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Could We Fund a Universal Basic Income with Universal Basic Assets? (fastcompany.com)
Universal Basic Incomes aren't really the issue, argues Fast Company staff writer Ben Schiller. "It's how you find $2 trillion to pay for it."
One answer may come in the form of "universal basic assets" (UBA). UBA can mean a fund of publicly-owned infrastructure or revenue streams -- like Alaska's Permanent Fund which pays residents up to $2,000 a year from state oil taxes. Or, it can mean actual assets that drive down the cost of living, like tuition-free education and free public broadband. There are lots of proposals going around now that fall into these two camps...
Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a "joint inheritance." He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The U.K. think-tank IPPR recently proposed a similar "sovereign wealth fund owned by and run in the interests of citizens." It would finance the fund with "a scrip tax of up to 3% requiring businesses to issue equity to the government, or pay a tax of equivalent value," sales of land owned by the U.K. monarchy, and higher inheritance taxes.
Blockchain can help. Blockchain technology could offer a way to divide publicly-owned infrastructure so it's genuinely publicly-owned. We could issue tokenized securities in the assets around us giving everyone a stake in their environment. Then they could trade those tokens on exchanges, like they were cryptocurrencies, or use the tokens as collateral on loans.
Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a "joint inheritance." He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum. The U.K. think-tank IPPR recently proposed a similar "sovereign wealth fund owned by and run in the interests of citizens." It would finance the fund with "a scrip tax of up to 3% requiring businesses to issue equity to the government, or pay a tax of equivalent value," sales of land owned by the U.K. monarchy, and higher inheritance taxes.
Blockchain can help. Blockchain technology could offer a way to divide publicly-owned infrastructure so it's genuinely publicly-owned. We could issue tokenized securities in the assets around us giving everyone a stake in their environment. Then they could trade those tokens on exchanges, like they were cryptocurrencies, or use the tokens as collateral on loans.
If it's something like oil or natural resources, then maybe. The real question is whether there's enough of them and they're valuable enough.
The Nordic countries are rich in oil, low in population, and have been investing that money and it's working out for them. There may not be quite enough to go around for larger populations, though.
Figures, that the globalist and socialist answer to technology that could free mankind from government control is to try to chain him to government forever. There is no need for 'Universal Basic Income' as its being envisioned. With new technology people will be able to and should be encouraged to live and provide for themselves independently with at most a very basic safety network not all that much more substantial than whats available now and can be provided by family and friends or the local community not some monolithic government authority that should wither away.
people give value to money, banks take that idea, split it many times over, each time doubling the perceived value, yet nothing real is created, only a perception, an image. Money is virtual, a creation made to control, quantize, and retain control over large groups of people.
Yes there are some benefits, yet the abuse of the system far outweighs any long term benefits humanity can ever have by retaining this system.
YMMV
Publicly owned infrastructure used to be called Communism, but I guess they needed some re-branding.
Forget having no clothes, the emperor is dangerously stupid.
UBI and UBA are common items in Saudi Arabia
They have oil, lots of it, and the oil generated so much money for them they did not know how to spend it, so they wasted a lot of the money
Not long ago the oil price tanked, and the Saudi government felt the pinch and stopped the UBI --- lot of rioting as the result (many people killed too)
So if the lazy millennials are thinking of getting something for nothing, please look at Saudi Arabia
Blockchain can help. Blockchain technology could offer a way to divide publicly-owned infrastructure so it's genuinely publicly-owned
Bullshit. First of all, blockchains only work when the tokens have sufficient value, otherwise there's no incentive for miners. Secondly, even in the case of the most successful blockchain, Bitcoin, we have 99% of the miner capacity in the hands of a few big players, not the general public.
I think you are confusing what is required. For the US 2 trillion gets you less than 7k a year for each person and that is 2 trillion a YEAR. So what you need is something generating that per annum, lets assume some infrastructure with an awesome return of 10%, that means you need a 20 trillion investment to get everyone about 7k a year. want to turn that into a real livable income you are looking at 3 or 4 fold that in cost
So how do you control for population growth? Hundreds of millions of unemployed people with nothing to do but fuck. If you pay for babies, you get more babies. And since there is no more need to compete for resources, they will all be little morons.
The total US stock market value is only about 60 trillion. Even taking a 10% stake in every company on the stock market would not come close to covering your 2 trillion a year price tag. people don't seem to comprehend just how huge a number that is. that is more than half the current US total tax revenue. perhaps if you see it with all the Zero's you might comprehend what a fuck load of money that is 2,000,000,000,000. Now then start thinking about how fucking huge a set of assets you require to consistently generate that income, it would need to be 40-50 trillion dollars in assets owned by the state to generate it and even then you are only giving people a paltry amount, not enough to actually live on,
Redistributing wealth gained from selling nationalized natural resources, ok, but that's not sustainable everywhere to the point to fund a UBI. What happens when electric vehicles drive down demand for oil? When coal electric generation is less profitable than solar? There goes your carbon tax income, too. Even for resources that won't become obsolete, it's presumed that a country is selling its resources more than it's importing i.e. running a trade surplus, and obviously not every nation can have a trade surplus.
What's the benefit of free tuition when 70% of people go on to University and there are too few teachers and too few field-related jobs to support all of the degrees being earned? I thought AI was going to create structural unemployment anyways, even those who are University-educated. Free broadband I'm cool with, since it's basic infrastructure and ought to be nationalized like roadways and water pipes; it's easy to throttle ethically, unlike say electricity use where some will abuse it (cryptocoin mining) yet causing brownouts is troublesome (your electric heater shutting down in winter).
Localities charging businesses to use the air, water and minerals already exists. Pollution regulations, and cap-and-trade, cover the air. Mineral and water rights are sold just like land, and businesses can buy water directly from a locality as well. Businesses have to pay for a license to use electromagnetic spectrum, too. These may not technically be 'taxes' but the effect is the same.
