many of our jobs are artificial anyway.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Finns will spend their money on vodka and salmiakki.
When you give money to white trash like Moscow Donald he uses it to pay off porn stars and commit treason.
I'll take a Mexican taco truck over a white traitor any day...
I don't know...
In the past (up until WW2, I guess), many creative types of work and technological advancements were brought to fruition by people who did not need to work, otherwise said they had the means to live comfortably without having to work. Still, they have produced very useful things, both in art and science.
Not saying this can repeat nowadays, but you can't dismiss it either.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Mod. Parent. Up.
For a few years, then your taxes will creep up.
Now we have 3 bums sitting on welfare because nobody will hire them for minimum wage and then they will lose welfare and besides they can't afford daycare for their kids. With UBI and no minimum wage, two bums pay the third one some change to watch the kids and go blow up balloons in birthday parties to earn money for some joints. Before long, bumtown with a collapsed economy has people trading with each other for services, some earning enough to pay back their UBI in taxes. In the meantime, everyone is staying busy and out of trouble. If we have to subsidize people, do it in a way that doesn't discourage them from working and gives them maximum flexibility in meeting their own needs on free market.
Indeed, and by taxing trust-fund babies to provide welfare services, we incentivize them to work instead of living off inherited wealth.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
FYI: Hillary won the less than $50K segment and Trump won all segments at and above $50K.
Same here; I'm not rich and I'm definitely seeing a tax break here. But for welfare parasites, cutting someone else's taxes is considered a "tax increase" for the parasite because they will be able to mooch less of the dole.
Trump raised our taxes to pay for tax cuts
Wow, I just feel SO SORRY for eat or west coast millionaires who have to pay more in taxes now that state tax refunds are capped. It's true you are helping pay for tax cuts for the poor across the U.S., sorry to hear you are so put out by it. Not.
I mean it's so sad that you may have to stop waxing your yacht quite as often as you like or what have you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Raised our taxes?
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns.
And I'm not some billionaire.
Wait 10 years.
The bill made permanent tax cuts for corporations and temporary ones for individuals. The reason is that reconciliation (the rule that let them pass the bill with only 51 votes) says the bill can't raise the deficit after 10 years. So at the 10 year mark the corporate tax cut is partially paid for by a tax hike on individuals.
Of course this is fake math since the GOP doesn't actually expect the individual cuts to expire. In 10 years they expect a Democratic administration to be in power, an administration who will be faced with either letting the cuts expire (and getting blamed for raising taxes on the middle class) or renewing the cuts and finding a way to pay for them.
I stole this Sig
It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook were founded by college students living on daddy's dime.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Sure for one to two years. consider your vote purchased.
For a few years, then your taxes will creep up.
But only if we elect Democrats, since they all voted against the tax bill and all the Republicans voted for it... so Republicans a few years from now would vote to keep the cuts permanent, and obviously Democrats would get rid of the tax cut.
Rare to see an AC on Slashdot argue so clearly why the whole country should vote Republican!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The deficit that many are predicting from this tax cut also assumes annual GDP growth of 2%, not the 3%+ we're running right now. Get back to 3% - the average we're used to seeing - and the deficit will come down.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It is too good to be true.
The problem is that these trials only ever give people free money. They donâ(TM)t tax the businesses in the same area considerably more to measure the impact.
You canâ(TM)t just give away millions of dollars extra without increasing taxes and increasing taxes makes it harder for businesses to employ people.
not artificial if you get money for it, with which to buy things. doesn't matter how pointless you might think a job is, only how much the person paying your believes it is.
You don't work, you don't eat. Simple. There may be a few exceptions such as crippled or elderly, but those are exceptions and not the general rule.
According to my last back of the envelope calculation, I'll be paying an extra 7% in federal taxes on my earned income ($60K per year) from my government IT job.
Then you should be hiring an accountant, because you're too incompetent to use a calculator properly.
If my math is correct:
$652 / month = $7824 / person / year * 2000 people = $15,648,000 total / year
"at a cost of around €20m (£17.7m or $24.3 million)"
Leaves $8,652,000 to mail out 24,000 checks.
This is why Government programs fail.
Accountants are probably the only people who benefited from the Republican tax bill. Most Americans will not be able to file their taxes on a postcard.
I'm unsure. I will pay more in taxes because my income will likely go up, that's one factor. But I will not get the same tax breaks I used to. My best guess is that I will pay slightly more, but it'll be small enough that it won't matter. Most charts I see out there show that the larger your itemized deduction, the more likely the taxes will go up, and people taking the standard deduction will benefit the most. I haven't used the standard deduction in years.
That's ok if your deductions are high because you're rich and are more able to absorb it, but there's a lot of people who may be relatively poor but with high deductions for miscellaneous reasons (medical for example). And anyone with high state and local taxes will lose out as only a fraction of that will be deductible.
You don't create wealth by taxation. No country has ever done better by increasing taxes. They just defer their problems.
But keep living that lie. It will catch up with you. It's like gambling - the house always wins and you lose.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
If they do nothing instead of spending their time committing crime it might well be worth it. If my options are to pay people to stay at home or to pay police, prison guards, and and much larger legal system I'd prefer to avoid creating bigger government for no real benefit.
Also, we're already paying loads of taxes to fund various welfare programs. You could have a reasonably sized UBI by getting rid of the various different programs and putting everything towards a UBI instead. That also has the added benefit of greatly simplifying the system and making another huge chunk of government bureaucracy redundant.
No system is going to be perfect, and there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system or who add no value to society, but they exist independent of the system. However, that shouldn't stop us from making pragmatic choices when possible.
which to buy things
...made in a foreign country
I think the idea is that most people, even people with severe limitations, want to do something. There is a percentage who will choose long-term to do nothing, however the cost of policing that exceeds the cost of accepting some leakage.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
All completely true, agree 100%. Hear, hear. /. who want to suddenly find themselves living in the economy of Star Trek's 24th Century Earth, but without the technological infrastructure that makes it possible: Ubiquitos nuclear fusion and antimatter reactor-based power (to the point cost-wise of being literally free to all), and matter-energy conversion technology, making matter replicators (which can create literally all the basics of existence for you instantly, for free, directly from energy, no other raw materials required). If we had these technologies, then the only people who would have to work would be the people who wanted to work, money would be obsolete, and the possibility of a Utopia where everyone can pursue whatever they wish to could become a reality. But we do not have these technologies, that society/civilization does not exist, energy sources and the basics for living are far from free, and so-called 'Universal Basic Income' simply does not scale up to a population the size of any first-world country.
There are many people on
Furthermore: it is my opinion that many of the proponents of UBI are disingenuous, and do wish to be living in a world where they get handed money, and will do nothing other than sit on their behinds, being fat, lazy, and contributing nothing to anyone other than themselves, with not a care in the world for the fact that they're just parasites.
The discussion of Universal Basic Income should be shelved until if and when we live in a world where we have the aforementioned technologies or equivalent to support it, and not a moment sooner.
Why? Paying farmers not to grow crops actually encourages them to grow more.
I dunno what the real estate market is like in Helsinki but 140 euro a week would be lucky to pay the rent on a 1 bedroom apartment where I live, a decent sized industrialised city in the Southern Hemisphere.
For those that believe in small government, a universal income would slash the number of public servants overnight - those who currently administer unemployment schemes in ensuring that 'dole bludgers' have met the appropriate conditions to continue receiving payments. This would also apply to administering veterans' affairs, disability support and aged pension.
For me, it *should* in the long run be a little better (though my withholding actually increased a shade), at least for the temporary interval.
For single parents and parents of 2 or more kids, unless they know to go rework their withholding, they will probably be blindsided by increased withholding, though they will have big refunds unless they fix that. The old W4s didn't give the companies enough info to accurately set withholding. There is a chance they make an educated guess about exemptions as to whether they are children, but that could lead to another problem.
For folks with any dependent adults in their household that they are not married to, they lose exemptions and no child tax credit to make up for it. If a company mistakenly assumes adult dependents are children and set withholding accordingly, they will be in for a particulary nasty surprise come filing time. Either way, it's a bad tax plan for having an adult dependent.
The biggest problems are:
-It's a shell game with the rates and standard deduction versus exemptions that end up with personal income taxes being about the same, despite all the rhetoric
-All those shenanigans were an excuse to pass a rather gigantic and meangingful corporate tax cut
-Signing up for a reduction of revenue to the tune of 1.5 trillion without any certainty of spending cuts is not exactly a fiscally responsible move. It's making things far worse, and then after making the mess using it as an excuse to go after medicare, medicaid, food stamps, and other 'entitlements', which will *really* hurt the lower class. If they had explicitly put those sorts of spending cuts as part of the tax bill, it wouldn't have passed, which says something about how obviously unpopular such a concept would be.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
not artificial if you get money for it, with which to buy things.
The money is real, but the work is artificial. So much of what happens is bullshit make-work that's unnecessary replication of effort, which happens only so that people can get paid. But there are environmental costs to work, so bullshit make-work is just spending the biosphere to maintain capitalism. Does that sound smart to you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know a similar situation exists with people on disability benefits. They can earn around $1,000 a month without losing benefits and health insurance. Many find part time work to earn just below the limit. However they're then trapped unable to accept a pay raise or seek promotions. Considering the benefits they receive it may be worth $1,000-$2,000 to remain on the program.
How does one go from earning $1,000 to roughly $3,000 in one jump? Some take classes or gain a certification that enables a career change, most stay part time indefinitely.
I think the country in the article already has universal health care so it's a fairly similar situation. Without the fear of losing their benefits I think a lot more would take the time to seek greater earnings.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Yes the money has to come from somewhere. But it's possible that this saves money elsewhere. The goal is not to give people money so that they stay home and watch cat videos, but to see if this actually gets them out and get jobs. This is an experiment only, because they have a radical idea that government should see what works and what does not work instead of relying on ideological gut feelings.
Unemployed people are a big drain on the coffers in many ways. Finland already supplies many basic services with a high tax rate. If they can save money in the long run that's a good thing.
The article also makes it clear that this idea was not a far left idea but came the center-right.
Even the tiniest universal basic income given unconditionally to every citizen of a country could save countless lives in situations where people are struggling simply to find food. it would be a brilliant idea and would be well and truly affordable by many governments now.
I dunno what the real estate market is like in Helsinki but 140 euro a week would be lucky to pay the rent on a 1 bedroom apartment where I live, a decent sized industrialised city in the Southern Hemisphere.
140s euros a week is more than enough to pay a mortgage in many places. Not desirable places, but nobody said that you should get to live someplace nice for free.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can relate to this. I am in my 40s. My home and vehicles were paid for in a few years of work. After I lost my job in the 2009 fiasco, I found that the three of us can live in Florida on
I'd have to be reminded of the old habits again to change that. If someone were to give me enough that I upped my spending significantly, it might get me hooked into the addiction of spending again.
What is so bad about doing nothing?
Try it some time. Very soon you start to hunt around for things to do. Shortly after that you begin to find ways of rationalising your time-wasting as productive, like "if aliens invade and challenge the earth to minesweeper, I'LL BE READY."
> Mr Piccolo: You CAN'T play someone in Minesweeper, it's a single-person game!
> We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING. Do we actually know that? I think it's good of them to try it out in small scale just to be sure.
Well the real question is does everyone need to do 'something that benefits a corporation' to bring value to the world. Someone do 'nothing' that sits at home and has no goals or ambition - well they are better off being paid not to work anyway - because they are going to do a shit ass job and make life worse for everyone else. Someone who might enjoy painting or creating art/song/etc. may do so now instead of taking up another job calling people to renew their car warranty. Is that still 'nothing'? Are we net better off?
If the 'worthless jobs' of working at a fast food place double your take home - would people treat them with more respect - because no boss will put up with lazy crap because at the back of their heart they worry about the kid at home that needs food/a home?
There are so many interconnected threads to the idea of what someone might do with the money.
As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie. We don't need the study to know this.
Answer to this question - is another question - How many billionaires that never need to work another day in their or their great great great grandkids lives - sit at home and do nothing?
One participant who hoped to start his own business with the help of the unconditional monthly payment complained that, after speaking to 140 TV crews and reporters from as far afield as Japan and Korea, he has simply not been able to find the time."
and this demonstrates why such programs ultimately fail. In the course of a year speaking to a 140 people somehow consumed all his time so he couldn't start a business? REALLY? being generous and saying each of these took 2 hours of his time what the fuck did you do with the other 1200+ workable hours of the year? no incentive to work means their is always an excuse to not work.
Can you say self presentation bias?
This program is neither universal or basic.
No, it's testing a specific aspect of a universal basic income, exactly what you'd want a responsible government to do.
It's simply another welfare program.
No, a welfare program is designed to maintain the well-being of citizens, this is an experiment to see if a universal basic income will reduce unemployment.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
But we don't know how big that segment is, or exactly how they are distributed, this will shed light on that question.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
They already had an incentive not to achieve anything, traditional welfare programs.
What this does do is reduce some pressure to find work, but it also removes some incentives for not entering the workforce (such as losing benefits).
I stole this Sig
Giving people money for not working will not encourage them to work. This is so illogical that it's laughable.
If I don't have to work then I have lots of time to do what I want to do, which is to do retromods and repairs, build drones, crap like that. Lots of people want to produce things, if only they had the time. Lots of people want they crap they want to make, or fix. Our system is dependent on looting and defiling the environment in order to provide people jobs which we say they have to have just because. Capitalism as it is being practiced depends on endless growth, but only amoeba and mushrooms grow endlessly. Unless you want to infest someone's guts or live in the dark and eat shit, you should have a better plan than theirs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In trial runs of UBI, the participants know that the trial will end. So if *hypothetically* people would go lazy secure in the knowledge they will have a UBI, this won't prove anything as they won't be that secure in the income.
A negative result would be really discouraging, a positive result would be too ambiguous.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
... they had the votes. My CPA told me that the domestic production credit (aka tax breaks for creating jobs at home) is gone! And I frigging believed him when he said he was going to bring jobs back home and held my nose and voted for his narcissistic ass.
You may or may not see more back... for the middle class, for a couple of years, some people will see decreased taxes. Some will see increased taxes. However, for sure you will see a tax hike when the cuts disappear (I believe in 8 years). Whereas the tax cuts that benefit the ultra-rich go on forever. Basically it's a cynical way for the politicians to be able to vote for the billiionare benefit w/o taking as much flak.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
No it doesn't. Fiat currency can come from nowhere.
It can be spent on goods and services though. These will involve a small amount of work done by an actual person. For the moment at least, until the jobs are replaced by further automation.
Any effective UBI would cost more than the sum total of government income from taxes. Which would require raising said taxes or else abolishing all other government spending (yeah, right). So, raise taxes and then you see the gradient ... where there is a clear line in the sand. Those below it benefit in varying amounts based on the amount their taxes were raised. Those above it, the opposite.
So ... when you peek behind the curtain, its nothing more than another welfare. And really there are much simpler ways of doing that if that is the goal ... so why all the UBI fanfare?
Parents scaling back to a one-income household is people doing nothing. But closer child raising doesn't directly translate into the holy Cash Dollars of Money (For Us In Particular) metric, so who gives a fuck right. Nevermind that it might have effects like better education or crime rates.
Well, considering that we simply don't have enough work for everyone, having a group of people who isn't going to compete for jobs is not really something I'd mind too much...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dude did you even read the bill? The top earners are getting hit hard. Theres even a Democrat that stated it will be hard to get millenials to vote Democrat once they see how much they will save. Google it. Crap.
In the end, you will have unemployed people. When there is one job and two people, whether one wants the job and one wants to not do it or whether both want it but only one gets it has the same net result.
