Canada's Ontario Government Ends Basic Income Project (www.cbc.ca)

Lisa MacLeod, Progressive Conservative member and Children, Community and Social Services Minister of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, said Tuesday that she would end the city's basic income pilot project, calling it expensive and "clearly not the answer for Ontario families." Few details are available as to how the project will come to an end, but MacLeod said her government will end the program "ethically" for anyone who is currently enrolled. Slashdot reader kenh shares an excerpt from a CBC.ca report: Close to 4,000 people were enrolled in the basic income pilot program in Thunder Bay, Lindsay, Hamilton, Brantford and Brant County. The pilot project started in April 2017. It was originally set to last three years, and explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income to those living on low incomes -- whether they were working or not. Under the project, a single person could have received up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earned. "A couple could have received up to $24,000 per year." People with disabilities could have received an additional $6,000.

Comments

Translation.

[Anonymous Coward]

We ran out of other people's money.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: we can afford to create a leisure society but it hurts people's egos.

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[50000BTU_barbecue]

And yet we never run out of other people's money to bail out banks, GM, or get new toys for the military.... (eyeroll)

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[alvinrod]

âoeBut Billy hit me firstâ is not a good argument if you want to be taken seriously. We should not have bailed out those failed financial institutions either, but making a mistake once should not mean that we become more accepting of making that mistake twice.

Of course the politicians love the finger pointing because both sides can continue to get away with bad behavior as the citizens anger will be focused on the other side rather than the newest example of bad behavior.

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[ahodgson]

Ontario ran out of other peoples' money over 400 billion dollars and nearly 30 years ago.

What they ran out now of was people willing to vote for the Liberals.

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[ShanghaiBill]

Indeed. The dumbest justification for any proposal is that we already spend money on other things that are even stupider.

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[ShanghaiBill]

My opinion is that if we continue further with deep learning taking over low skilled jobs ...

Are you serious? How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?

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[Lonewolf666]

Of course the politicians love the finger pointing because both sides can continue to get away with bad behavior as the citizens anger will be focused on the other side rather than the newest example of bad behavior.

Or it leads to a general feeling of "the political establishment consists of criminals and traitors". That is where we are drifting in Germany, and we already have a new party called AfD ("Alternative fuer Deutschland" or "alternative for Germany". They are getting a percentage of votes in the range of 10-15 percent.
      The AfD is a mix of hyper-conservatives and nationalists, a bit like the Tea Party in the USA if those had their own party in Congress.

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[Anonymous Coward]

banks

Returned more than was given to them to the government.

GM

Similar, combined with strategic interest. Outsourcing wartime production to China, a very likely opponent in a theoretical war, is so fucking stupid even you should realize it.

toys for the military

Pax Americana is the only reason you're able to shit up the Internet right now.

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[Luckyo]

Basically, same thing as we saw here in Finland. We're rediscovering why it is that we demand evidence for why you can't earn the money on your own as a condition for social assistance from society.

Basic human laziness.

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[Luckyo]

If people receiving social assistance were on contract to repay it in full with interest within a few years, which is how bank bailouts worked, you wouldn't call it social assistance. Social assistance is something you're entitled to, and something you're not under strict contract to repay in full and have limits placed on your actions until you repay it in full.

Comparing apples to oranges is not helpful.

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[Opportunist]

Where did bank bailouts work that way? You know what happened here? Banks needed bailouts. So they needed money, from the state. The state did not have that money, so what did the state do? Lend it of course. Where? Well, banks.

What REALLY happened here is that the state stood as guarantor for banks' liabilities, usually paying more for interest and fees than they got from the banks that needed the bailout. In the end, I don't know of a single state or country that went away with a plus from the deal.

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[Opportunist]

It's not a justification, it's a question: How comes that there's always money to save the rich from having to go a year with less than a million bucks to blow on shits and giggles, but never any to save those that actually need it to survive?

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[ShanghaiBill]

The bank bailout was paid back, with interest. So not doing it would have saved nothing.

Military boondoggles like the F-35 may be stupid, but they are in no way whatsoever an "alternative" to UBI.

Each spending proposal should be justified on its own merits, not on a scale of relative stupidity.