The 'use blockchain to split public assets and then trade them like cryptocoins' idea is asinine. I give it a week before the usual suspects buy up all the cryptoassets, cornering the market, effectively privatizing public assets.
The only good idea here is taxing speculation, as e.g. a percentage of the value of every securities trade rather than the net profit on the balance sheet at the end of the year. This has been suggested many times before, though.
My personally preferred idea for a UBI:
Step one: utilize eminent domain law to buy out and nationalize ALL land and residential buildings in the country. People/buildings can remain where they are. Step two: implement SANE rental prices for contractual use of land, decided by calculation of objective measures of the land's value, thus making it immune to bubbles. Step three: free housing for everyone, no more paying to live in an apartment.
Obvious caveats: needs efficient enough bureaucracy (ha!) to not run into the red-tape problems Cuba did with nationalized residences. How to decide who gets to live where, if they get a house versus an apartment, how many square feet? Waiting lists; less-picky people get preference, encouraging people to only ask for the minimum they require. Councils of engineers, social planners and architects will decide when buildings need to be torn down for safety reasons, and what kind of new residences to erect and where.
IMO if people have free housing, the other details don't matter so much. Food is relatively cheap and there are plenty of food banks/food stamp programs that already help with that. Water and broadband would be free, you'd only pay for electricity and gas (although honestly, how much gas can someone use? nationalize that too, why not...)
Wait, how're we going to pay for all that nationalizing of land and residences? By nationalizing the patent and public research system. The government now owns all patents, no more worrying about first to file; on the upside, they will fight infringement in court on their own dime (and are thus motivated to spend money not to grant obvious/overbroad patents, although selective enforcement could be a problem), and let the filer keep 20% of any licensing revenues. Public research leads to public patents, the people get 100% of licensing fees. Ditch software patents while you're at it. Eventually, as new technology emerges and takes over, ~80% of all wealth will be nationalized due to patent licensing, with businesses who utilize those patents owning about 20%
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Why do i imagine this being said in an almost pleading tone of voice?
This is an old proposal - it has been around for decades. But I don't think it is going to happen, and the reason is simple:
Being rich means being in control. In control of your own life, your own destiny. A universal income would give poor people a similar level of control over their lives, a level they do not currently have. And many people do no think that is a good idea, for a wide range of reasons from envy to paternalism.
In the future the vast majority of people will be living in squalor. There is no way to avoid it.
Publicly owned infrastructure used to be called Communism, but I guess they needed some re-branding.
No. Communism is public ownership of all assets. If there are still private assets it is not Communism. Communism is something rather more dramatic than most of the people who throw around the world Communism mean, but in recent years this has generally been done on purpose so that any idea that is not pure unfettered neoliberal capitalism can be shot down as 'crazy communism'.
Of course no country has actually ever had pure unfettered neo-liberal capitalism either, and very few people believe you can organise a society effectively without any form of 'community regulation of the means of production' - you know, things like food and drug safety standards, a centralised military and police force, competition and fraud rules for commerce. Stuff that is actually on the spectrum of Socialism (albeit the lighter end)
In the end though, this is all about trying to claim ownership of words so that the historical connotations associated with that word in popular culture can be loaded against an idea you don't like. So it doesn't matter what the merits of this idea actually are (and I question many of them), by claiming it is 'Communism' people will cease evaluating the idea rationally and just reject it because it is associated with bad stuff. In many ways, I think one of the most influential aspects of the1980s economic reforms was associating them with the word 'free'.
Citizens collectively own the robots that are working for the companies. The companies have to pay the robots as they would have paid humans.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/04/19/1355231/finland-is-killing-its-basic-income-experiment
Sounds good, doesn't work. (yet, automation needs to go way up and there will be a very painful transition)
Now argue against the 90% of UBI proposals that don't involve printing money.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Watch the economists, refusing to let go of their mythology, trying to invent the perpetuum mobile within their limited frame set.
The problem is that some have far too much while the rest has far too little. And this is a stable state within the current economic "models".
Private property should just lose the absolute value it has nowaday and just be seen as an instrument for social cohesion among others. I don't think we should do away with it, it *is* an useful instrument, it just should not top the others, as if it were a basic moral principle. It isn't.
That would be the first step.
Stupid?
The example of Alaska is poor because naturally many states don't have resources that can be leveraged to provide 2000 dollars to each resident per year.
What is more, even alaska's oil reserves are finite. What happens when that runs out? And it will.
And it gets worse... you have to concede that this would just go federal... where in all national resources would go into some sort of federal pot to be spit up. But that's no good because once divided you won't have enough. Do the math.
But its worse than that because even if you did have enough... it would again be finite.
And worse than that because even if it weren't finite there would still be market fluctuation that would cause the pay out to change. That payout change would render the UBA unreliable. If you cached extra funds in good years to level out the payment in bad years then the payment would be more reliable but down turns or upturns in the commodities markets can last decades. Are you going to cache reserves to last decades? Come now.
And it gets worse because even if you didn't have any of those problems subsidizing the population in this manner would almost certainly lead to run away consumption. It would not be in the interest of the public to have population growth because that would be more mouths to divide the money between. And yet the UBA or UBI or really any radical expansion in the welfare system would encourage people to join just to suck at the tit.
It gets worse than that too because our agency in our republics is directly related to our economic logistical utility to the society. It was that increase in logistical utility that ended the rule of the nobles. Old Feudal style economies were not competitive because societies that did not grant agency to their valuable workers were not competitive. Economics is largely a question of motivating people. If individuals have more leverage then they must be bargained with to motivate them to work. If their labor is of no value then they have no leverage. The UBI and UBA concepts argue that large portions of the population will be of no value. One must hope that doesn't happen because if it does and the situation sustains throughout time then it is inevitable that they'll suffer extreme tyranny and possibly genocide.