It's heaps cheaper (for everyone involved, government, employers and even the unemployed, or the employee, respectively) if you remove those that don't even want the job from the equation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Try it some time. Very soon you start to hunt around for things to do. Shortly after that you begin to find ways of rationalising your time-wasting as productive
So I will become a php developer? A lawyer? A gender studies professor? An economist?
Also, during my periods of unemployment I usually either partied a lot or learned new skills (kernel programming, ocaml, story writing, performance). I find these skills productive for me, and this is more important than being productive to a rich man.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Sweden, Norway, Austria, Netherlands, Germany, ...
There's plenty of countries where the tax rates are high that offer a WAY higher quality of life than most of the US for most of its people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In other words, useless jobs (or to be more accurate, "growth") are to captialism like prayer is to christianity.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Creimer posted an on topic comment. Please do the same.
I keep hearing this myth, but oddly, countries that have a strong social system and hence a distribution of money to the bottom don't suffer from higher inflation than countries that distribute money up towards those that already have more than they can spend.
The reason for this is simple: The amount of goods and services that can be offered is not fixed. If you have 100 instead of 10 people wanting and being able to pay for a haircut, prices for haircuts don't go up. Instead, more barber shops open and more people have jobs.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
to be paid back.
When I was in high school I was a delivery driver for a drugstore. There was one "subsidized income" neighborhood where everyone was on welfare (I knew since they paid with welfare "stamps" for prescriptions) yet one had a nice porsche in the driveway, most had expensive electronics, etc. After a while I realized, that a good percentage of these people worked odd jobs "under the table" while collecting welfare - one guy drive delivering pizza for example and I asked him once about it - he said that delivering pizza was not going to sustain him and his family, and that he wouldn't do it the income was declared and simply deducted from his welfare (plus all the paperwork associated with it was a deterrent too), but will do it as "extra money" - along the reasoning of this finish study.
While I've always strongly believed that welfare should be a second chance, a social safety net to allow people to take bigger risks, rather than a way of life, the reality is that there will always be people who will do nothing unless starving, there are some on welfare which would contribute to society if welfare was in a form of basic income rather than welfare you have to qualify for. It also seems more fair and simpler to administer - everyone gets it, even the super-rich.
... and so is yours. Wealth is created through efficiency - aka how little work do I need to do to get the most for my effort? There are many places where taxation and government led spending is the only approach to achieving a certain efficiency. Health care is a good example - rather than having highly regulated, health insurance providers whose only job it is to deny coverage and create profit, the government could expand medicare to everyone who wants it and simply tax everyone to pay for it. Another one is air pollution - polluted air has health care costs, so making R&D investment dollars ðY' available to reduce pollution, and taxing people upfront to pay for it but reducing the health insurance costs and medical costs in the long term are strategic moves that only a government could make.
10 years, HAH. The tax giveaways to corporations are so extreme that in order to keep under the 1 trillion dollar/10-year limit, the personal tax cuts expire after only 5 years.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Your logical flaw is to assume that the amount of money for working and not working is the same. If those 600something bucks is enough for you, don't go to work. Personally, I couldn't even live a week off that.
And bluntly, if you can't earn more than 600 bucks by working, the problem is that salaries are too low and someone not paying more does not deserve getting employees.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Claims fake math... cites Wikipedia as reference.
Yeah, yeah, there is absolutely NO difference. But hey, you lump Nazis together with Commies, so even trying to educate you is probably a lost cause.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Some people are really offended by other people doing nothing. They think there is a pride to work (there's reasonable room to debate), and that pride can be earned by the threat of starving to death.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
You say that like it isn't the obvious thing to do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Perhaps this will make it easier. You will have a tax cut, unless you itemize more than 12K in deductions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/tax-bill-calculator/?utm_term=.c86e3b9bdd3d
There are two flavors of UBI. If the money is enough to live, then employers have to convince workers the jobs are worth it. If it is too low to live, workers must take any job, and employers can pay less because there is UBI, this is just a socialized help for the employers.
At $652, it depends where you live. In some cities, this is clearly the second flavor of UBI.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's the liar's talking point. Almost everyone will get a tax cut, but they are out in full force lying and trying to sell it as for roch/corporations only.
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns. And I'm not some billionaire.
No, you are simply an idiot, a liar, or a Russian troll (the latter being more probable). You will end up paying handsomely for debt service of the trillions stolen by Trump and his cronies, and your children will too, that is, if you are not too stupid to figure out how to reproduce. Is a dog biscuit now enough to convince you that it is a good idea for you and your (also stupid?) descendants to suffer thousands or millions of dollars of future losses?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"...This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people."
A dozen countries have decades of statistics from millions of welfare recipients.
You could have found that answer a hell of a lot cheaper than $24 million.
They would have needed about ten more to make it permanent, as it was it was very close to not passing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Washington Post calculator says I'll get a $1,500 tax cut. New York Times calculator says I'll get a $750 tax cut. Which one is accurate?
It's the Alaska Permanent Fund from proceeds of rights to oil drilling and pipeline rights-of-way. People studying the feasibility of basic income should start there.
The deficit that many are predicting from this tax cut also assumes annual GDP growth of 2%, not the 3%+ we're running right now. Get back to 3% - the average we're used to seeing - and the deficit will come down.
Your assumption is garbage because high debt is certain to bring down GDP growth as an increasing portion of the nation's capital is diverted to debt service. Or in other words, get used to watching China's tailpipes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My twice a month paycheck is going UP, not down. Seems to me your math is incorrect. If the government were taking MORE of my money, I would have LESS, not more.
Hello Troll!
Hello high-numbered poster with an english-as-a-second-language-sounding nick!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
And... Based on the fact that even fairly simple math is too complicated for you, I can both understand why you are only getting paid $60k year in an IT job, and horrified that you haven't been replaced yet.
I'm not talking health care or emergency services here. I'm talking everything else. In my town most of the homeless living on the street work and I think that is respectable. Begging should be a last resort measure- but I respect those humble enough to do it who are living on the street. There are large groups that government won't help. And I think this is probably best, but the real problems is government is the reason we have a lot of homeless people.
I find homeless people whom take to begging to be demonstrating a form of self reliance. It's a respectable quality we should all strive for. They're not stealing from you or I. They're *asking* you for charity. The problems we have are government interference in this practice and crack downs on "tent cities" and regulating those trying to help via various method. From cracking down those offering shelter because "safety" to those providing expired food to the homeless.
Stealing from Joe and Steve to pay for Sara's apartment is immoral. Ever heard the ends don't justify the means? Well, that's what government does. It steals from many and threatens anybody who refuses to pay up. Charity *is moral*, but stealing is not. So stop voting for these wealth redistribution schemes. It doesn't matter if it's a corporate wealth redistribution scheme (ie forcing people to purchase health insurance takes money from one group that does not have it in many cases and puts it into the hands of another who wants it, ie insurance companies) like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was (Obamacare) or welfare.
The best thing to do for the poor is to eliminate the police (ever hear of private security??? it's not a bad thing- because you get to decide how much or how little you want- and police don't actually make us any safer- they merely take reports and harass mostly people committing victimless "crimes"), the drug war, customs, boarder thugs, welfare, social security (ie you pay for it- and if you didn't you'd be able to better invest your own money!!!), and all the other schemes the government has put together over the years. It's depriving everybody of around 70% of there income. I'm neither a conservative nor a socialist. I want my freedom back.
Either you're lying or repeating lies you've been told. I suspect that your $60k/year IT job is really 60k after taxes, in which case, yes, suck it up, or you've got quite a bit off other income that you're deliberately not starting.
And yes, my taxes are going up, but that's on about $120K/year out off the taxpayers pocket and its okay that taxes go up on 6 figure incomes.
And then they tell me that capitalism is not a religion.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Chris,
The discrepancy is obviously related to the way the sites handle operator precedence when you entered the data and you have to adjust for it.
Since you are renowned for having a problem with operator precedence and that you don't even know what an operator is, I would follow that other poster advice and hire an accountant,
Read what Chris Reimer (cdreimer) wrote here:
https://groups.google.com/foru...
You are such a perfect miracle imbecile Chris!
I can't believe that you are actually imbecile enough to post this thread here. It makes you look like an even more imbecile fucktard yet.
As some have stated on that thread "dot is NOT an operator", you fucktard! Apperently, you did not read the thread yourself or more likely, your ameba brain reading comprehension doesn't allow you to understand its content.
It's like asking: What is the dot operator precedence in Linux Slackware 1.2.3? You can't daisy chain dot operators in Windows versions (e.g. 3.1, 3.11, etc.)
What is the precedence in the 2.5 IQ that you possess?
And if you ever asked about real operators the word is "Precedence" you fucktard!
Dots are not operators in ANY OOP language you silly fuck!
See java:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase...
For python, you could have googled it but no, you needed to grab the attention on that google group and didn't care that it made you look like a total fool.
http://reeborg.ca/docs/oop_py_...
See example in above link:
Fido.head.mouth.teeth.canine.hurts();
Other example:
Criemer.head.brain.isHurting(); This is always false because your head is empty you dumb fuck!
But Criemer.head.isEmpty() always returns true...
Maybe this is why I see the largest number of homeless people sleeping on the streets than I have ever seen, while the news programs are all proudly announcing that the unemployment rate is at a record low because the economy is totally awesome. It's bullshit. These people get written off because it makes the numbers look good.
In any event, this Finnish thing is an EXPERIMENT. It is not concluded, they want to see if this idea works or not. But no, Slashdot says experiments are stupid, just go with your gut feelings, because science isn't popular anymore.
Actually, I believe that the 1 Trillion increase to the deficit assumed annual GDP growth of 4%+, which is not going to happen. If growth is lower, then the 1T deficit increase will be far, far worse. In no case will it be lower than 1T; the GOP used every magic number they could getting it that low, and their estimates have been terribly incorrect
My taxes are going down for now, but it's not worth it.
neither, in the long term you actually get a tax increase with a short term decrease. sadly people focus heavily on the short term which is why this shit gets through. Corporate Tax needed reducing but the way it was done is going to be a clusterfuck that sinks the US into massive debt.
I'm getting tired of all the AC's who are polluting \. with Trump comments in every thread. While I can understand mentally ill people can be affected by TARD (Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder), the fact that Trump is living in their brains, rent free, and infecting everything they do and say is unfortunate. It will be my tax dollars which pay for their medication, therapy and future involuntary committal to an institution.
Trump said we should be able to do our taxes on a postcard. If anything, the Republican tax bill made taxes more complicated. There's no such thing as "simple math" when it comes to taxes.
Now send me my UBI!
I am not offended by other people doing nothing. I AM OFFENDED by me paying other people to do nothing though.
Truth is treason in an empire of lies.
Have a national ID card or set of national ID to prove citizenship. Not a citizen? No basic income.
Just go for real means testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Citizen is not working for any reason for a longer time and is not between work for a short time? Basic Income long term with no questions asked.
Citizen is not getting a wage above the min wage for any reason? Basic Income support long term with the need to report any wage changes.
Citizen has a varied and seasonal wage that is below the min wage for some months in the year? Basic Income support and monthly reporting of any wage changes. So they are always supported.
The citizen finds full, part time work thats well above the min wage again? No more basic income.
That would be more fair on citizens who are not working and people who need support while re entering the work force.
A provision that covers all citizens at the many different stages of productive work in many different parts of a nation.
Been in full time work or a profession and changing to another job? Unemployment benefits that stop when a citizen has found a job again.
Automate the basic income for the poor from the existing support payments.
No citizen with a good paying job, good income gets the basic income.
Non citizens attempting to prove their need to become citizens can stay in supported housing with no claim to basic income.
Non citizens can become citizens, move to another nation wanting to accept large numbers of non citizens or get deported back to their own nations.
The basic income does not become a reason for non citizens to stay in the nation offering its own citizens a basic income.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Because those that have no choice but to work hard and feed their family aren't always fond of leeches who take away half their paycheck for doing nothing.
Hmm...Federal Budget...all the "Social" programs combined (welfare, medicare, medicaid, SS, various pension plans and such) would allow for a UBI of ~$7500 per person. Which isn't a lot, but might (and I stress MIGHT) be enough for a family. Maybe.
Double Federal Income taxes, and you boost that amount to ~$12.5k per person. And which should be more than adequate for a family of four....
Note that a UBI should also reduce the Federal Bureaucracy a bit - won't need people to determine whether you meed the requirements for Welfare, Medicaid, etc. Which may or may not be good, depending on your perspective.
So, might be doable, might not. But certainly worth looking into.
PS. Do note that increased taxes would be part of the deal. On the other hand, no taxes on your UBI, so you get that much as an absolute minimum....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As long as people are freely giving you money, you're doing something that someone wants. There's plenty of BS in large orgs, but they're paying you for some reason, even if it's not a good one.
$24 Million for a government to spend on an experiment that may reorder all of society seems downright cheap - possibly irresponsibly low.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Chris,
Please stop hurting yourself and I beg you to hire an accountant.
--
Silvia Bunge
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley
You miss one basic fact in the 'analysis'
These are Finns, not Americans.
there is a reason that Scandinavian (and yes, Finland is marginally that, but hey) socialism 'works' (at least better than other places), and that is that they still have a moderate number of people who are responsible, proud to be reasonably self sufficient, realise that stupid actions tend to lead to actual and bad consequences, etc.
IMHO, a lot of that comes from living somewhere where tripping over on the wrong winters day can, and does, kill people. Not planning ahead when a storm is coming can and does kill people.
These countries are NOT America. They may have their own issues (and certainly do), however they are a very very different place.
Unfortunately they are being slowly infected by 'American Exceptionalism' and all the BS that seems to drag along with it, however they are less far along that diseased path.
TL;DR - Finns are more likely to work even if they dont have to - which you would understand if you know some Finns, however they can also do math, and wont work if it means they come out worse off.
Americans are actually united in a way that Democrats and Republicans are not: The majority of us favor both tax cuts and increases in benefits. They both sound good to me, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Good news, no one is asking you to pay a dime. The government's paying for it.
Also, it's probably cheaper than putting down an insurrection, or dealing with the crime that people turn to to feed themselves
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Didn't you get the memo? Creimer fired all his trolls yesterday. Your services are no longer needed. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
not artificial if you get money for it, with which to buy things. doesn't matter how pointless you might think a job is, only how much the person paying your believes it is.
Well there's a fundamental difference to a private company hiring you because they think you're doing a useful job and a public company hiring you to do busywork to pretend like you're not unemployed.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Oh, we are so SO far past that.
I am offended by other people who are not doing anythings children being given priority access to health and education over my children, because I choose to not do nothing.
I suspect the next stage will result in me being offended that what I have worked my life for is taken away and given to people who did nothing, because I am 'entitled' (ie: I worked hard, and saved, and ended up without towering debt) and they are 'victims' of me having dared to try.
Of course the powers that be are quite happy with that - a class war is as profitable as any other kind, and they make sure they rules never touch themselves.
The ONLY Solution unfortunately involved people putting aside their small differences, uniting the middle and lower classes against those at the top, and tearing down the corrupt power structures put in place by those at the top.
Unfortunately, the majority are more worried about friday night football, Oprah, and who is showing their tits on game of thrones.
Panem et circenses.
Looks like the sum quoted wouldn't pay the rent for a small studio flat in Helsinki:
https://www.expatistan.com/cos...
Maybe rent is paid for separately.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Trump said we should be able to do our taxes on a postcard.
Yes, good lord, yes!
STUDEBAKER HOCH can write THE LORD'S Prayer on the head of a pin!
Why bother with means testing? You can tweak the income tax so that it works mathematically the same, but you save any overhead from determining if someone qualifies.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
a) - yes this is not UBI, naturally, as they are not making it universal, they are testing on the lowest part of society.
b) you dont understand what UBI is, and I suspect you are an American.
a *real* UBI is simple.