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[jellomizer]

The premise behind the need for basic income is flawed.
It goes around the idea that efficiency improvements means taking away the jobs that are needed by people. We hear this every 40-50 years or so, When there are some major changes to the workforce.
However history seems to show that efficiency improvements create more jobs in the long run.
I am not going to be the doing the same Job my father did, and he didn't do the same Job his father did. Even if they get the company business how they do their work is different.
Now the pain we feel now is the fact the efficiency measures could replace jobs that we are use to, and once implemented could cause some people to loose their job. However over time the company grow or smaller businesses start up and needs workers to perform different jobs.

Think of the old country store of the 1950's there was normally one person there the whole time, they had to stock the shelves, by paper figure out how much people owed and calculate change in their head. These stores were small less then 1000 square feet. Because that was the limit that a person could do.
Then we we got cash registers with computers that kept track of inventory and did all the math. This allowed the store to become these big super markets with dozens of employees working at the same time. Things changed the small stores took a hit, but over time the economy and life styles changed. So other then having a deli guy running his own business he is working for the supermarket Deli. He may not be making as much, but he also doesn't have the expenses and risk of running his own business. For the small stores the ones that made it, found a niche that kept them in place. So the Deli store may have higher quality meats which they sell at a premium. Where before having a niche store like that wouldn't be profitable because you are too busy selling the cheap stuff to the masses that needed it.

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[The Cynical Critic]

I mean the main point of most basic income programs (including the one in Finland) that have been or are being tested right now along with those that had a real chance of being tested is to make it easier for poor people to take up part time work without having to worry about earning too much to get unemployment benefits, but not enough to actually live on their salary alone. That and simplifying benefits so you don't have to apply for a load of different ones based on things like disability or living expenses.

We're not talking about a direct hand-out to the poor, just an attempted streamlining of benefits so that more poor people actually enter the workforce. The bank and GM bail-outs weren't hand-outs either as they were loans that genuinely need to be re-paid (and to my knowledge have been done so with the banks).

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[Anonymous Coward]

Are you retarded?

First, we spend trillions of dollars keeping people alive. Not even talking about Medicare or welfare, the ACA is basically a massive subsidy for poor people, paid for by the middle class.

Second, our military is used almost exclusively to defend the defenseless. It has cost us trillions to protect people around the world who otherwise would be dead without our help.

Paying people free money to sit around jacking off all day isn't "helping" them. It's creating welfare zombies stripped of motivation, who will be dependent on government handouts their entire lives.

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[Luckyo]

Incorrect. Banks paid it back. Early. With interest. Because limitations bailout deal put on them was restricting their abilities to do things like pay their employees large bonuses.

Hindsight is 20:20 and that was a great investment in hindsight. But when you're blinded by ideology, you cannot see even that much.

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[Highdude702]

Thats exactly what half the country wants though..

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[Mashiki]

Don't forget that Ontario's deficit went from 100B(2000) to 340B(2018) under a single party who threw the money at any social program that they thought would keep them elected. Threw money at whatever any environmentalist group dangled before their eyes. Ignored low income housing, ignored people on disability, ignored the gigantic scandal at workmans comp.

People are so angry that when a person running for I think it was mayor or counselor claimed that Toronto should be it's own province, people started cheering for it. Oh it wasn't the people in Toronto, they have this idea that us rednecks will starve to death without them. It was rural, and rural-urban voters who were cheering this idea on, after nearly a generation of being literally fucked over by a single city getting all the money they wanted because it's such a gigantic voting block.

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[magzteel]

Where did bank bailouts work that way? You know what happened here? Banks needed bailouts. So they needed money, from the state. The state did not have that money, so what did the state do? Lend it of course. Where? Well, banks.

What REALLY happened here is that the state stood as guarantor for banks' liabilities, usually paying more for interest and fees than they got from the banks that needed the bailout. In the end, I don't know of a single state or country that went away with a plus from the deal.

You don't have a clue. Try reading this for a start:
https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/...

Or this if you want more depth
https://business.cch.com/banki...

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[Applehu Akbar]

And while we're putting in typographic quotes, to also include the European accent characters.

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[tbannist]

âoeBut Billy hit me firstâ is not a good argument if you want to be taken seriously.