The UBI and UBA are at best... death sentences... they are a suicide pact. At best. At worst they fail for screwing up an almost endless list of economic problems that are pretty obvious. But assuming you can deal with that, the ultimate political consequences will be fatal.
I would not advocate these policies unless you have nothing but malice in your heart for the people that will receive it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
This is bonkers.
Blockchain has become just clickbait.
Guess its time to save money for the startups that have business cases that are sound *even without* blockchain.
If you pay people to do fuck-all, a lot of them will do exactly that. In the US and the UK, we have the example of the corrosive effects of multi-generational dependency and in the Middle East, you can see that it doesn't get better just by giving people more money.
This is not even touching on the issue that government can only give away what it takes forcibly from those who produce it, and fuck that noise.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The GP never said anything about non-citizens.
If you have any common sense left, you would have understand that all the national assets must be owned by citizens. Non-citizens don't get nothing.
Maybe its just me, but this sounds like extremely complicated and expensive way to do socialism. Socialism does not work.
Are (any) fiat-currency and (any) cryptocurrency really equivalent, as cryptocurrency fans claim?
For example, US Dollar and Bitcoin are really equals?
Value/validity/authorization of US dollar is provided/guaranteed by US Government (and in-turn whole US Public)!
Also, not to mention, US Dollars in any US Bank is insured by US Government!
What authorization/guarantee/insurance is behind Bitcoin? Nothing!
Sorry but that is the end of discussion then!
Why do you think Satoshi Nakamoto is really hiding his identity, if Bitcoin is really such a great innovation?
He is just someone does not like media/fan attention?
Or, could it be really because Bitcoin (and all cryptocurrencies followed it) are actually Ponzi Schemes?
(So he knew very well that law enforcement would come after him sooner or later?!)
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really good innovation, why they attract so many criminals/criminal activity?
Could it really be because, all cryptocurrencies themselves are scams, and that is why they attract all kinds of criminals/criminal activity?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really currency, why no company/store can use Bitcoin as currency anymore?
Because the price of Bitcoin proved to be extremely unstable to use as a currency?
Would the result be different, if Bitcoin replaced by any other "cryptocurrency"?
Aren't all work the same way?
If so-called cryptocurrencies are really money; isn't people issuing their own money, illegal already, in all countries?
If so then, why they are still not banned in all countries?
Or, they are not actually virtual currency but virtual investment?
But, if they are actually investment, why we need/want them?
What would happen to world economy, if people invested in virtual investments, instead of real investments?
Or, all so-called cryptocurrencies are actually just a modified (made decentralized and paying variable interest) Ponzi Schemes?
(Price of cryptocurrencies would keep increasing in the long term (by their design), so it is equivalent of paying variable interest to all long term investors.)
As more and more people invest in cryptocurrencies, it will become harder and harder to ban their trading everywhere!
All cryptocurrencies need to be banned globally before it is too late!
Look, Universal Basic Income is really simple. You pay every person (over a particular age) a fixed amount per week, regardless of their other earnings/personal situation/etc. Done.
The benefits of this approach is that people don't need to do pointless tasks that don't really benefit the economy as a whole in order to not become destitute. Living on UBI and not doing any work should be possible but not comfortable; the ideal should always be gaining more skills and experience to get a better job and earn more money because that is what causes the economy as a whole to grow.
To pay for it you remove most tax deductions, lower income tax band thresholds and increase taxes. Aim for a situation where median earners end up with the same income after tax as they do under the current system, and high earners pay a bit more. I have done the maths for my country, and it is doable with a net tax increase of 0% for median earners, 1% for 75th percentile earners and about 5% for 90th percentile earners. It's possible because you roll up all the existing wealth redistribution/safety net/means tested benefits/situational benefits (unemployment etc) into one simpler system, and save a vast amount on administering all those different inefficient systems.
Acquiring income-generating assets at the national level isn't necessary or even practical in most cases. Unless you're exploiting a primary resource and selling it to other countries (Alaska, Norway, Saudi Arabia) you just end up with the government giving people money and then selling them stuff to get the same money back. By all means invest in public services and infrastructure to reduce other costs, but that is an ENTIRELY separate issue and should not be conflated with UBI, which is already a hard enough cell to people who perceive any kind of "universal" anything as communism when in fact it's just a more equitable and efficient version of what we already do through taxes and benefits.
Micro - if the wage cost in a shop is X per annum and you double the wages, the cost of goods in that shop needs to rise to cover an additional X per annum, i.e. wage increases cause the cost of goods to go up.
Macro - if you give 1000 people a Snickers bar, those people have gained something of value; if you give everyone in the country a Snickers bar, Snickers bars become almost valueless, i.e. when you give *everyone* something, the value of that something drops.
Mix micro and macro - UBI gives wage increases to everyone so it would put costs up at the same time as devaluing the currency. So it's likely that's-so-kash is right that UBI cannot ever work.
Indeed this is an issue faced on reservations too. In places where shared ownership reservation lands were turned into individual owned plots, much of that land eventually became owned by a few outside corporations. This is not a new experience, per post USSR Russia, but rather it is a very old trick.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
Jobs are not a central issue for what is to come as jobs will virtually vanish. For example, in the past we took natural resources and apply labor and export products. That meant that the income taxes for the investors and workers supplied the government with money. But now we can take the human effort out of production. We simply use machines to turn natural resources into products for export. there are very few workers to tax and less jobs every few months. so what can we do. Assign a basic income to each person of $3,000 per month. Fro that require the person to select a stock to purchase and hold for 30 days. Those that made money on their stock could receive the profit or let it be re-invested in a separate account. income tax would only be calculated to the stock market earnings that you placed in a second, long term account. The investment requirement would be made on the same day that the pay check comes to you and you can not make any changes until the next pay day and then you must make the investment that same day. now the good parts are that since every person is assigned to different days of the month the stock market is made stable with more moderate swings in value. Next those that spent time and studied what they should invest in would establish a social pecking order which seems to be important for humans. So some people would still earn more than others. Those humans who remain in jobs will be highly taxed so that taking that $3,000 a month is attractive and the difference between working and non working adults is not so great. Obviously businesses might be facing heavier taxes. And that is fair. After all with little to no human employees all a business does is take from the common elements of this world and trade it for cash elsewhere with no particular good done for the citizens of a nation. The real fun may start when AI devices are defined as legal persons and they apply their massive intelligence to acquiring cash and control of other companies. Imagine a large company like IBM investing all of its resources perpetually in building ever smarter computers.