You scrap unemployment payments
You scrap government pensions
You scrap disability payments (other than actual medical support)
You scrap housing support
You scrap the tens of thousands of government jobs involved in operating, planning, administering , and policing all of that
You scrap minimum wage laws
You scrap unions for public sector workers
You take all the money you just saved per month, divide it by the population, and send everyone a cheque.
The thing a lot of people DONT realise about UBI is it is a politically 'small government' not 'socialist', because the main reason it works is the entire section of government you remove by simplifying things.
The theoretical gains are efficiency - the people who were administering everything are not free to have productive jobs in the economy
The people who were on benefits which stopped them working (by being removed if they did) are free to work without loss.
Thanks Nancy,
Your posts are always enlightening and right on topic! Keep up the good work over there at Special Education!
I have noted that Chris uses child psychology to convince his so called trolls to give up by pretending they just give him free publicity. That's adoring! ;-)
Anyway Chris would have a hard time to learn anything above child level matters, including psychology.
https://childdevelopmentinfo.c...
---
Silvia Bunge
Psychology Department
University of California, Berkeley
Imma let you Finnish[sic], but this is a great idea! :)
You guys are hella-weird, but you have the best social programs in the world.
Keep it up Finland! Maybe the US can learn something from you.
Chris' case is definitely getting extreme now. His paranoia caused him to fire his accountant because he thought he was a troll!
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
So, the reason the individual income tax cut is not permanent is because the DNC voted against it? Had they gotten 9 DNC Senators on board the tax cut for workers would be perm?
Sounds like we need to boot out DNC that hates middle class workers and get the GOP another 9 seats at the least so we can make it perm for us.
Yea, its the GOP that did something for the workers that is evil, while the DNC that shit on us is our friends?
Fuck off.
I remember when the military raised their Base Allowance for Housing (BAH). The same time that increased was the same time all the apartments increased their rates to take advantage of that additional income. That's the real danger of just getting money from the government is all the businesses that may take advantage of it.
So that people working who are in full time employment pay tax and don't get paid a Universal Basic Income.
They are working and get a good wage in the private sector, from the gov, mil as part of working and having a real job every day.
That keeps the universal basic income for people who really need it. Citizens who cant work, who have seasonal work, are doing part time work, are doing education or re entering the work force.
Lots of citizens will need the universal basic income as they study, cant work, change jobs, find seasonal work.
Citizens with full time jobs don't need a universal basic income as they have a normal income every month and year. Working citizens have a wage.
Means testing ensures a government can keep the universal basic income working well for generations of all its citizens.
Working citizens pay taxes to support the universal basic income.
Citizens not working or looking for work get the universal basic income.
The ratio of tax payers and people not in work can cover the costs of supporting a universal basic income thats only for a nations citizens.
An old age pension then covers citizens without a private pension or a low/failed private sector pension plan.
No need to cover non citizens. Citizens who are working normal jobs and paying tax to support the universal basic income payments every year.
Means testing ensures all citizens get their universal basic income until they find full time work, find a good job after getting an education and stat paying taxes.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why do we expect the poor to be meaningfully different than trust fund babies?
My point is that the income tax on people making more than X can just be increased by the UBI amount. And then it's the same as not paying them UBI, but it saves a lot of paperwork.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'll save a little, the rich will save a lot, and your kids will have another trillion in debt to deal with.
Excuse me. If we are running 3% growth right now, why do we need the tax cut?
Nope. it was based on a static projection with no assumption of growth. A dynamic scoring of the tax bill shows a MUCH smaller deficit, and even then it assumes GDP growth of under 3% per year. Push past 3%, and it's going to be a net gain.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Wait 10 years.
The bill made permanent tax cuts for corporations and temporary ones for individuals.
Why does this objection always sound like the old joke "the food here is terrible ... and the portions are so small!"
Paying 100% of a nation a UBI to wealthy, working citizens with good average wages is not going to "save" on the amount of UBI payments.
Paying a few citizens doing further education, who cant work, doing seasonal work who are between work will save on UBI payments every generation.
Only so many citizens are not working, doing study, cant work in any given generation. For many years most of the rest of the normal citizens are earning a real wage and paying taxes to pay for the UBI.
No need to pay a citizen who is working a UBI. Ensure the UBI is for citizens who are not working, cant work, looking for work.
Governments use less "paperwork"now and can use gov computers to sort their entire population of citizens. Who gets a payment, who is working, who is doing seasonal work, who is doing study, who needs an old age pension, who has a/some private sector pension.
No work and a citizen gets their full UBI.
The UBI fully covers all citizens who need it until they are working again, reach retirement age. Then they can use their private sector pension or get an old age pension.
The UBI can then keep helping generations of citizens when they needed it.
Workers, professionals who are working and productive don't need a UBI and can be set to not get a UBI with a tax database. No "paperwork" needed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It will show everyone (again) that rent seekers control a huge portion of the economy.
This is Finland.
They already did nothing and received something anyway.
That's how it work.
The bit above â600 isn't even much money in Finland.
And they don't necessarily get more money.
However I assume they get the money no matter what! Even if they start to have an income. So they definitely get advantages of getting one. Also they don't have to worry about losing the benefit but know they will always have it.
Mean-while I'm in Sweden and get â1100 / month or something for not doing anything but if I started to do something I'd lose this benefit and the right of it (though I could always go back to â750-800 ...) but that make it a bit less attractive now doesn't it?
It is artificial if you get money for it in a socialist society. Like our Nordic countries.
Plenty of artificial jobs created either directly in the public sector or on up public spending to cover part of the salary or even salary + payment to the employee for accepting the previously unemployed to do something. All salaries here doesn't come from people who actually wanted to pay for the service made. It's socialist enough societies to pay for the stuff people and companies don't really want to spend their own money or resources onto.
Who would have guess that?
Now they have the time and funding to commit more elaborate crimes. "World's Dumbest Criminals" has a surplus of material to choose from.
Christopher, my love,
Never mind those "hump leg" trolls.
I am deeply sorry. I didn't feel well lately but I am better now since I had my meds adjusted. I am sorry that I called you all sorts of names and I feel truly ashamed of myself.
The python click script you wrote for me my sweet love for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work.
Could you come visit me in my studio so we could look at it?
Signed:
Ethell, your sweetee tree who will love you for ever.
P.S. when I posted there was a funny form that asked me to retype the word "biceps" in a text field. That's funny and I went to look at your new picture again and got turned on. Please contact me ASAP.
I am not the one who comes across as a Russian government sweatshop employee.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Ya dummies, that's the point. If you want to live in Helsinki and go out for drinks, you supplement your UBI with a job. The job might be part time, and it might be something that doesn't crush your soul, and the UBI is there so that when you add it to your wages you can live securely even if your wages are low. It's not meant simply as welfare. It's meant as as a starting point on which you build to whatever extent is compatible with your sense of initiative.
How about this. Consider it a subsistence existence payment. The payment for denying the people the right to subsist by being a hunter gatherer. What right do you claim to be able starve people to death, by denying them a subsistence existence and killing them slowly in prison or fast with a bullet should they dare to attempt a hunter gatherer existence. By what right do you claim to be able to force slave labour or starvation and any claim on that right also provides a claim on the right for people to kill anyone who attempts to deny them a subsistence existence. A human being has a right to exist and the right is expressed by being able to exist to survive, not to be turned into a slave via threat of starvation, imprisonment until death or summary execution.
The simplest definition of capitalism, 'my capital worth is worth more than you life', in fact as many people as need to perish in order to preserve my capital value and that is the fact of capitalism, the legalisation of capital worth being greater than human worth.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Wow!
Sex between a tree and a mountain!
This obviously surpasses anything creimy the mountain could have envisioned!
At least, creimy the mountain has hopes to go on...
For the ones that might not get the reference to the creimy the mountain story, it is inspired by Billy the mountain by Frank Zappa. It is a classical that has its own Wikipedia page, with useful documentation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I have to admit the story fits nicely with creimer's one! :-0
Lower crime rates means less police and lawyers which means higher unemployment which means increased taxes for those who do work to support whole population getting free money.
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns. And I'm not some billionaire.
No, you are simply an idiot, a liar, or a Russian troll (the latter being more probable). You will end up paying handsomely for debt service of the trillions stolen by Trump and his cronies, and your children will too, that is, if you are not too stupid to figure out how to reproduce. Is a dog biscuit now enough to convince you that it is a good idea for you and your (also stupid?) descendants to suffer thousands or millions of dollars of future losses?
That's one thing about Russian social network trolls: it's clear when you get under their skin.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Bullshit. There's studies on UBI going back decades suggesting it works well and doesn't significantly decrease employment (the exceptions tend to be students, parents of young children, and other people in temporary situations where working is clearly bad for their well being). The claim that UBI has anything to do with technological advancement is a misguided argument from proponents who are trying to point out that in the extreme it's necessary.
Crime might increase. If you have to work to reliably eat and keep a roof over your head, you have less time to augment your income with crime. Once you have a reliable income that will meet most of your essential needs, you don't need to work and have plenty of free time to augment your income with crime. The more sporadic tax free income you gain from crime will buy you bling.
YOU are not an ECONOMIST.
Would work much better in a very poor country. We should try it in a few of these countries. My expectations is that it would significantly and permanently boost the economies of these countries.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree cremertard, as you seem to enjoy calling yourself!
Good night now!
--
Ethell
Your beloving imaginary tree wife
Kind of like how a segment of the population in my country has been given a choice to invest, bought 10 houses and then use negative gearing to pay zero tax.
They do nothing for the country too, in fact, there's abandoned buildings all over the place that just sit there unused because it means someone doesn't have to pay any tax from the writeoff.
"some people are lazy do nothings" is Kind of a pointless argument when you have leeches already sucking money out of the system at the higher levels.
Non-citizens should not get any benefits.
I don't think we need to be 100% at post-scarcity in order to start experimenting with UBI and the effect it has on the economy.
With how rapidly automation is moving it might be needed temporarily in some cases as a welfare system like Finland is testing. Consider the freighting industry in the US for example, which has almost 1 millions truckers right now. I don't foresee that being automated to the point of 0 humans but I see the industry shrinking drastically. You could see 1 or 2 people acting as lead drivers in a automated truck caravan style (2-3 following trucks) setup. To me this seems highly likely since there still remains a large demand for truck drivers, so this would meet that demand and over time result in the number of needed drivers shrinking. Then there are the taxi services, aeronautical services, etc. Again, most of these will probably maintain some level of human involvement but you will need fewer bodies in place to do it and it might even reach a point where those bodies don't need formal training for some of these jobs.
Some of these current jobs pay well and the smart people will be looking for what they need to learn for the new industry change. The issue is that a subset of these people either won't have the money or the smarts (maybe they believe their job is secure) to train in advance. These people may only get 2-4 years "advance notice" before the market really starts to shift hard and they all start to get their pink slips. At that point, there won't be a lot of jobs around that require their skill set so they'll have to retrain, which I don't see a lot of people in the mid-40s to early 50s doing. This is where UBI/Unemployment programs will step in. Giving these people $600-1k a month to give them breathing room to find a new place to work. If we don't do this, we'll see our economy contract even more.
You earned $25 from your side "business." 7% of that is $1.75 (coffee money). Easy!
Thanks Ethell,
I have to go to sleep now so I can wake up at 4:30 in the morning and spend an hour and a half turning around in my bed while glancing at the books underneath it before catching the express bus.
I will talk to you tomorrow, I promise,
Love you sweet darling tree.
XXX
Good news, no one is asking you to pay a dime. The government's paying for it.
I'm sincerely curious where you think the government gets the money.
Most European countries are not living up to their defense obligations, relying upon the US to backstop them. That isn't a trivial matter.
Here is an interesting read: If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States
Many European nations are endangering their future with the policy choices they are currently making. In 30 years it is possible that Europe will be almost unrecognizable, including the country you live in. Demographic decline, immigration, the EU is under great strain already and the heavy hand of Eurocrats may push other countries to leave the UE. Russia is resurgent, Eastern Europe is terrified, and Western Europe is intent on suicide it seems.
Be sure to turn off the light before you go.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You dont takes in consideration my silver anonymous stocker precious metal channel has far most hits!
woosh...
Alternatively, you just aren't very funny.
The TCO for a house is not just the mortgage, though.
fuck your grasp of economics is just too awesome to debate. perhaps it might be a good idea for you to research where the government gets its money,
The problem is this test won't tell the government what they want to know. A UBI causes the economy to pivot around the value of the currency. The economy tries to value the UBI according to how much productivity was generated to earn it. Since zero productivity was generated, it tries to value the UBI at zero, which means it devalues the currency (inflation driving the UBI received closer to zero value).
However, this effect is negligible when you only have 2000 people on your UBI. Basically the millions of other taxpayers end up subsidizing the UBI recipients at a fraction of a cent on the Euro. Which means the resulting currency devaluation is only a fraction of a percent - impossible to distinguish from regular inflation.
Totally different story if, say, a quarter of your citizens elect to live off the UBI.
The thing UBI proponents don't seem to get is that while money's value can fluctuate, productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed has to be produced at some point. Consequently, if a UBI causes a significant fraction of people to produce less (quit their jobs and live off the UBI), then overall productivity will decline. There are fewer goods being produced, so those goods will be priced higher (basic supply/demand) - i.e. the value of the currency declines. You can make money out of nothing, but you cannot make productivity (goods and services) out of nothing. Someone has to work to produce those things before someone can consume them.
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes. Also, "hopefully" is not a good way to govern.
2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead.
3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion. If the US were to implement a $4.6 trillion UBI program, it would be short $1.3 trillion per year - and that's assuming it is willing to give up completely on healthcare, education, infrastructure, defense, research, fire departments, a police force, etc.
Of course you can just raise taxes... Let's say we just keep defense and interest payments, and get rid of all other US government programs (that means no more social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment compensation, pensions, the supplementary nutrition assistance program, education, veterans benefits, housing assistance, etc.). That means we still have to somehow come up with $0.9 trillion for defense and interest payments, plus of course $4.6 trillion for UBI. Income taxes would have to be raised from its current level of $1.5 trillon to $5.5 trillion, so each American taxpayer will have to pay 3.7 times as much income tax. If you think that's feasible, great, let's have UBI!
Shall we do it for Finland? The cost of living is at least something like E10800/year (that's for a _student_, living in _student housing_, not for normal families, but hey, let's roll with it). There are 5.5 million people in Finland. UBI for the whole country would cost E59 billion per year. Total government revenue for Finland is E55 billion.
Actually this UBI program is only paying E6720/year. This is below cost of living, so either these people have some other source of income, or they are living in cardboard boxes. Even so, rolling it out to the whole nation would cost E37 billion, leaving precious little for other government expenditures.
Beware of ABI, because in all the proposals, brain farts and wishful thinking I've seen, it is not paid for by the 1%, but by the working middle class.
So a Millionaire then? Because my Middle Class ass got a Tax INCREASE.
The main flaw in that study (that I can find after a couple of minutes) is that the statistics are completely wrong. The median income figures used are *post-tax*. The swedish figures are ignoring the income used to pay for everything in the state:
* free healthcare.
* free education.
* paid parental leave.
* subsidized childcare.
* much much more.
The correct comparison is the gross income figures. In the swedish case somebody earning around the median level is paying about 25% in direct (visible) taxation, and about 65% in invisible employer contributions. I.e. If their headline (visible) salary is $40000, they receive about $30000 after tax, but their total tax ia about $30000 taking into account mandatory social contributions from their employer. Their actual gross salary is about $60000 and this study treats it as $30000.
Tldr: the study is deliberately using the wrong income figure to make a false comparison.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes.