Are you sure about that?

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[Opportunist]

So having a dead-end, meaningless, "you-want-fries-with-that" job is motivational?

If anything, those soul-rending treadmills are what strips any kind of motivation from you. By the time you're done with the work, any kind of motivation is solidly beaten out of you and all you want is to forget the world around you exists.

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[Train0987]

"The bank bailout was paid back, with interest."

No it wasn't, not even close. $10 trillion in new debt was printed and then given to people who should've gone to prison instead. It will never be paid back nor will the national debt.

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[tbannist]

It has cost us trillions to protect people around the world who otherwise would be dead without our help.

The problem is that in too many cases, America has spent trillions "protecting" people around the world who otherwise would be alive without American "help".

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[king neckbeard]

Second, our military is used almost exclusively to defend the defenseless.

Found the problem. You are clearly living in an alternate universe. In this universe, the US military backs dictators and corporations.

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[mpercy]

Many banks wanted nothing to do with the money, but were forced to take it by regulators so as to not paint the few other banks that may have "needed" it from looking like they were failing...if all the banks took money then they were all "equal". Most banks paid the money back as soon as they were allowed to.

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[JackieBrown]

Not at all. It's just the people making up or exaggerating stories about them have moved on to Trump.

The Tea Party is alive and doing well.

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[fred6666]

With the money spent on defense, the US could probably have saved all of Africa. But instead you fought in Iraq.

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[plague911]

Yes it was paid back and a profit turned.

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

"Detailed Breakdown $627.4B Outflows " "$713.4B Inflows"

Go make up numbers elsewhere, we can actually do math and quote sources here (for the most part).

Re:Translation.

[Excelcia]

It's unfortunate that the modding on this will be a battleground between the bleeding hearts and those with common sense, because it's not even really a political issue.

My own political leanings have taken a large turn to the left myself from my Alberta-born roots, but no matter what your stripe is, this is something we really need to look at outside a traditional political context. Game designers (and bear with me because this is relevant) have learned that while players WANT to be given the tools to easily 'win' (quick levelling, cheat codes, legs up and ways to buy their way to the top), that it is often self-defeating. People are wired to seek ways to reduce the challenge, to make things easier. In a game this consists of levelling up, powering up, etc. But when, especially in MMORPGs or even just traditional RPGs, once you have levelled to the point that there is little challenge, the game becomes unfun and people gravitate away from it. The magic in any computer game is in making the journey fun, not in the arrival at that state where it's no longer a challenge. Even the pay-to-win games where they use payment schemed to allow players to shortcut game time have learned that you can only go so far, that if you let people simply buy their way to the top instantly, that they lose interest quickly and there goes their revenue stream. So P2W games have become a balancing act to let people pay that money for things that will reduce the apparent challenge but that have little overall effect because once they make it too easy their golden goose goes somewhere else.

In the same context, I believe that this leads to an effective way to bypass the political paradigm for the basic income issue. Because, simply, no matter what way you look at it it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea from a financially conservative point of view, because you are using a tax-paying working base to pay for the lifestyle of a non-productive segment of society, and no matter how much automation we throw at things, this is just going to be ultimately unsustainable. And it's also a bad idea from a socially liberal perspective. You remove the challenge for people, and they start losing the ability to meet challenges. Putting in that safety net takes away one's motivation and personal initiative. In short, while people will think they want this, because we are all wired to try and reduce challenge, in the end it is actually bad for the recipients. So even though some people will always seek such a situation, no one can truly thrive in conditions that remove consequences and challenge. Eliminating financial stress at no cost to the recipient removes a powerful motivator.

We see this with lottery winners. It's so common a trope that it's essentially at the level of cliche, that lottery winners commonly squander their money and end up less happy and fulfilled than before the win. Handing someone money does not make them value it or magically give them the discipline to properly manage it.

Re:Translation.

[bluefoxlucid]

The premise behind the need for basic income is flawed.

It goes around the idea that efficiency improvements means taking away the jobs that are needed by people. We hear this every 40-50 years or so, When there are some major changes to the workforce.

That's the common argument, yes; and it's ludicrous.