Finland is ending its Universal Basic Income experiment.
Your dream, much like the success of communism, is dead.
Perhaps if you focus on the root causes of many ills in society(lack of focus on the spurning of education and civility in Serbian population groups), youâ(TM)d stumble upon an answer. But I highly doubt it.
it attempts to give "to each according to their need"
without requiring "From each according to their ability."
... what they really want is a honest paycheck and to be empowered, listened to and respected for what they contribute. Society should be providing free employment, not free pay. Give a job to anyone who asks for one. Is that really so difficult to do or understand?
However, I also believe that the upper class won't go for anything that takes away their power, like the fear of losing your job gives them. Until this power over employment is taken away from the powerful the rest of us will only ever be wage slaves.
It's called "Kindergarten through 12th grade"
not everyone deserves to go to college. If society is going to pay to let these schmoes go to school for free, SOCIETY should get to dictate what they go for, not their choice.
Since right now, the student choosing is what is causing them to have issues with their student loan payback for degrees that don't get them anywhere in life....much less a job to repay the loans.
"Blockchain could help"
Yeah, so could a practically infinite number of other things. The 'put blockchain in everything' era of "ideas" is getting old fast. It's all very reminiscent of the game development space about four years ago when every game pitch was " IN VR!"
These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change.
Regardless of whether it would work as the article describes or not, income inequality is not in and of itself a problem.
There are at least a couple distinct problems there. One is the disconnect between productivity, wage distribution, and spending power. Productivity has gone up and wages have not kept pace with these improvements. Unless you're at the top of a company where most of the wage improvements are going.
Another problem is the ability to simply exist. A lot of jobs have been eliminated by technological progress and there have been some low-paying jobs created, but what we need in an ideal world and what we have are two very different things. Lots of big box stores and so-called "gig economy" jobs have moved to part time which doesn't mandate benefits and things like that, so people are left paying more with their adjusted for inflation and productivity, lower wages.
There are some other assorted problems like things costing way less but bills costing more, cost of living overall increasing against stagnant wages, the fact that the richest .1% own something like 30% of all assets - these aren't exact numbers and I don't care to look but this is a reasonable paraphrase of the concept, etc. etc.
But conflating at least these two main things and possibly many more problems under the simplistic banner of "income inequality" is misleading. Some people make more or less money and this is not a problem. This is the system functioning as designed. You're better off talking about what specific issue with income inequality that this allegedly solves.
...is still communism. Transferring vast amounts of wealth from the corporations and wealthy to the common people for the common good always sounds like a great idea in theory. But the practical results have pretty consistently proven disastrous.
Humans seem to need motivation to work and achieve. They need to feel like a big reward is possible, even if it's practically out of reach for most people. Penalizing success to give everyone more motivation to do the bare minimum is ultimately unhealthy for most societies (beyond a certain point anyway). No one disputes that we should have a social safety net for the old and infirm certainly, but a universal income for even the young and healthy only encourages a type of social stagnation.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How about Universal Basic Occupations? Yeah, a fucking job. Give up on your startup that's going NOWHERE and get off your ass at Starbucks and make me some coffee. Starbucks isn't hiring? There's a place down the street that is.
Even\ in countries where universal welfare is available, most people there *decide* to work. We have real-world examples of this being the case. Real-world examples trump theories that say "couldn't work". e.g. the old canard that "theory" can't explain how the bumblebee can fly. But they clearly do.
UBI systems are intended to replace welfare. The difference is that when you work in a UBI system, you still receive UB rather than losing the UBI. Therefore, UBI systems have less anti-work incentives in them than providing a traditional welfare system. If you look at a nation such as Australia, in the good years about 4 ~4.5% will be getting welfare benefits. The other ~96% of the population prefer to work, and Australia has quite generous welfare benefits, which you lose if you start working.
UBI doesn't penalize you when you start working therefore there's no reason to think that most people will be satisfied to only get UBI. People want more, even when they could just get unemployment benefits now.
The current blockchain is not carbon friendly.
What you say is mostly right but that says nothing about GP's post. There are two faults main with your thinking. First is that you are only looking at the problem from the recipient perspective. GP said nothing about the recipients perspective but pointed out that it won't work because it will destroy the economy. Second is that you assume switching to a carrot-only incentive will be as good as carrot-and-stick. Most benefits systems use the latter which has been proven to be more effective.
Sorry folks. You can't make everyone wealthy by printing money and giving it away. It doesn't matter how the money is shuffled around; the result is the same.
Just 'don't be silly'. We-all get back what we contribute to 'society', priced at what society needs. Get it wrong, and you'd better work harder, or at something more useful. If productive assets are confiscated, go get your pitchfork.
It's absurd to earmark money from one source for another. All money should go into general revenues and then be spent in whatever is the most valuable way. It's the usual rubbish where people say we should have a state lottery. People disapprove. SO they then say, "we'll have a state lottery and the profits will go to the schools". The people approve. and then the legislature just reduces direct school funding because the state lottery pays. So the end is, there is a state lottery and the net funds go into the general revenue and people are fooled and you now can't undo it because it would defund the schools.