One of the reasons they don't work is working means they lose benefits. But they don't lose the UBI by working, therefore more will enter the labour force (to get extra money) and pay more taxes.
2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead.
I don't know all the details of this implementation. But I'd assume that some would be eliminated entirely and others remain, overall a reduction in benefits paid and administration.
3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
No it will not. The bulk will come from taxes. The reduced administration just makes things more efficient.
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion.
Remember coupled with that massive tax hike is a massive rebate in the form of the UBI.
When it all balances out it's not that different from making the tax code more progressive and giving everyone who's unemployed EI benefits. The fact these people are surviving right now suggests we're giving the necessary resources to live, the UBI just changes how we direct those resources.
And if the UBI does bring more people back into the labour force you make the country wealthier.
I stole this Sig
In any event, this Finnish thing is an EXPERIMENT. It is not concluded,
Is it Finnished?
But to test whether the action was causal, should there be a parallel test where jobs are created, and then see how many are filled?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Just because you don't like it, does not alter the meaning of words.
This program is neither universal or basic.
Yes it is.
Universal = everyone gets it
Basic = everyone doesn't get very much of it
Income = the money that everyone gets not very much of.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Durrrr. No shit, sherlock. It comes from taxes just like all other welfare.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If you need to work to reliably eat and keep a roof over your head, but you CAN'T find work anywhere due to illness, lack of (the right) skills, past crime history making you undesirable for hiring etc., then spending your time stealing stuff becomes very attractive. If you have a reliable income and you're basically a good person you stop stealing stuff.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
There are people in this group who got a job and some who started their own business. While the study is not about universal basic income, it will perhaps answer to the question how people will use this kind of money. Not sure why we need such a study, since similar study was already done in India and Kanada and results are very good. In other words, it is a good idea to give free money to the people.
But that is only when people know that the money will end within few years. We still have no studies where basic income would continue forever and in the whole country. Best option would be to pick a small country, and then the whole world would fund a research where basic income is to last e.g. 50 years. E.g. Samoa has about 200 000 people. 50*12*1000$*200000=120 000 000 000$, which is quite a lot of money, but it only means 120 million per country per year, if divided for 20 countries. Obviously we could pick even a smaller country. It could also be possible to negotiate the system so that if all goes well and people continue working and generate income, the world will pay only for the costs of the experiment, which could make it a lot cheaper, in theory even free experiment.
Furthermore: it is my opinion that many of the proponents of UBI are disingenuous, and do wish to be living in a world where they get handed money, and will do nothing other than sit on their behinds, being fat, lazy, and contributing nothing to anyone other than themselves, with not a care in the world for the fact that they're just parasites.
Well, opinions are like arseholes: everyone has one.
In civilised countries, there's already a considerable social safety net. You can wish that away to a post scarcity world if you wish but I doubt it's going anywhere anytime soon.
The point of UBI is to rearrange the existing social safety nets (and taxes to match) to simplify the bureaucracy. The idea is to greatly reduce the administrative costs of running the system and also remove some of the things that disincentivise work.
For example, you can get job-seeker's allowance in the UK if you're between jobs. But it takes a while to kick in after your job finishes. That prevents people taking short jobs inbetween finding a better one because the cut to the jobseekers allowance after the job ends ends up being a net negative. That kind of thing vanishes.
Another thing, the UK tax system already fairly closely approximates UBI + flat tax (for income above a certain threshold), using a complex system of piecewise constant tax bands. My rougher approximation of the negative part, where benefits kick in is much harder to do accurately but it veeery roughly holds there too.
So, why not replace that entire hot mess of benefits and tax bands with basic income and flat tax? The numbers come out very similar but it's a hel of a lot easier to administer.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In this case, it's panem et Cersei.
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
No one except people trying to cut down straw men proposes a UBI system where it's exactly the same as the current system plus UBI on top.
You revamp the tax system in parallel so the for the majority of people, the UBI is offset by the extra taxes. In other words the tax goes up so that most people see no net change in income.
I did the calculations once for the UK. If you have UBI and a flat 45% tax, people above some threshold (can't remember off hand but it's around 15,000) see almost no net change.
UBI isn't a giveaway, it's a rearrangement of the current system. You don't do UBI by not rearranging the current system.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You haven't tasted salmiakki vodka, if you say them like they are a separate thing.
Very well said. I consider myself a libertarian and small government conservative. But people refuse to understand the costs of crony capitalism.
We should all be able to say "no" to our bosses. The fear of loosing your job should not be coupled with the fear of loosing health care, becoming homeless and facing brutal violence.
Every human being has a right to breathe, sleep, drink, eat, and expel waste. Society has in effect negated these rights by saying, no, you MUST work or you cannot subsist. Sleeping in public can land you in jail. Simply taking off your clothes can land you in jail. Peeing can land you in jail.
If society says we cannot do these things in public, society must see that every human has a place to simply exist without fear.
Otherwise, defacto, my boss has the ability to take away my rights to be human, simply by firing me. If there is a ground state under which my employer can not threaten me, it relieves this tension and allows a modicum of dignity.
The best 10% will always succeed. Why must the worst 10% be forced into slavery? That is what we have now. The tyranny of the "successful" over those who are not.
Here's a link for anyone interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmiakki_Koskenkorva
captcha: dissolve
If you make your own, let the salmiakki dissolve at least a day, although I'm not 100% sure on how much time it needs, i haven't had to make my own yet.
"The government's paying for it."
And who is funding the government?
According to usdebtclock.org, the Federal debt sits at ~$20T (that's 20 million million dollars). Or $63,000 for every citizen. Your mom, your brother, your girlfriend, your 7 year old niece, every person you see on TV today sitting in the stands at a football game - each and every one of them owes $63,000.
And since not all of them pay taxes, for those of us who do, each of us owes $170,000. You thought your debt was your car loan, your Visa card and maybe your school loans? Add $170,000 on top of that. You pay taxes? You owe. Big time.
This is beyond unsustainable. (Personally, I like zero-based budgeting. You start from zero - not from what was spent last year - and you allocate money to the top priority first, then the second priority, then the third... until you have no more money to spend. The low priorities that are below the line, well, if they're really important, the free market will fill in. I'd also like a balanced budget amendment, to apply at the Federal level, except in times of war or national emergency.)
UBI should be in the form of services, not currency. Giving away currency is just renormalization (or inflation) of currency.
You are not making bums richer, you are making all these illegal immigrants struggling on 3 jobs and sharing a room with four others poorer.
Give the bums free shelter, free food and free Internet access, not money.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Posting to undo err moderation.
To error is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the OS.
Well, you'll make damned sure you leave nothing to your kids when you die, huh? You wouldn't want to reduce their incentive to work.
It is hard right now. My wife and I are both unemployed for well over a year. She has three university degrees and I have one (in hard science). We both speak three languages. We applied for hundreds of jobs. A few interviews. No offers. The pay rates are much lower than what we were accustomed. What to do? Yet, neither of us receive any benefits, so we do not count as unemployed. Our savings will soon be out and we will likely have to apply for something in the way of public benefits. We are already living with relatives and must soon leave. We have no vehicle. We will soon be homeless.
What to do?
This is in Germany. And we must pay our own health care premium as long as we have more than 8000 Eur in savings.
Yet the unemployment rate is lower than ever.
I see a lot of concern over income equality, and people earning a livable income. But clearly universal income is a subside at best and welfare for sure.
I have to wonder if at anytime these people who receive this income have to give back in some way? When you start to convince people their just entitled to income then you limit their ability to want to do better. In the US, I would much rather see people get welfare, and be required to learn a skill, do public service or something to change their dependence on this welfare. It doesn't help, that many think replacing low skill workers with automation is a good solution.
Those are *both* bad things. We should be providing unemployed people with something useful to do - and we should also be offering people in purposeless, artificial jobs with something useful to do. The more useful stuff that gets done, the better all our lives are: having people doing useless work is a failure of our economic system.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
That segment of the population is already doing nothing. The whole point about basic is that it is enough for people to survive. Despite what you think of people nearly all of them are not content with surviving. The vast majority of them actually want to live, not just survive.
That's right, we don't bring war to the world, we wait for it to come to us. In the past 70 years, though, nobody bothered coming. And even back then nobody would have if we didn't find some idiot to start one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am offended by other people who are not doing anythings children being given priority access to health and education over my children, because I choose to not do nothing.
So am I, which is why I'm in favour of UBI, especially the "universal" bit rather than the "means tested" or the "single mother" or the "disability* support" (*where disability is defined as anything other than being 100% perfectly healthy).
It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook were founded by college students living on daddy's dime.
You have picked two examples out of millions around the world. That is by definition a coincidence.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1827/ Survivorship Bias.
There are environmental costs to having those warm bodies sitting around at home all day, consuming fossil fuels and electricity, causing additional pollution with their waste products while they contrbute zero productivity (as opposed to suboptimal, but non-zero productivity by having them carry out 'bullshit make-work'). If we are to measure the worth of people's existence by their net contribution/cost on the biosphere, do you really want to take this line of logic to its inevitable conclusion?
At least while working, some will have the opportunities and incentive to become more productive.
Lower crime rates means less police and lawyers which means higher unemployment which means increased taxes for those who do work to support whole population getting free money.
Police aren't privatized.
They cost tax money even when they work.
However, if they are unemployed they don't feel entitled to as much of the tax money.
The US government gets its money from the taxpayers. It then follows that the taxpayers are indeed the ones paying for it.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
That is mostly because the US performs exceptionally shitty in terms of quality of life compared to other Western nations, though.
You made a fairly long post on Finland's UBI experiment. Its only salient fact was that results will be available in 2019. A waste of perfectly good 1's and 0's
What was your intent?
The only discussion I see is about the U.S. tax plan
>I am offended by other people who are not doing anythings children being given priority access to health and education over my children
Cite only one place in the world where this is the case. If you are unable to do it STFU you manipulative bastard.
While I can understand mentally ill people
You know that Trump is owned by Putin and that Putin uses paid trolls and botnets to protect his property?
Don't assume that Trump-shills are people.
Lots of European countries have worse. Imagine this nonsense in your country.
Reinfeldt: Det ursvenska är blott barbari
Lets not get started with Merkel . . . it might not end.
Trump is a considerable improvement over them, and far, far better than the alternative in the US election: Hillary Clinton.
Maybe you should read more, and from additional sources.
Well, as a self employed making less than 150k gross, my taxes are increasing.
My father in law, a traveling salesman who voted for trump, is seeing a huge tax increase because he can no longer deduct the mileage expense for his travel.
Over 10 years, this is a huge tax giveaway to the very wealthy, and a huge tax burden for the upper middle class down.
At least if they are doing nothing, they aren't out committing crimes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The problem with your post is that you're talking out of your ass with zero evidence. The purpose of testing things is to get some evidence, rather than basing decisions on philosophical/ideological considerations like you just did. It's called SCIENCE.
I donate money to some organizations that run soup kitchens, why should I have to put up with being approached by beggars in the street?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You can't cough up the $20 million expenses of this program with everybody doing nothing.
>You have picked two examples out of millions around the world.
There are not millions of microsoft or facebook. We looking at a very rare event. But if you check the major breakthrough, you will see a pattern (statistically significant): people not working, or not working on what they were expected to. This does not mean that not working is the cause (which will be a survivorship bias) but merely nearly necessary. And imho, there is some logic behind this: you cannot innovate doing like other people, just do your own shit as it pleases you.
The idea is to greatly reduce the administrative costs of running the system and also remove some of the things that disincentivise work.
The problem is that the administrative costs are only a very small percentage of the overall cost. Accurate overseeing of the system easily saves more money than it costs for any reasonable program.
Free money! No work! Laze around popping out kids! It's like heaven pending 72 IT nerds who died young (does it say anywhere that the virgins are female... or even human?)
If they do nothing instead of spending their time committing crime it might well be worth it
That's a very big "If" at the beginning of your statement.
Proponents of universal welfare suggest that people who work will continue to work, but people who try to support themselves by committing crimes will stop. There's no reason to believe either of those will actually happen.
Our country never do this.This is Democracy.
Yes, and as such, any scenario which should rationally tie the two things together should come together as one bill, rather than passing the very nice sounding bill first, thereby forcing your own hand to do the unpopular thing (and ultimately timing it conveniently around election years, in the hopes that the bad part *looks* like the fault of your opponents).
Tank tax revenue, then come in and say "oh look, we can't afford welfare, well shucks, guess we have to gut it".
Or conversely, "yay, dispersing money to everyone!", way to go" then "oh look, we are low on money, well shucks, guess we have to raise taxes" if that's your political leaning.
Any high profile politician that shows some outward signs of contending with nuance and compromise gets eviscerated in the general election by politicians pandering to the easy answers and painting the nuanced approach as weak and inconsistent with some simplistic party lne. So we end up hoping that for the sake of the government that the politician running is lying to make themselves look dumber and will conduct themselves with some degree of intelligence in office.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And this is a good thing. We won't have nearly enough work for us humans to do in a few decades. Nothing wrong with not having to work.
Not that I believe particularly in UBI, it certainly wouldn't be a quick fix, but what YOU seem to be missing, is that all those people ALREADY get that same amount of money to live somehow.
Unless you are living in a country that just lets its citizens day, everyone can get the minimum amount of money necessary to live ALREADY.
What UBI really is (well, at least from one point of view), is a replacing a welfare problems with the design, beauty and success of socialist 10-year-plans with a truly market-based/capitalist solution of just giving people money.
Also, the decline in productivity is not a given.
There are also other issues to consider. For example in Germany one major concern is not lack of productivity, but lack of spending. Far too many people save money instead of spending it on something. UBI might help improve that by improving confidence in their financial future.
There are environmental costs to having those warm bodies sitting around at home all day, consuming fossil fuels and electricity, causing additional pollution with their waste products while they contrbute zero productivity (as opposed to suboptimal, but non-zero productivity by having them carry out 'bullshit make-work').
No. Stop. You have this wholly wrong. It is better for the world if they sit at home and watch American Gladiators than if they go to some bullshit job and do something we don't actually need them to do, which consumes even more energy than staying at home and getting dumber.
If we are to measure the worth of people's existence by their net contribution/cost on the biosphere, do you really want to take this line of logic to its inevitable conclusion?
Yes, because I have actually thought this through, like you clearly haven't. Have you ever read the Mars trilogy? It spends a lot more time on eco-economics than I reasonably could in a Slashdot post.
At least while working, some will have the opportunities and incentive to become more productive.
UBI doesn't permit you to live high on the hog, or at least that's not the concept. If you want more than a banal, minimal existence, you're going to have to work for it. There is still plenty of incentive to produce, and there's still plenty of opportunity to do so as well. It frees people up to do neutral or negative things, certainly, but it also frees them to do positive things. They can spend their time making themselves better people, or doing things for other people. They can trade labor, or engage in barter, or work a side job to get spending money.
I am not against work. Work is how things get done. I am against senseless work which wastes energy and materials whose production costs are debited from our collective future. The notion that our value as a being is based on what we do for society is not without merit, but we must subtract what we do to society from the balance in order to come to a fair accounting.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem is that the administrative costs are only a very small percentage of the overall cost. Accurate overseeing of the system easily saves more money than it costs for any reasonable program.
As I mentioned, it also removes a number of problems that disincentivise work.
Anyway back to the admin:
Basically it eleminates a large amount of benefit fraud. There'll still be opportunities, for example disability benefit which may have to beyond UBI, but a huge amount of fraud is simply impossible. Apparently benefit fraud was about GBP 5 billion last year.
As for the administration, you're of course not including the indirectly incurred costs. How much GDP is wasted with people doing unproductive things like tax returns and so on (les here with PAYE, but plenty of people still have to do them)?
HMRc itself takes nearly 4 billon per year to run.