The only exception to that rule is when politicians just can't be trusted to do the right thing and simultaneously stability of a funding source requires such an endowment or earmark.
SO if general basic income is a good idea you need to just fund it directly out of general revenues. Don't come up with some misdirection about an endowment or carbon tax. In the end those are feel good hoaxes. In the end if it's costs are a drag on the economy then it's exactly the same cost no matter which pipe the funds flow through. This is not to say it's a bad idea to have UBI. It might or might not be what we want as a society. It might or might not harm productivity. those are different questions. I'm just saying don't come up with this imaginary funding scheme. those don't exist. it's sort of like conservation of energy as a law.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The funny thing is, in many places you don't need to spend more money to make UBI work, you just need to spend it more wisely.
In Canada, for example, if you took all the money currently spent on welfare, employment insurance, government pension and similar programs, you could afford to make sure every family in the country had an income of about 10k+ per year (plus an extra 5k/year per child).
Which means it would cost almost nothing extra to make sure every family could get by with their basic needs without any extra spending or taxes. UBI would be obviously simple and almost cost-free to implement in Canada and the long term savings in health costs, reduced crime and added security/investment potential would make than make up for the difference.
We don't need to find an extra trillion dollars, we just need to readjust how the current money we have is spent.
Exactly.
Soon as I read "solves climate change" I knew this was a scam idea.
This is just a scam to tax people more and make people more dependent on the government. We need LESS handouts not more. Instead of looking for a way to give people money for doing nothing, find a way to get these people to work to earn money.
We need a block chain version of the appy apps guy. That is all I got from this summary.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
And I don't mean Groucho.
Have gnu, will travel.
If the top 1% were forced to surrender their obscene wealth it would be easy to do. The public should not tolerate such inequality.
What does "carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" have to do with "universal basic income"?
Changing tax rates up or down doesn't "generally" move revenue either direction, it totally depends.
Starting with a communist country, 100% tax rate, cutting the rate by 80% will massively increase economic production and increase government revenue. Starting at a 0% tax rate, moving up to 20% will greatly increase government revenue. There is a rate which maximises revenue. If the current rate is too high, reducing it will boost the economy, increasing paychecks, and increase revenue. If the current rate is too low, increasing it will boost revenue to the government, at the cost of reducing people's paychecks.
There is of course a LOT of debate about what the ideal rate is for a given country, the rate which maximises government revenue. Studies indicate the best rate is probably somewhere between 20%-30%, that's the general range you get if you leave politics out of it and just try to objectively optimize revenue.
While either increasing or decreasing tax rates may increase government revenue, increased rates almost always decrease people's pay checks. Therefore it's better to err on the side of a tax rate that's slightly lower than what optimizes government revenue. Better for you to get $2000 and the government get $950 than for you to get $1000 and the government gets $1000.
Also of course the different types of taxes have completely different optimum rates. One of the best indicators for how well an economy will do is savings rate, how much people save up and invest. People who save up in a 401K now are generating revenue for the government both now and layer, so you want tax policy to strongly encourage savings and investment.
UBA, See also: Communism and socialism
Never have worked. Never will. Go ask Venezuelan citizens how they feel about how great these ideas are.
If you take 10% of stock market every year there will be nothing left in 10 years - this is simple math.
The reality will be much worse - the stock market will evaporate once the passage of such law will become even remote reality.
Then again, why are you employing the lazy to do work? they just slack off posting idiotic claims about lazy people on slashdot and even if you DO get the lazy bastards to do something, it takes longer than it should and is of worse quality, so you need someone else not only to goad them on to actually work, but also check the quality and redo it if it falls too far.
Or UBI means that lazy fuck stays home and away from me and my work.
First of all, 'Duh.'. This fact and the fact that so many young advocates are unaware of the complete context of such ideas is why they get mocked so mercilessly. All of this has been attempted before, this is not news to anyone.
Second, it would be impossible to implement without stomping all over people's free will. Believe it or not, not everyone wants what you want, and you are not allowed to force them to, nor should you be.
This topic is a joke. You are just going to have to work, millennials. Sorry. The great irony is that under a socialist/communist form of government, you would be working twice as hard for much less, with no hope of upward mobility, and if you refused, there would be consequences. The system we have now is precisely what allows you to stay in your or your parent's house and create posts like this in the first place. Don't take it for granted.
Wealth comes from production. You can't arbitrarily declare a certain amount of money and then expect that to hold up; that's what central banks do and EVERY time it leads to an eventual market crash. F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this analysis of the business cycle.
Money is just a tool to facilitate trade; it's "stuff" that constitutes actual wealth: food, houses, cars, clothing, electronics, etc. And creating new stuff requires production.
Socialism cannot work over the long-term because it has no price system to deal with the scarcity of "stuff."
Here's some free economic education for you:
www.BernieIsWrong.com
The American people didn't want the tax cut, it was actually pretty unpopular. Major GOP donors wanted the tax cut.
That's also why the US doesn't have Universal Healthcare or DACA despite both being popular policies.
If you feel the government isn't requiring enough taxes from you under threat of violence, then by all means feel free to get out your checkbook and make a voluntary donation to the Government! As for Universal Healthcare, if most Americans really wanted it, the Democrats wouldn't have gotten massacred in the mid-term election after they passed it.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
A scam to pay for a lie? Sounds legit.
Welcome to soviet Pottersville. Mr. Potter buys up the assets for penny on the dollar.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And it shows what this really is about: Some desperate losers trying to perpetuate the scam. Despicable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Step 1: Postulate that a viable UBI program increases economic vitality. Any tenuous, single-dimensional projection of the global economic system onto the Graph of Progress is fine here, so long as it incorporates at least a single macroeconomic truism (these are a dime a dozen; if you're having trouble coming up with one, it's because you're failing to appreciate the true, deep, eternal genius of sweeping-paintbrush oversimplification).