As far as I see it, it would save a few billion here and a few billion there. As we know soo that adds up to real money.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If the government gets to decide which of its citizens can and can't receive the UBI, it defeats the whole point of a UBI in providing [1] a minimum standard (of living) income for all citizens and [2] reducing the number of citizens who either fall between the cracks - or get caught between the gears of - the bureaucracy. The latter is just as important as the former!
Your suggestion that the government continue the current "guilty until proven innocent" approach to social welfare and worse do so via further computerisation and expansion of government surveillance databases is ironic considering your Redgum signature - and even aside from chilling effects, I hope you will consider how badly a bureaucracy can GIGO, SNAFU, FUBAR and just plain waste taxpayer money on large database systems let alone national ones involving at minimum millions, and easily billions, of records.
We don't have UBI here in Norway, but we do have a welfare program which is like a "last resort" where the only qualifications is that you're a legal resident, you don't have any other income or savings and you don't qualify for any of the more specific benefits like disability, unemployment and so on. It's not grand but you don't go homeless and you don't need to beg in the streets, I don't think we're the only social democracy in Europe with a program like that. I just checked the statistics and a little under 1% of the population live primarily on those funds, about 0.25% stay on the program for >12 months, it costs 0.5% of the national budget and about 0.2% of the GDP. Many of these are basically unemployable anyway, they just don't qualify for disability. So the theory at everyone would just quit their job if they got a tiny bit of money for doing nothing is provably false.
For everyone else with income it'd basically just be a formality, pay extra tax for UBI, get UBI for roughly zero net difference. The one big difference would be that people with savings could take a break and live on UBI + their own money. But to have the savings to do that you need a well paying job meaning you need an education and a career and a few sabbaticals and early retirements more wouldn't shake the system at its foundations. I think a realistic UBI would be around 1/3rd my current income, say I think 5/6ths of my current income would be an okay standard of living. Today I could work five months putting aside 1/6th and taking a month unpaid leave spending those 5/6ths. With UBI I could work three months putting aside 1/6th and take a month off with 2/6th UBI, 3/6th savings. Still working and paying taxes 75% of the time instead of 83% of the time though. The numbers only go nuts if you assume people want to live on a UBI standard.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re "If the government gets to decide which of its citizens can and can't receive the UBI, it defeats the whole point of a UBI in providing"
Giving an entire working population an income will see a nation fail to support the tax rate foe the new UBI in a generation.
Tax rates will not be able to keep up with citizens working and getting free cash.
Citizens who are working for decades and paying tax don't need a UBI. They have jobs.
Re "reducing the number of citizens who either fall between the cracks". If they can get the UBI they have a bank account. They are interacting with the banking system. So that is an easy way to sort the citizens who will get the UBI or who are working, paying tax, in the tax system, still in gov approved education.
If a person cannot get a bank account as a citizen then social workers, a charity, health care workers can usually help.
Should a citizen not want a bank account then a new UBI won't help such citizens. They would be on some support payment to their bank account now and that would change over to a means tested UBI.
So nobody would fall between the cracks, as they would be in the tax and banking system as they are now as citizens getting support.
A means tested UBI would just not be paid to people working. That would reduce the number of citizens getting the UBI and allow more support for citizens who need the UBI and related support services paid by a nations tax payers.
That UBI has to cover generations of citizens at university, the sick, citizens who cant work, who are between work and as they near their old age pension.
Keep the UBI for people who need the support and use extra support for them too. Why just hand out a UBI to working citizens earning well above the min wage for decades? Use that tax money for something good not just a UBI payment for all working citizens for decades.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Only if you live in a commie state.
Well that's really the crux of the question isn't it.
Not all people are the same. People have different values and ways of being.
The rich person who worked hard all his life is going to find it hard to sit home doing nothing. They're going to keep working to be great like Jeff Bezos. Or they're going to charity like Bill Gates. Or they're pursuing their passions like Elon Musk.
Heck, I have part of that personality as well. I can't sit home and do nothing. I have to do something; be it write or workout or program or whatever...
Yet, I know plenty of people who sit home and do nothing. I know even more who would do nothing if they didn't have to drag their ass to the job they hate. Heck, growing up in the developing world in a country with like a 40% unemployment rate, many (maybe most) people did spend most of their time doing nothing. They weren't off trying to do great things to making the most of what they have. They weren't perfecting music or trying to improve their communities.
Of course, if you think the only difference between an unemployed person and Jeff Bezos is that Jeff Bezos is privileged enough to have been given the job of CEO to make his billions... well that's where we differ.
Different people do have different values and different ways of being.
You're saying it's as bad as the Obamacare time-bomb? So, it's not a partisan thing, it's a psychopath/politician thing, they all do it.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Maybe :"stay home and watch cat videos" isn't the goal but there are humans that will interpret as such. And my niece has interpreted it that way. Got a text from her two weeks complaining that WIC hasn't approved her and emailed me the link to the formula she needs off of Amazon. I texted her back a link to condoms on Amazon. She hasn't communicated with me since.
When I see a now hiring sign on four corners at the same time and a guy asking for change in the median strip between I call bull shit to your claim.
Of course, if you think the only difference between an unemployed person and Jeff Bezos is that Jeff Bezos is privileged enough to have been given the job of CEO to make his billions... well that's where we differ.
No - although he's exceptionally separate from most billionaires. If you think that the difference between someone working 60+ hours a week and the heir to the Campbell's fortune - (the Dorrance family - 17.1 B) is that the heirs are brilliant hard workers - well that's where we differ. People like Bezos deserve everything he has in life - people like the Dorrance family *may* be awesome - but it's doubtful. For every Bezos there are millions of flubs - I don't doubt that - and neither did the people who created this country. That's why the *estate* tax (death tax) was 90%.
For the record the kids in the Dorrance family - even though they were super rich and never had to work a day to earn the wealth - don't seem to 'do nothing' with their lives. The point I was making above is... someone who was already going to do nothing is better off not having to half ass it and make everyone elses lives miserable. Anyone who has even a shred of initiative or desire to better themselves can still do so - only now instead of the stress of trying to find a job that pays rent they can focus on finding a job that betters themselves.
I think the net effect of UI would be positive because I see it as getting people who don't want to work out of the workforce - I see that as a good thing - jobs that could be shitty *only because of a glut of labor* are forced to be better to attract people. Jobs that only have people doing the motions are better because they go home don't bother. Thats just me though - I'm not saying it's even doable - I just dislike the idea that assumes everyone automatically will do nothing. Sure some will - I just wish they weren't around already - because every damn 'joe' that only shows up to do the least amount of shit to keep a job makes my day harder.
Norway is smarter than that - the trial looks at all factors, and will look at more were it to expand.
Where you sleep, what you eat, and if you really have no other income or savings is the REAL determinant, plus some factor for drugs/alcohol/ gamble. I think the test will be living much worse than a poor student.
It is obvious that those that are homeless and do rough sleeping because there are no longer boarding houses and rooming lodges, let alone emergency accommodation - because council shitheads got rid of that.
Setting up universal accomodation is just as important as UBI.
Mental health cases are not being cared for.
How about we do a Germany and tax lazy capital. Tax the riches playthings like real estate and private jets. Breadlines is many developed countries
prove there are huge social failings
If we're going to start working down our national debt, we'll need a surplus. Building growth to 4-4.5% will give the Federal Government enough revenue to run with real surpluses and start paying down the debt (something that has not happened since 1957, under Eisenhower). A 3% GDP growth was considered "below average", prior to 2008 - we should shoot for at least the historical average of 3.3%.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
for a year or two before it expires. The money being funneled to the really rich are permanent at our expense.
Source?
But this UBI doesn't remove the other social services that they get. Its just the same old tired wealth transfer that doesn't work.
Look at the 3rd world. If you don't work or make money yo don't eat. That's a STRONG motivation. I visit my family in Asia and they all work. The #1 fear they have is not working because money = life. In the US there is now generational poverty. Know the SSI/EBT rules front to back is NOT a marketable skill. When I see an unemployed 300+lb mother with 4 babies that tells me the system is NOT working.
UBI will fail. Many countries (the US, Japan, others) are going to face a HUGE issue with social services (aka wealth transfer programs) as there are not enough workers projected to cover the aging population PLUS the poor.
Unless you work, you should not get any money (unless disabled). You'll go hungry or get your ass up every day and work and contribute. That is the only fair system.
Yeah, I really don't know the answer to that.
I have no idea what a culture of 'free money' will do to society.
In a theoretical world where everyone basically keeps doing what they're doing, I have no problem with a guaranteed income to keep some people afloat even if they just sit home and play video games.
The bigger question is not what will unemployed people do, but what will working people do. How will this impact people's behavior this generation, and the next, and the one after that.
Sure, you can think maybe the world is better off without minimum wage fast food workers. Who cares if they choose not to work. But how about engineers, trade people, nurses, doctors, janitors, miners...
Think about this for a second, we're in a world where we need say Lithium for all the cool electric batteries we're going to have. Would you rather go work in the mines finding lithium, or be paid a good living salary to chill? I don't see too many people whose passions is working in the mines.
And what will be the value of money if you can't spend it on things because all the minimum wage workers don't do those jobs anymore.
I really don't know the answer to the question.
But I definitely think the wrong question is being asked in many of the experiments. It's not about whether a currently unemployed person will be discouraged from looking for a job, but whether or not the rest of society keeps working... and thinking about the long term. Not just this generation where people already have an ingrained work ethic, but future generations as well.
You will need a baby boomer for such numbers, with all the problems that will cause. If you want an over stimulated economy, get ready for a historic crash eventually. You do not have the population growth, nor is your base rich enough to support such an increase. The economy will crash, boom/bust is the prefered model of the right.
By hunter gatherer you mean crime? You mean that some should be either be paid or be allowed to commit crime?
Give them an xbox, pizza and an MMO and they will happily spend countless hours. They do not need tons of $$$ to be happy.
You are too stupid to use a computer.
Nazis love the idea because it will give them money to not work and it's inventor CH Douglas made a few anti-semitic comments once.
"Progressives" like UBI because they think it will reduce poverty, but on its own it probably won't because...
Neoliberals are coming to love the idea because it will allow them to eliminate the minimum wage and pay workers less.
Landlords like it because they will be able to raise rents.
Leftists prefer a Job Guarantee.
I am someone who, without a doubt, would have loved to start a business. I have a great passion (although it's waning now that I'm finally debt-free). I excelled at what I have done in my field (CS). I've been published. However, I didn't come from means and I started my life $25K in debt. A car loan and no car (actually, I had an '88 tempo I paid' $500 for in 2005 when I graduated; a total deathtrap). By the time I paid off my student loans, almost a decade of my life passed since I left school. I no longer have the young man's full energy. Simple fact is that our society in the USA is designed to ensure that you start working for someone who already has capital and don't stop. I didn't even want to go to college at 18, and I'm still not convinced at 35 that it was the correct decision. I dislike my career (it's boring and, often times, exploitative). I've contributed far less to the species than I could have. All this because I had little choice but to start life in the hole if I wanted to work in computer technology. I understand that there's no good moral or "feelings" case for giving young men a safety net, but there is a very good case that not doing so is stunting economic growth and assisting the consolidation of capital that just keeps marching on.
Well the real question is does everyone need to do 'something that benefits a civilization' to bring value to the world.
You spelled it wrong.
Corporations exist to serve the public good, believe it or not. Without trade, you'd need to create everything you would ever use yourself. Farm your own land, protect your assets from thieves, know nothing of lands beyond those of which you've directly traveled, etc. Government employees do not work for corporations, they may be able to purchase goods from them, but we're not arguing about whether they do that but who they "get paid by" here.
Also, you really need to understand something else here: Corporations are a tool of freedom. The only reason corporations would not exist would be because people would not be free to create them. You would be bound to only purchase or work at the behest of some sort of body of government officials. Since we have freedom, we can create our own businesses, or rather have the opportunity to generate revenue streams to house, feed and care for our families in any way which makes sense to us within the laws of our lands. Naturally some individuals/groups stretch that but it's also why we have an enforcement arm of our elected government, to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules.
What you're really unhappy about is Too Big To Fail, which is simply a sign of corruption in the government. It's not a sign that corporations run our lives - we have the option to allow them to or not. You don't *need* a smartphone. You choose to own one. Granted, it's difficult to do a number of tasks in 2018 without one, but you are trading convenience for a bit of your freedom and privacy. It's not necessary - it's still a choice. When you can be thrown in prison at any time for not having your smartphone on you, it's no longer a choice.
Sweden, Norway, Austria, Netherlands, Germany, ...
There's plenty of countries where the tax rates are high that offer a WAY higher quality of life than most of the US for most of its people.
Well, Sweden is almost U.S with high taxes and a little extra welfare...
In Germany the work week consist of 36 actual work hours while they get paid for 40 hours.
In Sweden the work week consist of 45 hours, but they get paid for 40. And the healthcare albeit ALMOST free isn't really free. You pay a fee of 25$ each time you visit, untill you reach a maximum of roughly 250$ of which hereafter the visits are "free" for the rest of the year, and then it starts over. And you pay for unemployment insurance, and you have to go to a "job-corps" like thing at an unemployment office if you're unemployed and want to collect on your unemployment insurance, which is ludicrously low anyway.
And Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage - you can pay your workers under 10$ and no fingers lifted from any gov. In fact, they do this at a lot of schools - because the schools are understaffed, many of the biggest factories doesn't pay HALF of an average Amercian salary, and yet we have the highest taxes in the world. I live here, and I wonder sometimes if I traded down...
To go to work 6 o clock in the morning and come home 6 o clock in the afternoon is not a sustainable life for me...I might want to move again.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I notice you reworded the statement "We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING" to "people given the option WILL DO NOTHING" to then be able to call it a lie. Can you say the original statement is a 100% provable lie? Or can you only refute straw-men?
trow money away to support an army of paid social functioneers.
Chris, you are a perpetual entertainment machine. We can't stop playing with you, unlike the other kids when you were in grade school.
by Rutger Bregman. It has other proposals, but Bregman, a little uncomfortably, has been turned to as Mr. UBI Spokesman for a lot of journalists.
The most surprising part of his story on UBI is not that it was tried in various Canadian and American municipalities and found to work amazingly well, but that those trials convinced none other than Richard Nixon to seriously propose it. (Died a slow, agonizing death in the Senate over years of dithering.)
It has a lot in common with legalization of cannabis: while the science has been solid for decades, a certain mentality just. can't. stand it. Offensive on a gut level.
The old joke about "can't stand that somebody, somewhere, is having fun" about cannabis-haters works, changed to "somebody, somewhere, is getting something for nothing". Ah, well, there used to be a LOT of people with the mentality that interest on loans was "usury", a sin, and "getting something for nothing". It took literally centuries for it to become a commonplace that lenders were contributing to society.
We may be in the last few decades before it's acknowledged that people whose contributions to society are hard to measure with our current economic system are nonetheless contributing - or at least, so many of them (humans being incorrigibly productive in great majority) that picking out the rest for punishment has too high a "transaction cost", as they say about the idea of tollbooths on every block to pay for roads. Everybody who drives on million-dollar-a-mile pavements gets something for nothing.
So it's something retired people like?
I think you are confused - the article is about Finland, and last time I checked, Donald Trump was not the president of Finland (although he might have claimed to be exactly that, of course).
[...] except in times of war or national emergency.
hmmm... I wonder how that plays out.
checks headlines to see who we're at war with today
man, I feel like mold.
Say you are given $500/month. Say the only job you can get pays you $300. You'd be stupid to give up the $500 to earn only $300. And $500 is probably not enough for you and your family. So what do you do? Earn the $300 on the side, so you don't have to declare it and manage to get $800 onto your household.
You're saying it's as bad as the Obamacare time-bomb? So, it's not a partisan thing, it's a psychopath/politician thing, they all do it.
Except the ACA wasn't written with the expectation that expiring provisions would get renewed, they were written to help the transition to the new system.
I stole this Sig
I'm fine with a UBI - it significantly lowers admin costs of welfare programs (because theres nothing to "qualify" for).
The question is - how much. A UBI should give you enough money for a 1 room studio with a micro fridge, and basic subsistance food/utilities. If you can afford to have TV on UBI alone, it is to much money.
For some - and ive ZERO idea how many - beibg assured a safety net - from daddy or the gov - would enable the more risk adverse, but still inventive, to create new things: services, businesses, cures, aid. Whatever.
For some others, that security would be a license to get stoned and play video games.
My thoughts are if the basic income was super basic - you got enough for a room and basic foods - then a lot would take advantage and create some wondrous stuff.
So "They pretend to pay us so we pretend to work"
Im a different AC. You're right, the spouse and children ARE bigger drains. But they're drains that I CHOOSE. In my view, the minute you put your hand out, you should abdicate some degree of say. We do that if we decide to get a mortgage, or rent a house, or get a car loan. it's reasonable that adults should abdicate how they spend their time and what they pay for, if they out their hand out.
In the end, you will have unemployed people. When there is one job and two people, whether one wants the job and one wants to not do it or whether both want it but only one gets it has the same net result.
Except the issue in the real world is that very often there are actually two jobs and two people. It's just that one of those jobs only pays marginally more than social services, so you go from making $15k for doing nothing to making $18k for working 40 hours a week. Or one of those jobs is a term position, so if you take it you end of losing your social services, and then have to go through the whole rigamarole of applying to get them back when your term ends.
I agree with your analysis. I used to blame either Republicans or Democrats (variously at various times) but now I just see them as a reflection of the electorate. If we want better politicians, we need a more informed electorate.
(vaguely on topic: another one that bothers me is people who oppose or favor something based on "We need more regulation" or "We need less regulation!" That's a real false dilemma)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't know... In the past (up until WW2, I guess), many creative types of work and technological advancements were brought to fruition by people who did not need to work, otherwise said they had the means to live comfortably without having to work. Still, they have produced very useful things, both in art and science. Not saying this can repeat nowadays, but you can't dismiss it either.
Exactly this. There are no doubt tons of good ideas out there that will never get acted on because it's too much of a risk. Heck, I'm a smart dude and have research projects I'd like to pursue, but I can't take the risk that they wouldn't pan out because I have a daughter to support, and I like having a roof over my head.
If people are given a chance to follow their dreams, we're going to benefit with a lot of amazing art and science (we'll also get a lot of crap art and science too... bu that's the price ya pay, I guess)./p>
Most European countries are not living up to their defense obligations, relying upon the US to backstop them.
Or maybe they realize that a lot of those "obligations" are not obligations at all, and that much of the US "defence" (offence) spending is completely unnecessary, and they have no desire to take part in that folly.
A zero growth economy is a foregone conclusion *eventually* just from a physics perspective. It may be a long way down the road, but isn't it smarter to balance our books planning for zero growth and using growth to acquire assets like infrastructure and lowered taxes in the future when we already have the money in hand? That way when zero growth becomes a reality it isn't as painful.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Life experience.... When you're poor you tend to better appreciate the stability of not having to choose between housing and/or food, whereas a trust fund baby who has no experience with that difficulty doesn't appreciate that stability.
For a few years, then your taxes will creep up.
Only because that was the only way to get the bill passed, due to congressional rules. The right would love to make the tax changes permanent, and the left just wants to play it off as temporary, which is bullshit.
Just another day in Paradise
With a UBI of $2000 per adult, $800 per dependent child, it would be possible to do with a 45-50% flat tax on all income (other than the UBI itself) and a 25% VAT, PLUS providing a Universal Health Care system.
10 years, HAH. The tax giveaways to corporations are so extreme that in order to keep under the 1 trillion dollar/10-year limit, the personal tax cuts expire after only 5 years.
Yeah, they're "so extreme" as to reduce what was some of the highest corporate taxes in the world. Get a grip. The only reason the personal cuts expire is because of reconciliation rules.
Just another day in Paradise
You're clearly a shit for brains snowflake. Obama increase debt by over $9T, and you're whining about $1.5T that is only a bad prediction.
Wife and Children are things someone chooses to spend their hard earned money on, it is not something forced on you. Are they bigger drains financially. hell yeah, but you don't get them to be profitable. No I am truly and utterly offended about paying for others to do nothing, I don't want control of them, I want my HARD earned money that I am forced to pay to the government spent wisely, spending it on people to do nothing is not wise, it is fucking insane, especially when so many other things in society need addressing.
This program is neither universal or basic.
It's simply another welfare program.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
It's NOT just another welfare program. The intention of most UBI backers is for it to replace the patchwork of social programs, and thus reduce cost to the government.
True, some segment of the population will always do nothing. Those who do will have barely enough to get alone under most UBI designs. That doesn't make it bad for the vast majority who actually would do something, as has been shown in several studies...google it.
Just another day in Paradise
Try to understand where I, for instance, am coming from. I work with computers. It's a relatively-long-hours, relatively-high-stress job, it's very intellectually challenging, and as a result my salary is over $100k/year. So I'm not exactly a couch potato. But what I see, working with computers, is that a good coworker can easily accomplish 10 times as much as a bad one. I see some coworkers who just don't have the brainpower to contribute, and any project involving them will actually go more slowly than the same project without them. I extrapolate to the remainder of the population, and it's obvious that masses of people should not be working, they only make the world worse by going to work each day. And because I don't want these people to starve, I support UBI.
This article is about a UBI. What you're talking about isn't. U means Universal, everyone gets it with no means testing, no income testing.
The UBI is offset by higher taxes for those people with high incomes. A flat tax of 45-50%, offset by a UBI of $2000 per adult, is not regressive as a straight flat tax would be. Add in a VAT, and you're also getting taxes from people with wealth even if they have no "income" (and again, the UBI makes up for the regressive nature of a VAT).
NATO countries agreed to spend 2% of GDP on defense. That isn't outlandish, but few of them meet that, or even come close.
The true folly is putting yourself at risk of living under the rule of a foreign enemy that conquers you. Perhaps you should speak to some of the people still alive in Europe that remember how that worked out before you cheer the folly that refusing to provide for an adequate defense enables.
Military spending by NATO members - Does America contribute more than its fair share?
Ah, but I forget . . . Europe is headed for ruin anyway since it chooses not to control it borders, native Europeans are failing to reproduce in meaningful numbers, and the EU and many national governments are inviting in the foreign replacements for the European population which has little or no love for Europeans or their values. It turns out that you will live under foreign domination of those hostile to your values after all . . . just give it 30 years or so unless things change drastically, and soon.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You seem to have misunderstood it. (One of the hazards of TL;DR + TSOTWTSWS*)
If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States
The nationwide median income for the US is in red. To the left of the red column are other OECD countries, and to the right of the red bar are individual US states. These national-level comparisons take into account taxes, and include social benefits (e.g., "welfare" and state-subsidized health care) as income . Purchasing power is adjusted to take differences in the cost of living in different countries into account.
*Throw Stuff On The Wall To See What Sticks. And you got a +5? Impressive
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Entitlements. Why do we have them? When did it become so popular to rely on them? At what point did our fully functional democratic republic turn into a democratic kleptocracy?
Life is not for the lazy.
You must be talking about Government if it's in regards to performing unnecessary public sector work... My job is abstract, as most are, but yields tangible results in efficiencies. I'm capitalizing (getting a cut) on a portion of the savings from said increasing efficiencies. It's a win/win situation. Less energy consumed, more people employed to do other meaningful tasks, and better yield of other's time to perform said tasks. Someone, at some point, that works its way back in some small part in serving my life better; from the products I purchase, to the services of labor rendered to me in exchange for the money I give.
Life is not for the lazy.
Money is also printed, which dilutes the existing value of cash holdings. In effect, it's a form of "taxation" via tapping into the wealth of new money, then spending it first before everyone else does. Oh, but that new found debt also gets to be paid for via taxation too. Double-whammy
Life is not for the lazy.
Riiiiiight. That's why they wrote them to expire - pure motives, but when the "other team" does it it's evil, right? Gheez, people get dumber every year here.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I used to live in the Netherlands, and I can tell you the high tax rate is a bit of a myth, but the devil is in the details.
As a foreigner, I was allowed a 30% tax rate instead of the usual 50% tax rate, so long as I signed a paper stating I would not retire in the Netherlands.
After 10 years in the country, they assume you lied about the not retiring thing, and your tax rate jumps up to 50%.
The difference in tax relates directly to the cost of dutch social security and pension, which is very good.
So someone who contributes 0% to their 401k in the US is technically taking home more money, but they should be saving.
Therefore, I like to think the Netherlands is a better value for your money, as you're forced to save for retirement in a way that Americans are not. (Which ultimately, results in a lot of heart ache when people end up retiring and having to eat cat food).
Another thing to point out is some countries like Switzerland have a lower tax rate, and their citizens have a better quality of life.
Definitely a lot Americans could learn!
Because your reading comprehension sucks?
Re "The UBI is offset by higher taxes for those people with high incomes."
If the UBI can be set for people who actually don't work then a nation won't need "higher taxes".
More citizens get to keep the money they earn working.
The citizens not working get their UBI without any questions until they are working agin.
Re "UBI makes up for the regressive nature of a VAT"
All citizens getting new free money does not get "make up for" by what a VAT did before a UBI. A lot of citizens are going to have to be taxed a lot more to pay for a UBI.
Nations need jobs and growth not a new growing "flat tax of 45-50%" to cover a new UBI.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Finlands centered right is skewed to the left similar to how the American left is center right.
Define nothing
With democrat support, the cuts could have been made permanent - oddly, Democrat leaders aren't too quick to point that out and Democrat supporters never ask 'why?'
Ken
Even if this is true (and I don't believe it's been proven so), these people are already costing society. Either in tax dollars going towards welfare programs or tax dollars going towards police forces / incarceration.
It's entirely possible that there is a segment of the population that will do nothing. Do you really believe this segment is doing something productive in the absence of universal basic income? Alternately, there are likely some people who want to do something productive, but lack the means to obtain the basic necessities required to gain employment.
Now, I'm not saying universal basic income is a good idea or a bad idea. We don't know whether it works or not, but it very arguably has the potential to save money in the long run. Isn't that a good reason to study it?
Except the whole point is to avoid needing to micro-manage everyone's income, investigate how much they have in savings and investments, regulate gift giving, and so on. With a flat tax, you don't have to do weird things with withholding when someone has multiple jobs. You just take it out, simple. Then you just pay it out as a UBI, just as simple. For anyone not running a business, you don't even need a postcard, you literally don't need to file a tax return at all.
With welfare, unemployment, disability, there are negative incentives to work. A UBI eliminates that, and eliminates the shaming of people who are unable to work, or are unable to find work. Yes, some people will be useless slugs, but anyone who is content with that probably shouldn't be working anyway. For everyone else, it will represent tremendous freedom.
What you're talking about is just another welfare scheme.
Hmmm
Canada’s navy has ‘capability’ to help enforce North Korea sanctions: Vance
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
loser
The cheese stands alone...
Wow, a torrent of bigotry pretend-disguised as thinking.
The cheese stands alone...
Exactly, if you want to see do-nothing-layabouts, look to the rich.
The cheese stands alone...
So much of what happens is bullshit make-work that's unnecessary replication of effort, which happens only so that people can get paid.
For example?
I assume these make-work jobs must be in the public sector. If not, there are huge opportunities for sharp executives to cut costs by eliminating the make-work.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well, it got you 2..
If the trend is that everyone sits at home and plays call of duty all day; then certain ideological arguments are smashed, and people are proven not to be risk averse, but to be essentially as lazy as they can get away with being.
If the trend is that people become less risk averse, and get any old odd job they can now that the risk/reward is more balanced in their favor, or start their own micro business, or even write that novel, then certain other arguments are smashed. People are proven to be inherently positive contributors provided socioeconomic factors are more neutrally balanced, or balanced in their favor.
It's not as simple as left/right of course, a lot of people on the right hold to the view that when you have more advantages you contribute more to the world, and a lot on the right disagree, and the same on the left.
What will also be interesting is, even if ideology is proven wrong, will it still hold. I mean, if this ends up being cheaper than the cost of running a bureaucracy to monitor, means test and enforce social security AND it also puts more people in to work or otherwise meaningful contribution, will the policies opponents there and around the world continue with ideological opposition? That's the more interesting question to me. On current evidence, my hypothesis is that the results, whatever they are, will change very few minds on this issue. I hope I'm wrong though.
Re "Tax rates will not be able to keep up with citizens working and getting free cash."
When discussing social welfare systems with people over the years, I've found the phrase "getting free cash" is a very strong indicator that the person in question has a poor understanding / hasn't done their research. Sadly I'm too old and too tired these days to explain it over and over again, so if you actually care you might want to read this link - http://www.basicincome.qut.edu... - and hopefully it will give you a starting point from which to do further research (if you want to) into models that avoid the poverty traps of current systems.
What I find odd in that Star Treks's 24the Century Earth is the amount of uniforms. And one would have to wonder who would own these matter replicators, because tjose are the people who would have power over you.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Say one is unable to hold a full time job for perhaps a combination of physical and mental reasons, lack of training and a saturated labor market. Lets call it life just beyond disability benefits.
Say one has been unemployed for many years but still bravely gazes over the job adverts however demoralizing.
One learned how to live within the means of social support. It wasn't a luxurious life but there is skill and experience involved. Regularly visit the second hand store, monitor the products on sale in various supermarkets. Help cook complex meals for more fortunate friends and/or relatives. And of course maintain your network. It is important to know people as one doesn't have money to fix the sink or the bicycle.
Now a part time job comes along that one seem ideally fit for. No more than 2 hour shifts announced an hour in advance, mostly at night. Say it is a hotel receptionist job and you only get to work when the regular employees fail to show up or have other urgent tasks to complete. The pay is crap and it doesn't add up to a lot of hours - but it is work.
The entire amount earned however is subtracted from your social support.
Would you do the job? Would you get out of bed at 3 am to pick up the phone, get dressed and go to the hotel to work for 2 hours? Would you sleep during the day just in case you might get called at night? Would you never drink again just in case you have to work the 2 hour shift? Would you break all your promises to your friends and relatives just so that you can work?
Lets say you are that person who cant work but wants to work so desperately that, without any financial gain, you are willing to give up everything else just so that you can participate in the labor market.
Lets say they are extremely satisfied with your performance and give you as many hours as they can spare. But lets also say the now 15-20 hour work week at crazy random times with 12 hours worth of travel still doesn't replace social support.
You are in great pain physically and mentally without any sign of improvement (on the contrary) and your quality of life is dramatically inferior to the life of not working at all.
Your network of friends and relatives is eroding and you persistently are not there for them when they need you. All you really do is sleep, eat and go to work.
Other unemployed people who use to be your friends have a drink together every now and then. They don't even dare invite you anymore.
Other hotel employees are doing quite well for themselves, nice cars, their own house, relationships, kids, vacations, festivals etc etc etc You know how it is. If you work full time you get to buy nice things.
Hotel guests make for an even more dramatic experience. They have it all while you, well, you've worked really hard to have a life that is worse than being unemployed.
You spend year after year doing this with no hope for improvements. You do get to hear your coworkers talk about what they did during Christmas, what lovely vacation they had, which car to buy etc
You are not jealous but you do leave the room before they get the chance to involve you in their consumerist conversation.
Eventually they do figure out that you are living on nothing. At first they all feel sorry for you, eventually they avoid you, just like the other unemployed people avoid you.