Step 2: Feed a new sustained economic growth rate into your super-duper exponential-growth-ifier (add as many extra increments of 0.1% to the sustained economic growth rate as your ego, steely biceps, and self-importance warrant—don't be shy here, think of these as economic vitamin pills for the betterment of the whole society).
Step 3: Presto, bingo the program soon pays for itself. Crow loudly. Why, you could even borrow NOW from such an illustrious, wealth-dripping future.
Bonus marks: And if you're really good, have the program pay for itself while cutting taxes at the same time (but don't try this at home, for professional bullshit artists only).
The place where tech utopia exists currently has a lot of contradictions. People who are doing extremely well live right down the road from the slaves living in trailer camps. Leftists support letting the migration continue so these privileged ones can have continued access to cheap slave labor.
SF writer Harry Harrison had a character in a novel that valued all human hours - janitorial and CEO - the same, justify that system. (I'm pretty sure it was one of the later Stainless Steel Rat books.)
The character points out that the huge majority of society's wealth is actually common property - the intellectual property that starts with the lever, the wheel, and fire, going on up through metallurgy and electronics - is long past patent dates, mostly has unknown inventors.
The existing way of using that is to let anybody use it for free, not just at the time they're messing about inventing the next improvement, but forever, for generations after (say) Ford leveraged 1000 years of progress in making things out of metal and developing heat-engines, to make the Ford family rich.
Viewed that way, suddenly the notion that the 5th generation Fords owe a lot more taxes than the rest of us, as society's closest-approach to fairly charging them for use of common intellectual property, seems a lot more moral than "theft by moochers". The existing system lets Mark Zuckerberg mooch all the intellectual property he wants from everything from the development of fabric, bronze and wheat to the development of HTML, add on another 0.1% new creativity, and keep the lot.
You can invent some scheme to charge society's most-successful leveragers of our common property - physical/environmental, human-infrastructural, and IP - for the shoulders-of-giants upon which they built, or you can just use the existing "progressive taxation" system, which has tradition going for it and seems to work.
The real problem with UBI Is that it takes a *lot* of said money, and it may just not be there. It's going to take a lot of experiments and scaling-up to develop something with the positives of UBI and doesn't go broke.
Carbon stopped rising. See NASA. There's also been no warming this century. See NASA again. Now what problem does he think he's going to fix other than lining his own pockets?
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Most people don't know how the systems that support them (and that they support through taxation or paying for stuff) actually work or are structured, nor do they know the constraints on those systems; the limits where if the systems are pushed/distorted too much one way they will collapse.
Therefore most people don't know what they SHOULD want, in terms of policy or outcomes. Most people don't know what effective, beneficial changes to feasible systems would look like.
Most people just can't figure out what's really going on, what's really wrong with it, or how it could be improved without breaking everything.
Most people are therefore highly susceptible to simplistic populist messages which are utter nonsense, but put the most manipulative charismatic blowhard in power where they can rage around like a bullshitting bull in a chinashop.
We need an emphasis in education on both critical thinking and systems thinking.
Then, democracy might actually work. Right now, it's a f**king disaster. A pet monkey spinning a bottle would make better policy decisions.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Finland abandoned the project after just one year, and if Finland with a low population and good financial standing can not, then it's pointless to even try it in any bigger country. There are ideas who sound good in theory but which cannot stand the test of reality. UBI is one of them. It's time to let go of it and concentrate on something else, instead of wasting time and resources on something that has been proven not to work.
If there is a credit that averages and a 30% tax rate what is the total net tax rate? 20%.
With the the deductions, credits, brackets, etc the nominal tax rate has little to do with the actual net rate, and those are different each year, and of course different in each country. So for comparison purposes we can use the total net tax defined as "how much does the government take". In pure communism, the government takes all of it. There are no private pay checks in complete communism, all the money goes to the government. Workers get only need-based government checks, what would be the rough equivalent of welfare in the United States. The government takes all the money and does what they choose with it is a 100% tax rate
Good point about it being technically inefficient for government to direct specific revenues to specific services.
But that being said, UBI is a good idea and carbon taxes are a good idea, and we have neither, so perhaps tying them together (their amounts) is politically smart in the short run to get acceptance of them.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
...as they keep their country minority free, they will be OK.
The idea that it will destroy the economy is ill-conceived, since e.g. the same amount of money is already right spent on military now (the Iraq war alone cost US taxpayers more than 2 trillion USD over about a decade), welfare recipients already get welfare + high administrative overhead, and the money people receive will be spent on products. UBI is basically a radical simplification of existing welfare systems. Nobody claims that UBI is uncomplicated or cannot create a burden on the economy and decrease international competition, but UBI is certainly not based on printing money.
Look- you can say that socialism "works" when you put up boarder walls and there is a highly desirable reason for businesses to exist in a geographical area like for resource exploitation. However if you start thinking about these issues seriously socialism fails flat on its face from an economic perspective. The objective presumably being for the benefit of all and if it isn't your a racist bigoted individual. So if you say no boarder walls then you are welcoming the impoverished and your poor will make your socialist ideals uneconomical. The problem comes down to the most able in society fleeing- so unless you implement a totalitarian prison like state such as what many communist countries had/or have it won't work. And even if you succeed at keeping these able bodied persons captive they are going to be the least productive in this system. Countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and similar aren't poor because of the United States. They were or are instituting forms of government which inhibit productivity and the US just adds a bit of downward pressure to this unproductive economic system with its trade barriers. If you want the help the poor great- it's called charity. Charity isn't always the best answer to poverty though as there are different reasons for poverty. From drug abuse to lack of jobs. Many people don't understand that they have to move to where the jobs are- else suffer the consequences of poverty. You can't afford to keep shoving charitable donations or social welfare at them or they will never become or return to being productive members of society and if you do this sufficiently it will bankrupt you.