Now I ask you,
Wouldn't it be a better idea to just pay this person for every hour beyond zero? It doesn't have to be much but if the person works as hard as they can? Wouldn't it make sense for them to get at least some financial gain out of it?
Now you also have to ask yourself what percentage of unemployed people are going to embrace this morbid scheme in the way I've just described?
If you think this is a substantial percentage there is hope for communism in 2018. After all, if it is such a great formula for the few why wouldn't it work for the many? Imagine the money saved in salaries if everyone can just work as hard as they can to live in poverty?
I work 70 hours because I enjoy it. But if it would be required??? ..and I would also have to live in poverty??? Then I'd much rather just have the poverty without doing anything for it. I think I'd rather starve.
Money becomes obsolete, but not wealth in itself. The concept of wealth will simply shift from a physical good to something intangible, like your actual ability to do work and the credibility of your work within your particular community. So there will still be "rich" people and "poor" people, where the rich can have any job they want, anywhere they want, and the poor people will have to compact garbage or drill holes, or work in the part of the Enterprise that gets hit first and has a hull break, sending these poor people to their death while the prestigious captain is schmoozing away on the bridge.
For example?
For example, replication of effort for no reason other than to pump and dump. There are whole companies IPO'd for no reason other than to pump and dump. Or how about building garbage to produce future sales, like when Apple puts a garbage battery into a cellphone, or even cellphones without replaceable batteries? It's been years now that old phones were good enough to act as phones, if only they didn't fail prematurely. Cars are the same way; there are tons of parts which could be designed to last much longer, but they aren't because that would extend the sales cycle. Up to a third of a vehicle's lifetime energy consumption is in its production. It's not unrealistic to keep cars twice as long on average as we do now, if they're designed for easy maintenance and use durable parts like polyurethane bushings and heim joints. Dealerships don't want to lose thousands of dollars in revenue from refreshing tired suspension parts. But that's half bullshit work that doesn't even have to take place. Advertising firms producing advertising that nobody is even going to see. Consumer goods made in China, shipped to the USA, never sold because they are crap, shipped to the dollar store where most of them never sell, shipped to a landfill where they leach toxics into the ground. Nobody ever uses them, but we all pay for the energy cost of their production. Most buildings are built like total shit, and out of flammables. Big parts of cities catch on fire repeatedly throughout history, and then we build them all over again, out of more flammable materials. Even if they don't burn down, they'll fall down within a century because they're built out of thin sticks (remember when a 2x6 was a 2x6? Houses built that way which weren't washed away in a flood or burned down are still standing.) and Chinese sheet rock. We make coins whose monetary value is not only less than their actual cost of production, but less than their energy cost of production. We make thousands of tons of clothing no one will ever wear, which gets shipped to the first world, shipped to stores, put on racks, taken off racks, shipped to the third world, picked through to find the natural fabrics (rapidly vanishing due to climate change), and the remainder landfilled. The environmental cost of the textile industry is beyond ridiculous. We ask people to commute to jobs which could be done remotely, and how many of those jobs need to be done at all? Whole industries exist because of failings in our government, like health insurance. Cryptocurrency is a relatively minor line item, but it is literally burning up the biosphere to create tokens.
There are examples of waste literally everywhere you look, unless you're in a mud hut. Or maybe a shipping container home. Shipping containers are stacking up at ports because once they pass through certain ports and are fumigated with specific chemicals (usually horrendously toxic ones, as you might imagine) they are no longer permitted in certain other ports, because of the toxicity. Since we sell recycled steel to other nations for pennies on the ton, it's not actually worth it to recycle them, so in the main they are just sitting around rusting and losing intrinsic value when we could be using them to build fireproof, earthquake-proof buildings.
IANAE(conomist) and these are examples I could come up with just off the top of my head.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thanks for clearing up everybody's misconceptions.
e.g. Everybody thought this wasn't welfare. Everybody thought the money was coming from nowhere. Everybody thought that lazy people didn't exist. Your lack of ability to think in a nuanced way is painfully fucking obvious.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Your average slashdot denizen has no need for science, because they already know everything.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The goal is not to give people money so that they stay home and watch cat videos, but to see if this actually gets them out and get jobs.
Honestly, if someone really wants to spend their time watching cat videos, right now they're that guy or gal that is always on YouTube at work instead of working.
Is it not better to let these people do what they want in the privacy of their home, and keep them away from the workplace? I know I always hate having someone like that on my team anyway.
Speaking of ideological feelings, I haven't seen any argument against UBI that doesn't boil down to "I work hard, and everyone else should have to too!"
Raised our taxes?
I dunno about YOU, but I'm going to see MORE back on my tax returns.
And I'm not some billionaire.
This is a standard tactic used by politicians the world over.
Its a temporary tax cut, taxes have been lowered for this year... but they are going to be put up progressively over the next few years.
However in his characteristic stupidity... he blew his load too soon, this should have been done in 2019 so that people would recognise it when they went to the polls. In 2019, you'll be paying more tax than you did in 2016.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
> We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
Do we actually know that?
I think it's good of them to try it out in small scale just to be sure.
Its pretty much well tested, the argument is about what percentage of the population will do nothing.
/.).
There are a certain amount of people who only want to do the minimum they have to. In countries like the UK they're on welfare, in countries without welfare they're petty criminals. I dislike "benefits scroungers" as we call them here in the UK but I'd rather pay the small cost of welfare than pay the major cost of increased petty crime. Either they can buy their own cheap flatscreens... or they'll steal mine and that means I have to pay more for public services like the police, courts, prison system and then pay more for insurance.
Someone on benefits costs less than £15,000 per year, a prisoner costs £65,000 per year. If one in four benefits scroungers needs to be locked up, there goes all the savings without even considering the cost of extra police, judges or the rise in my insurance premiums and cost of having my locks replaced.
Also, houses here in the UK are lovely to look at... I'd rather we all didn't have to surround them in razor-wire and bar all the windows and doors like they have to in Cape Town (No offence to any Saffa's on
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I dunno what the real estate market is like in Helsinki but 140 euro a week would be lucky to pay the rent on a 1 bedroom apartment where I live, a decent sized industrialised city in the Southern Hemisphere.
Australia is stupidly expensive.
I recently moved from Australia to the UK, rents are slightly more expensive for what you get and the bottom fell out of the pound a while ago... but I'm still saving more money living here than I was in Perth when I was being paid about 15% more. I'm able to do a full shop for £30 a week and we're not talking about Sainsbury's Basics for everything either. Aside from rent, insurance and fuel, almost everything else is cheaper. Being able to go to the pub and get a pint for less than £3 is brilliant. Australia is nice, but fuck is it expensive.
140 Euro wouldn't get you a place in London, but it would get you a room in a share house in a nice town in England's south. It gets cheaper the further north you go, but the wages drop as well.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The UBI given to all wealthy citizens who are working full time would be a free flow of tax payers money to them.
The UBI given to citizens who need a basic income would be what a UBI should be for.
Why given a nations most wealthy citizens a UBI? They are working full time and have to pay tax. The UBI would just put more of a tax rate on them.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If there aren't enough jobs in the future that's the way it is. We innovated ourselves out of the need for vast amounts of manual labor decades ago, now we've innovated out of a need for unskilled labor. The fact is that there are too many people for the few jobs of that type left. We need to start having fewer new people. Especially if you can't afford them. That seems to be part of the solution that no one wants to even contemplate. But it's the only one that addresses the issue long term. UBI will work until it runs out of money, and that time will come. Then what do you do with everyone?
Of course, we should stop experimenting to find out what works and what doesn't, because someone on the internet has an opinion. And in bold letters even.
Guess it is back to the drawing board for the Finnish people. I've also understand we should stop experimental medicine, recently a homeopath had a very strong opinion about those, in italics even.
Why do you think I had that example. I have several started projects which sit in shelves or computer files because I lack the time to continue them.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Need I point out multiple instances of multi-generational welfare families here in the US?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Ask for charity from the horde of economic migrants posing as "refugees".
I'm sure THAT will work...
Just keep your wife away from them...
They would have to go up by more than $850, that's what I'm saving by no longer having to pay the ObamaCare tax penalty.
> We also know that a segment of the population, given the option to do nothing WILL DO NOTHING.
Do we actually know that?
I think it's good of them to try it out in small scale just to be sure.
As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie. We don't need the study to know this.
If it's a "100%" provable "lie", then PROVE IT.
What I SAID was "a segment of the population". Not "Everyone".
As evidence I can drum up instances of multi-generational welfare families here in the US.
I wouldn't be able to do this if it was a "100% provable lie.".
Ergo, thou art enunciating from thine own rectum.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No. I support a person's right to do nothing.
What I do NOT support is the notion that a portion of MY income should be TAKEN FROM ME and used to support those who opt to do nothing.
I would have no problem with it being made OPTIONAL, and donating in a charitable fashion.
I merely object to being strong-armed to pay for someone else's lifestyle.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Good news, no one is asking you to pay a dime. The government's paying for it.
Also, it's probably cheaper than putting down an insurrection, or dealing with the crime that people turn to to feed themselves
By reaching into his pocket and taking the fruits of HIS labor and calling it "taxes".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So you're saying we should reward people for being lazy, unemployable fucktards?
Yeah. NO!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
All of these studies have been done with relatively miniscule portions of a total population.
The problem isn't "It works in micro."
The problem is, logistically, it doesn't work at the macro level.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If the jobs that people work are static, then this would be the case. It is better to think in terms of "what could society do with the added labor force, if it didn't have to spend so much of it on police and lawyers?" Historically in the United States, there doesn't appear to be any correlation between crime rates and unemployment rates. And thank goodness for that. Could you imagine how unfortunate it would be if, in order to maintain good employment rates, we had to accept a certain level of crime, as a society?
Um. No. This isnâ(TM)t Comcast weâ(TM)re talking about.
And the money has to come from SOMEWHERE.
No it doesn't. Fiat currency can come from nowhere.
Proof that you have zero grasp of economics.
You cannot simply, endlessly, print money.
Chas - The one, the only.
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that's your opinion, if the government can pay people to do jobs that private sector is unwilling to do, there is nothing artificial about it. The money is real, the party willing to pay is real.
Giving someone money for nothing IS WELFARE.
END OF STORY.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The main problem lies in the basis how our unemployment benefit is paid, and the fact that if you actually would get job for short period of time you most likely end up being penalized rather than encouraged to do so. So a lot of people rather stay uneployed than take these short gigs. In case of basic income, most of the people I know (not all.) would rather take short jobs, study more or start their own company (which again is made exceptionally hard here) rather than be so bored that their balls hurt.
Yes, but this income is being given to poor people, not the rich.
no there is no difference, and there are plenty of "empty-suits" in the private sector. Nothing is artificial if there is buyer and seller for work
I think a universal income is too weird for it to be true. How about universal speed limits? Or maybe universal grading for students? It is just so very strange.
I am offended by other people who are not doing anythings children being given priority access to health and education over my children, because I choose to not do nothing.
I suspect the next stage will result in me being offended that what I have worked my life for is taken away and given to people who did nothing, because I am 'entitled' (ie: I worked hard, and saved, and ended up without towering debt) and they are 'victims' of me having dared to try.
Can we work on your grammar first, then we'll solve the harder problems?
Lower crime rates means less police and lawyers which means higher unemployment which means increased taxes for those who do work to support whole population getting free money.
Poe's law in a nutshell here. If I'm not mistaken, this is an argument FOR higher crime rates, because crime needs to exist in order to keep police and lawyers employed and keep the tax dollars flowing in. In other words, keep the poor down, crime of desperation is good for business!
I sincerely hope that the parent post is made in jest, but in today's political climate you never can be sure...
Wow, please learn to read, and then do so.
Just another day in Paradise
If you have a reliable income and you're basically a good person you stop stealing stuff.
Then the young males living in a public housing project (free government housing) near my daughter's home who trek though the woods behind her house on their way to the public park where drug dealers and their customers meet to hand out and do business didn't break in and steal my daughter's stuff?
Your contention is that surviorship bias is somehow unrelated to whether people have to earn their income or get it from daddy?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
There's currently no drive that I've seen to make the UBI into a really comfortable living. I don't want to have to live on any amount I've seen proposed, which is why I would continue to work for a living and stick to what appear to be good plans for retirement.
What this would do is make the labor market more free by removing the necessity of earning money to survive. Anyone wanting to hire someone to do an arduous, unpleasant, or dangerous job would have to pay enough to lure workers, not just count on desperation. If lithium mining were unpleasant and dangerous, lithium miners would be well paid. If this raised the cost of lithium inconveniently high, well, that's the free market at work.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In other words, if someone makes a design decision you don't like, anyone working on it may as well be idle. That doesn't sound like a scalable definition.
Apple designed iPhones so they'd sell. There's competition. If everyone wanted easily replaceable batteries, then people would only by Android phones with such batteries, and they don't. Lots of people want to buy what Apple offers.
There's also competition among car manufacturers. If most people wanted to keep their cars for twenty years, some manufacturer could design cars to last and advertise that to get people to buy their cars.
Cheap stuff from China is manufactured and sent here because it sells to people. People buy it. Now, retailers can make bad decisions about how much to stock, but if they keep making bad decisions they'll wind up out of business, undercut by retailers that are better at keeping costs down.
So many of your examples are cases where someone makes something because someone else wants it, but you disapprove.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If you don't want the government to support those who are unable to work to further the goals of the functional cogs in the societal machine, pay no taxes.
Ultimately, society has to support those who are worse off, whether it gets done using your money or not. If you've a problem with how your contribution is used, stop contributing.
Posted anonymously because complainers bore me just enough to want to get it off my tits on the happy old Internet.
You realize that, by not contributing to having and raising children, you're being a leech on society, right? You're betting your future that other people will spend their money on something you're going to desperately need when you get older.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie. We don't need the study to know this.
If it's a "100%" provable "lie", then PROVE IT.
J.K Rowling was on welfare when she wrote her first Harry Potter book. The vast majority of the open source software ecosystem is written by volunteers. There are plenty of seniors who choose not to retire at the soonest possible moment, because they enjoy their work. Any trust fund kiddie that actually started a business or went to work doing something is evidence that people will try to do useful work even if they aren't driven by the fear of homelessness. What's more, there's actually evidence that monetary compensation can REDUCE people's productivity in highly creative / intellectual situations, and destroy their motivation entirely in others - the "carrot/stick" model of human motivation is absurdly simplistic and inapplicable in many cases.
We should be asking different questions. Will some people work even if they can survive without work? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that every day. Will some people lounge around? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that thanks to a trust fund, welfare, or enabling family members. So the real question is, will UBI cause more loafing (some people who don't want to work but do it to survive), less loafing (people who want to work but are disincentivized somehow), or will it cause no change at all?
And even more fundamental - is the real goal of society to minimize loafing? Why does it matter if there are some people who choose not to work? We're more productive as a civilization than ever. Why should we expect all people to continue to work 40 hours per week forever, when advancing technology dramatically changes the need for and value of human labor? More important to me is suffering, freedom, and prosperity - we should create policies to minimize suffering, and maximize freedom and prosperity. This experiment is an important step to determine if UBI is a better policy than alternatives - the researchers are anticipating that it increases employment AND saves money. If it does so, isn't it unequivocally better than the welfare system it proposes to replace?
Actually, we are in something of a post-scarcity environment. We can feed the world. Anyone who goes hungry does so because of political or social-economic factors, not because we don't produce enough food. The cost of a high-quality sword in a 1300s style is far, far less than the cost of a worse sword in the 1300s. We spend lots of our money on stuff that just didn't exist a couple of centuries ago.
It really wouldn't cost much to keep people in a reasonably healthy lifestyle similar to what they'd have in 1818, or even 1925 (moving the year to avoid post-WWI economic problems). We could afford to do that, no problem.
Now, if we jump to 2218, we find that the fusion reactors need people to tend them, there's a shortage of engineers to work on the teleportation system, and it's expensive to make a really good matter replicator. By your reasoning, it isn't a post-scarcity economy, and we shouldn't try a UBI to keep people living in, say, the style of 2018.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Do you object to paying for police and fire departments? If your house has never caught fire, tax money is TAKEN FROM YOU to save a bunch of freeloaders who have house fires. Certainly that must offend you as well?
By Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder, I take it you mean the Trump supporters who, when they face a challenge to their Leader, campaign against Hilllary Clinton or Obama like they were contending for the Presidency as they speak.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sure we know why. It's because the cuts were primarily for the ultra-rich, and will swell the deficit like Republicans normally do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh dear, irony levels have hit maximum. I suggest that you read a bit more carefully. Yes, the claim that you quote is made in the article that you link to. But is it true?
Well, in the article that you link to they provide a link to the underlying dataset from the OECD that they used. The link is actually the part that you bolded in your quote. Let's follow that link to http://stats.oecd.org/Index.as... and continue reading.
You need to click the sidebar pull out on the right-side to get the metadta description:
So no, they explicitly do NOT take into account taxes and include social benefits. This is a flat-out lie in the article that you have linked to. Perhaps you should read a little deeper instead of TL;DR + TSOTWTSWS...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
None of this is "free". It is paid for by someone else. ...
*Healthcare paid for by someone else.
*Education paid for by someone else
*Parental leave paid for by someone else
*Childcare paid for by someone else
*much much more paid for by someone else
If you're a good person you don't steal anything in the first place, unless you're literally starving, which virtually no one in the first world is in any danger of.
The party actually paying is the taxpayer, not the government. That party has no say and probably doesn't want artificial work done at their expense.
So, all that's been created is an incentive not to achieve anything.
It must be sad leading an existence so pathetic that you have no interest in achieving anything. I want to achieve things and be successful regardless of money. Not that money isn't a good motivator but there are TONS of ways to make money if you just try a little bit. You can do it entirely with a 3 year old phone or even older computer and internet access.
So that leave the real question of what exactly do we do with people like you? I have to assume you fall into this category because people that don't already know the answer to this problem. You're, for all practical purposes, only a burden on the world and effectively useless. Sorry if that's offensive but it doesn't change the truth. We're actively demonstrating we don't NEED people that are only interested in doing the bare minimum and only if they're paid and that trend is only growing. You are EXACTLY the kind of person we're going to replace with some kind of automation or, in more rare cases, with someone who naturally wants to achieve things.
So you have no motivation, no internal drive, no useful skills and are only motivated by money. The most likely case is you aren't actually motivated by money, you just need money so you do something to get it. There are really only three options for you: either we create make-work for you to do, we cover your basic cost of living or we kill you. Make-work costs more to the world than just taking care of you and it makes you unhappy so of the other two, which is the better option?
If the government doesn't get to decide, then there won't be any reason for UBI recipients to vote for one candidate over another. So government will always keep itself in the decision loop.
Anecdotes don't make it a "100% lie".
As has been pointed out, Nierd reworded it from "A portion of the population" to the blanket statement of "people".
As for people opting to do nothing, and pointing out "trust fund kids".
The CRITICAL difference there is that you and I are not having money taken from OUR earnings to support them.
"We should be asking different questions".
Why? We already have the basic answer from extant welfare programs.
I don't care about "the real goal of society". I simply resent having a portion of what I earn taken by the government and redistributed to people who have no intention of working, and whose only "productivity" is measured int he amount of kids that they produce.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Police and fire departments are NOT the same thing as having a portion of the money taken from me to house, clothe and feed a bunch of freeloaders in idle "luxury".
And you KNOW this.
You're simply being disingenuous.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"Wow, please learn to read, and then do so."
Not an argument.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Police and fire departments are NOT the same thing as having a portion of the money taken from me to house, clothe and feed a bunch of freeloaders in idle "luxury".
And you KNOW this.
You're simply being disingenuous.
No, I'm really not. We pay for firefighters because it's basically a public insurance policy in case of a house fire. It also prevents a fire in one house from spreading to others and causing more harm overall. It's in our collective best interest.
UBI and/or welfare are no different. They are collective insurance policies in the case of income failure. They prevent poverty from causing starvation, homelessness, and crimes of desperation. They, also, are in our collective best interest.
It seems to me that the only moral objection to this comes from a misrepresentation of the situation as one individual stealing from another. Taxation is NOT theft - unless you agree that taxes going to the fire department are also theft. If you are going to be an ideologue, at least make your ideology consistent.
The CRITICAL difference there is that you and I are not having money taken from OUR earnings to support them.
Doesn't really matter. Money isn't wealth, it's a representation of wealth - taxes are not about funding govt, they are about destroying currency to keep inflation under control. This is clearly the case because the government can (and often does) create money out of nothing. Keeping government spending at parity with government revenue is mostly just a convenient way to make sure you aren't erring too far on the side of creating or destroying currency. The actual question is whether your working populace is productive enough to support your nonworking populace (including children, retirees, the disabled, and the unemployed, wealthy or no). This is also obviously true, because a society made up entirely of retirees could not function in reality, even if all of those retirees had theoretical pensions that would provide income for life.
We already have the basic answer from extant welfare programs.
We do? There's almost nothing in economics where we have "the answer". There are lots of cases where we have some evidence one way or the other, but even then it's usually fuzzy. I'd love to see any evidence you have in support of your views - and in any case, experiments are useful, and UBI is different in substantial ways from other kinds of welfare so the result may be different.
I simply resent having a portion of what I earn taken by the government and redistributed to people who have no intention of working...
Why do you resent it if it saves you money in the long run? There are studies showing it's cheaper to provide homes for the homeless than to it is to deal with the load they put on the ER, police, legal system, and jails. We should choose policies based on evidence, not feelings.
In other words, if someone makes a design decision you don't like, anyone working on it may as well be idle.
No, Disingenuous McDouchebag, if someone makes a design decision that no one likes, anyone working on it must be idle, for the good of all. It's not about me. I am not the arbiter of what is good. That's too much responsibility. But there's a lot of stuff which is clearly garbage designed to fail and generate more sales, and that has to stop for the good of all. That I will benefit is, frankly, beside the point. Who gives a shit about me? It's everyone that we should care about.
So many of your examples are cases where someone makes something because someone else wants it, but you disapprove.
What? Zero of them were about that. Nobody wants their products to be compromised shit. That's just what's offered to them in general, and especially at a price point they can afford. And that is a result of the worker's share of profits dwindling throughout history.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Excuse me. If we are running 3% growth right now, why do we need the tax cut?
Well, for one thing, markets anticipate, and they anticipated a tax cut.
Anyone with basic math skills can see UBI won't work for 300,000,000 people.
So you mean to tell me that you didn't go so far as drilling down into the methodology section by country? If you had you would have found the (i) link to this document in Sweden's row noted as "New Income Definition Since 2012":
TERMS OF REFERENCE OECD PROJECT ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLD INCOMES 2017/18 COLLECTION
TRR: current transfers received, including transfers from social security (including accident and disability benefits, old-age cash benefits, unemployment benefits, maternity allowances, child and/or family allowances, all income-tested and means-tested benefits that are part of social assistance, including quasi-cash transfers given for a specific purpose such as food stamps); transfers from employment related social insurance; as well as cash transfers from both non-profit institutions and other households.
TRP: current transfers paid, including direct taxes on income and wealth, social security contributions paid by households, contributions to employment-related social insurance, current transfers paid to both other households and non-profit institutions. Taxes on realised capital gains should be excluded from wealth taxes when possible. [Values for transfers paid should be reported in the OECD questionnaire with a negative sign].
And of course there are formula showing the addition of TRR components and subtraction of TRP components.
TD:DR?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
All this ignores the fight to reverse climate change. A green economy is a small economy. Most people will have to become farmers living in eco-villages and working communal land. There will be no consumer economy as few will have money or need much anyway. We can't afford the carbon dioxide released by the fossil fuels needed to build enough renewable power sources to replace what we use now so why try?
I started working on our small family farm 50 years ago, I can't do a full days work now but I could supervise. Would the world's governments be able to force such a system? Russia and China killed millions trying and failed but with the population understanding the need and no interference from other governments trying to subvert the change it could be done.
Using a UBI to sustain the current system is the stupidest thing a government could do. Paying people to change how they live would be the smart thing to do.
The government can do anything.
That doesn't make it right.
It's non-competitive products and services with less demand than other things which is what should be done because it's what people want.
For a real job someone is ok giving you whatever benefits in return for it.
This crap is just socialism and you know it and it's trash, fake and retarded. Just like the people who think it's how things should be done and defend it .. I don't even have to mention anyone ..
No the party willing to pay it isn't real. People don't want to have the shit the government do. Here in Sweden it spend million of SEK per non-asylum seeker of "Afghan" ethnicity but often from Iran. Hardly anyone would want to pay for that shit but the government do so anyway. But it's not their money. It's stolen money.
Re "The UBI given to all wealthy citizens who are working full time would be a free flow of tax payers money to them."
No, because if the government has implemented a UBI properly, the extra income will be offset by the extra tax. Whether that leaves wealthy citizens "better" or "worse" off from an immediate (net annual income before qualitative adjustments) perspective will depend on various factors; however, the goal of a UBI is to result in a net growth in a post-qualitative assessment (or in simple terms, it doesn't matter if the wealthy are a little bit less wealthy in the short term, because the goal is to reduce the poverty traps, economic failures, civil unrest and revolutions that make everyone a lot less wealthy in the long term).
Re "The UBI given to citizens who need a basic income would be what a UBI should be for."
Exactly! The UBI is for the people in need.
Re "Why given a nations most wealthy citizens a UBI? They are working full time and have to pay tax. The UBI would just put more of a tax rate on them."
Here's the thing. Part of the appeal of UBI is that it reduces the cost overheads of social welfare. Think about it. You have a taxation system. Money goes into the treasury. You have a welfare system. Money goes out again to those in need. These two linked systems each require the citizens involved to expend resources on determining how much has to go where, and each requires the government to expend further resources to process those determinations. By implementing a UBI and having the excess recouped via back-end algorithms in the taxation system, it's possible to vastly reduce the resources expended by the citizens and the government on the welfare system.
Of course, how well that works out in practice depends on how well (or not) the government does on implementing it, but that's a problem you face with any welfare system, including the one you have right now.
My contention is that for every Microsoft built up while not having to work you'll find 100 other businesses that were built up by people after they came home from their 9-5.
My contention is that you either don't know the meaning of the word coincidence or you didn't think it through.
"Roman politicians passed laws in 140 B.C. to keep the votes of poorer citizens, by introducing a grain dole: giving out cheap food and entertainment, "bread and circuses", became the most effective way to rise to power."
"If they do nothing instead of spending their time committing a crime it might well be worth it. If my options are to pay people to stay at home or to pay police, prison guards, and much larger legal system I'd prefer to avoid creating bigger government for no real benefit. "
But really all it takes is a trip down opioid lane, especially if their bored from doing nothing with their life, and the life of crime begins when there subsistence living doesn't support their drug addiction. In this case you end up paying the person and the police in the end. And maybe even paying extra for drug rehabilitation.
Absolutely every small business owner in the world knows this is true. Given the option to do nothing, a SIGNIFICANT portion of the population will do exactly nothing. Too many of them will do nothing but cause problems and create more work (not the good kind) for other people.
Case in point-- You go home from work. You have the option of doing some community service to improve your neighborhood, you could spend time teaching your kids how to anything, you could learn how to write a book, build a model spaceship, paint a portrait, cook fine foods, and some, SOME people do just that. They make our world richer, more interesting. But, as David Letterman once said, "Perhaps your purpose in life is to watch TV." Sadly, this seems to be true for the vast majority of people. Too many people, given the option, will just watch TV and eat snacks all day.
> As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie.
Please supply your proof. As a small business owner, I can say that given the option to do nothing, MOST people will do nothing. 100% true. Oh, how many jobs have you created? How many people have you employed?
>How many billionaires that never need to work another day in their or their great great great grandkids lives - sit at home and do nothing?
What an idiot. There's a reason those people are billionaires. Now ask yourself which is bigger, the number of billionaires in the world, or the number of educated, able bodied people under 50 who are on welfare? Don't give a gut answer, so the research.
Opinions aren't facts. Facts take a significantly greater effort to collect and also to understand.
Quote from your earlier post:
In fact, lots of people like iPhones, and pay money for them when there are cheaper smartphones available. This suggests to me that some people (including me) like the iPhone. There are good reasons for the phone to be thin, in that that's what a whole lot of people want. (I don't want one much thicker than 7mm, myself.) There are good reasons for making the battery not easily replaceable.
This isn't a pump-and-dump scheme. Apple wants to keep their customers happy so they stay customers, and that means they want their customers to find their phones useful and stylish and whatever else they want with a phone. Apple likes repeat customers.
So, you're saying that you don't like some of Apple's design decisions, despite the fact that people are willing to spend a whole lot on their iPhones, and therefore the labor put into them is wasted. Car manufacturers could make longer-lasting cars (my wife and I generally keep ours for over ten years, BTW), but people aren't going to pay extra for them, so they make what they can best sell. Therefore, the auto industry is largely waste.
If you're going to make a point, try to keep your personal prejudices out of it. Find examples most people will agree with. There's a lot of irrational anti-Apple sentiment on Slashdot (and also some rational anti-Apple sentiment), but someone who doesn't share your opinions is going to discount what you're nominally trying to say.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And so we reach conflicting claims within the same source - why should we trust it?
Lets do a basic sanity check to see if the ”source” is conplete bullshit or not. Given the claimed median income for Sweden, what is the take-home and gross salary of a worker on the median salary?
How does this compare to the official figures from SCB?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Very stable geniuses here.
Most European countries are not living up to their defense obligations, relying upon the US to backstop them.
Maybe they've worked out that if you don't go round bombing everywhere, the world doesn't have you and you don't need to spend hundreds of billion on defence?
If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States
I'm sure that a German, driving his Audi to work at 120mph on the Autobahn for his 35 hour a week job at a world-leading engineering company, before returning to his well appointed, modern apartment with strong tenancy protection, bemoans his existence, and wishes he was in Alabama driving a rusty pickup truck along pothole-ridden roads to his government makework job at a military contractor, working 60 hours a week with no overtime and no vacation, before going home to his trailer, or his dilapidated shack that turns into matches every hurricane season.
In 30 years it is possible that Europe will be almost unrecognizable, including the country you live in.
America is already unrecognisable. In thirty years it will look more like Mexico than 1950s America.
The thing about this plan is that it's in Finland, not America. They don't have to give a fuck what American nut-job libertarian/republicans think about it. As an independent country not answerable to the Trumpets, they're free to run this experiment on their own terms and decide on whether to roll it out or not.
Is a universal basic income really that different other than that they benefit everyone instead just fake billionaires who commit treason and their cronies?
Let's say Basic Income is $5K/yr, so everyone gets $5K/yr - where does that money come from? Are you going to cut entitlements? Are you going to raise taxes?
Where do those millions of $5K checks come from?
How long before politicians argue that 'no one can live in $5K/yr?' - don't think they won't, google 'food stamp challenge' and marvel at people, celebrities, and politicians argue that you can't live on 'Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program', AKA SNAP. That the first letter stands for 'Supplemental' is a fact that eludes them...
Ken
I actually know it. Because I was the one when I was student. After working for 15 years, I have totally changed my mind thinking to do something is the life, but I'm sure that if young people have the option, then some of them decide to do nothing.