You left out the reptoids.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If there are X people in a country and you give them all an additional Y dollars per annum, all you'll do is devalue the currency of that country by X * Y. Because you've devalued the currency, prices on a lot of goods will rise. Which will lead to Y dollars not being enough. Rinse and repeat to get one destroyed economy. As OP said, economics 101.
I guess if you're trying to destroy the lives of the poorest to foment a revolution, UBI makes sense.
Entrepreneur Peter Barnes has called for the creation of a Sky Trust that would both limit the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and provide revenue from carbon taxes. These "carbon dividends" solve two problems at once: income inequality and climate change. He would also tax corporations for using natural resources, on the thinking that the atmosphere, minerals and fresh water around us represent a "joint inheritance." He would also tax speculative financial transactions and use of the electromagnetic spectrum.
So the idea is to monetize the air, water, and minerals around us, right? And how exactly do you realize the declared value in these 'shared assets'? By consuming them, which means the only way people get the financial benefit is by polluting/consuming precious natural resources... why that's as stupid as funding children's health care by taxing their parents for smoking known carcinogens.
Ken
Ask Finland.
http://fortune.com/2018/04/19/...
Owning a piece of land, either urban or agricultural is possibly the best start a person or family could have.
The land title system is a cornerstone to inequality, but could be re-purposed to create equality.
Go well
Trading on the assumed stupidity of the masses. UBI/IBA is nothing but another suicide pact being proffered by the same bullshit artists as all the other wacko socialist schemes that always start by killing the golden goose. I will have none of it.
people could get a fucking job or start a business.
http://fortune.com/2018/04/19/...
Saying the problem with UBI is how to pay for it is like saying the problem with my perpetual motion waterwheel is finding a way to get the water back uphill: it glosses over the most important point.
UBI would carry a cost to society. Maybe the people would be up for bearing that cost because the program's benefits outweigh the costs, and maybe they wouldn't. If they'd make that trade then Great! They'll be up for the taxes needed to pay for it, all transparently and reliably.
It seems to me this entire writeup is about ways of hiding the costs, though. It proposes all sorts of accounting schemes to make sure the costs stay off the books where the people won't have a say in it.
That's the wrong way to go about public policy. It's both opaque to the population and inefficient in its middlemen.
So focus on getting more people convinced that UBI is a worthwhile trade. Convince them to accept higher taxes to pay for it. And then let them write their checks honestly for the program they support.
Tell Zucky that the government now owns facebook and its advertising revenue is going to the people.... since its the people that the money rightfully belongs to.... easy peasy.
[($)]
How does real estate/apartments/houses function in a world where money has no real value anymore
Oh wait you wanted all those programs AND UBI?! Well aren't you a silly fucker.
The truly hard part is going to get all the people currently sucking off those welfare and social programs to give up what they get in exchange for a lower amount that they have to share with all of those (young singles w/out kids) not currently qualified to receive aid.
Also if you are going to become a ward of the state, then you should have the same voting rights as any other child or mentally incompetent (none). Also if you can't score at least an 85 on an IQ test you can't get a license to have children. Think that won't happen, wait until the government becomes your only source of income. It'll be pretty easy to get that law passed.
Who cares! No-one cares! Stick to technology!
It's just so frustrating that people are so easily distracted from the real problem. All I see is hand-wringing about solving the wrong problem:
Do we need a basic living income?
Maybe, but you're getting distracted. This is a complicated solution to a simple problem.
Minimum living wage?
Again, distracted by trying to give just a little bit more to a lot of people.
More education? Will that fix it?
Of course not. How ever much education we subsidize, the rich will always pay for their kids to be in more exclusive schools for longer. But we just lost focus dealing with the issue...
How about racial eqality? BLM?
Maybe, but again, you're getting distracted. It's not the color of your skin that's got you downtrodden. It's that you're poor. There's nothing worse than identity politics to get people barking up the wrong tree.
***This is the problem***, and it's easy to solve.
WE NEED TO START BY TAKING A VERY LARGE AMOUNT OF WEALTH FROM A VERY SMALL NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS!!! With firebrands and pitchforks if necessary.
All this hogwash about tariffs and trade deals, subsidies, creating jobs, blah blah blah... It's all just to keep our attention occupied while very froth on top of the "cream" of society is bending us all over.
I think he is drawing a distinction between fixed wealth and wealth that is tied to family size. If I get a fixed value regardless of family size I imagine they would shrink, but wouldn't the ubi scale to familiar size? Shrinking family sizes in developed countries may be the cause not the result of wealth. But even if it is not, it makes sense with a fixed amount of wealth to divide it by the smallest number of offspring if you want to take the strategy of focusing on fewer better prepared offspring instead of spray'n'pray to its extreme.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
This is as close to magicking money out of thin air as it is possible to get without having a lucrative gig in Last Vegas.
The UBI proposals all hinge on "Soon, 1000 people will own all the farms, factories, and corporations that produce everything. They only need 20,000 employees total to manage the robot factories that run the farms, build all the good, and ship them to your door. Their salaries aren't going to support an economy of 320 million baristas, pro athletes, and Hollywood stars. Hey, maybe instead of giving the 300 million leftovers in this scenario a choice between robbery or starvation, we tax the ownership enough to feed them robot-grown produce while they live in robot-built apartment buildings and get across town on robotic buses".
In a healthy economy where you truly do need hordes of labor, I agree, UBI is a shitty proposal. But at some level of automation, the only labor that has any meaning anymore requires a genius IQ -- should we exterminate the merely average? UBI proposers say no. UBI opponents ... well, sort of dodge the question with cries of "Communism!"
While I don't disagree with the general idea of the summary, the example use (Carbon Tax) seems to be a rather poor idea.
The reason I think this isn't because I am for or against a carbon tax in general, it is because long term it isn't really sustainable. The basic premise being that a carbon tax and it's intent is to push industry at it's own rate to produce less carbon. So should it actually be successful, your tax revenues will drop, and then your fund for UBI will fall short...
Basically unless you support UBI through normal revenues (i.e. income tax more less), you need to be able to have a sustainable funding source. This could be like Denmark (or was it Norway) that has a huge resource based fund that you can literally just draw upon the dividends without impacting the pot of funds, or you need a source of reoccurring funding through a tax or a service that isn't going to diminish over time by design.
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UBI as a function of "giving people money to exist" cannot ever work. period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
basic economics, 101. thanks!
You understand neither basic economics nor UBI.
The money is already being given out, in the form of various welfare and entitlement programs (including social security). In fact, it's 70% of the federal budget, plus a large percentage of state and local government budgets.
In short, whatever inflation would have happened, has already happened. The money is already out there.
A lot of the available money is siphoned away by third parties, such as administrators and state and local governments, and Congress instead of being received by the people it is intended for. Governments play endless games that essentially come down to robbing Peter to pay Paul with these funds (and future generations find themselves in debt as a result of corruption in the previous generation, in violation of basic human rights). The money is still out there, it's being spent, it's just not being spent by the right people.
Any sensible UBI proposal just gets rid of the third parties, and hence the corruption. It's a simple reverse income tax instead of endless corruption and the associated economic problems that flow from that corruption. It also removes the economic problems from government being involved in price fixing (i.e. minimum wage).
With an UBI system in place, the government should be barred from going into debt except under very unusual circumstances. No more pensions - pay people what they are worth, and let them do their own savings for retirement (or 401k, or IRA) just like private employers. No need at all for social security.
Probably still need some sort of health care - but everybody gets it. Doesn't have to be single payer, something like the Swiss system would be fine (in that system, everybody gets to vote on changes, poor people get assistance, and all providers have to offer a basic plan at a specified rate).
The only real issue with UBI is that there should be a public vote on every aspect of the system - including any changes - and only those people receiving no benefits should be allowed to vote on the policies. Otherwise, people will vote themselves more and more money and then you DO run out.
There isn't any real need to include rent in UBI: most of the high cost of housing comes from illegal laws that implement rent-seeking on the part of property owners in violation of fundamental rights. The big blue cities are the worst culprits here, especially in CA - the historical economic patterns have completely reversed and poor people are fleeing these cities (and states) because of the cost of housing.
Badly conceived "rent control" policies just make matters worse - and should be replaced with sensible policies that don't involve the government fixing prices (but might involve fixing the interval between rent raises to be 5+ years, once the market has determined the price). Fix these problems, and housing will become manageable with traditional techniques (which do include some government involvement, but not price fixing).
UBI as a function of "giving people money to exist" cannot ever work. period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
basic economics, 101. thanks!
You understand neither basic economics nor UBI.
The money is already being given out, in the form of various welfare and entitlement programs (including social security). In fact, it's 70% of the federal budget, plus a large percentage of state and local government budgets.
It's amazing how many people misunderstand basic economics. It's like there's something wrong with our educational system. Probably need to get those social sciences into the grade school curriculum.
Another consideration: there's also a lot of money that already out there in the form of tax deductions that don't need to exist (and that serve as cover for all kinds of loopholes used by the rich). With UBI, there's no need to have deductions for marriage, kids, and so forth. Take all the deductions away, and use the money that's hiding behind them are part of the funding for UBI (in addition to all the money from entitlements, minus a little bit lost to pay higher salaries when you take away the pensions).
The tax code can be made far simpler - taken from thousands of pages down to a few hundred - and all the economic overhead associated with a complex and unethical body of law disappears. No inflation involved, since the money is already out there, already moving through the economy. Who knows, we might even end up with a tax system that is actually progressive, instead of just pretending to be!
All this article is missing, is the some reference to magically superior AI, that is going to obsolete all jobs (which, ironically, would fit perfectly - as distributing AI/automation benefits as a UBA is exactly what the author is looking for...) - just to complete the hype-laden tropes that the article is riding upon.
You don't build a new economy, by doing what the tech oligarchs exploiting everyone in todays economy, say you should do. There's a fucking reason things are the way they are, today - and a reason why these people are in the position they are, today - and benevolence plus desiring equality for all, isn't one of those reasons...
Ask yourselves: Why the fuck are these people so desperate to make us believe, that there can't be enough jobs for us all? This goes back well over a century guys, it's not new...
The way you control the workforce, the population at large, is by creating an artificial scarcity of jobs. You create a scarcity in the very means that people require in order to survive, then you have complete fucking control over them.
The UBI doesn't solve this. It masks the problem.
The way this problem is solved is by ensuring that enough jobs are always provided. It's the principal no.1 goal of economics. It's also a problem that has been completely solved long ago, yet is subject to a constant political tug of war that spans decades and generations, where the required solutions go in and out of the realm of political acceptability, in and out of the Overton Window.
The best present-day formulation of the solution, is the Job Guarantee policy - like the New Deal on steroids - it prefers that the private sector provides all the jobs required (and actually pumps-up the private sector until it does provide enough jobs), but while the private sector fails to provide enough jobs, the Job Guarantee program itself will provide the jobs, putting people to work in temporary public employment and training, e.g. on infrastructure projects and such.
I went to Google a link to the Job Guarantee description just now - a policy I've advocated for half a decade, with little success online - and I just see now that Bernie Sanders has catapulted it into the mainstream:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
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and its all a scam and criminals but https://steemit.com/ubi/@rudya... at least i try ... i would be very grateful if someone tells me the numbers are wrong
not the practicalities, but the numbers in experiment because for all i know
they're right
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?