I proposed a Universal Dividend--similar to a Basic Income, but not paying "enough to live", instead just a fair share by taking a percent of all income as a FICA tax and distributing it evenly. The American Citizen's Dividend is modeled on a 12.5% (1/8) FICA, redistributed flat among all adults, and manages to act as an effective tax cut at all levels.

That's difficult to explain, largely because it's a huge amount of math and quite counter-intuitive. The short version is we have an inefficient social insurance system, and I reworked it on an efficient model with the Dividend as a foundation. Social Security's Retirement and Disability benefits are paid in total with the Dividend (i.e. a recipient of OASDI gets the same from the three benefits in total, rather than additional on top of what OASDI pays now); while other means-tested welfare includes the Dividend as part of your income, thus reducing the amount of other welfare paid (because people are less-poor).

The slightly-longer version involves walking through the various income groups, their FICA burden, and the percent of the benefit which is represented by the FICA. If you get $6,000 and you pay $6,000 or more into FICA, we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $6k less; if you pay $4,000, then we illustrate the "cost" of the benefit as $4k less. That $2k that you receive in excess of your FICA paid essentially is represented by $2k somebody else paid in excess of the Dividend received, and that symmetrical number represents the "cost".

When you add it all up, I restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, with about $1.2 trillion going back to the same pockets from which it was taken--overall, $1.1 trillion becomes $0.8 trillion, or thereabouts. The Dividend itself only represent a $300 billion expense itself, in those terms, and somehow comes out with a more-efficient fiscal structure.

So... not a Basic Income; it's a social insurance against structural change: everybody pays an even share and receives an equal share.

This means if we become 10% wealthier (purchasing power income over time per adult) as a whole and you become 10% wealthier, you keep it; if you become 100% wealthier, you only become 87.5% wealthier due to the Dividend's FICA; if you become 5% wealthier, you end up paying 1/8 of that 5% and getting 1/8 of 10% (you come out with an extra 1/16); and if you lost your job, you are receiving 1/8 of everything. That FICA is an insurance premium against missing out or, worse, being the sacrifice to obtain progress.

That's the rationale between a Universal Dividend: it makes our social insurances efficient; it protects the losers from structural change without taking ever-more from the winners and forcing them to gain little to no benefit; and it has a huge pile of downstream effect that amount to bailing out collapsed local economies and rebuilding towns like Detroit, Blackwater, Flint, and Baltimore to middle-class, able to support a decent average local wage.

In other words: it's a zero-deficit-spending economic stimulus, perfectly targeted even to micro-recessions (single household losing income), with its greatest impact wherever poverty is most concentrated. It starts fixing recessions before they become recessions--or, worse, depressions, as we saw in the 2008 Depression (2008 was the first year since the Great Depression in which the United States per-capita income was not higher than the per-capita income of every preceding year in history--and you call that a

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[oh_my_080980980]

Bull fucking shit ass-hole. The money was not paid back in full when they don't know who much in total was lent out. Not too mention it does not take in to account the total cost of the malfeasance committed by the banks and the government's in action in helping the homeowners. There was not interest charged so no interested was paid. Not bailing them out would have been the better way. It would have restored moral hazard. Banks and investors would have taken a bath because of their risky investments and the financial services industry would have been for the better. Now we have even bigger banks they will require an even bigger bail out because of the bail out.

The point about the F-35 moron is that the government can magically find $2 Trillion (and that does not cover the cost of purchasing said plane) and counting to pay for this program but can't come up with money for UBI. UBI would actually help the economy, UBI goes back into the economy.

Unfortunately Virginia, spending proposals DO NOT GET SUBJECT TO THE SAME LEVEL OF SCRUTINY. That $80 BILLION dollar defense increase (over and above what we spend) had ZERO debates. We just magically had the money. Contrast talks about free college or medicare for all and people wring their hands over where the money comes from. Spending precedes taxing and borrowing - that's how the government works http://www.latimes.com/opinion...

FYI, not withstanding increases, we will spend $7.1 TRILLION dollars on defense alone over the next 10 years. Defense that apparently can't detect nor prevent hacking from Russia. Russia spends about $50 BILLION on defense and apparently they can hack our elections. Seems to me we should talk to the Russians. They know how to get a return on their investment!

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[dryeo]

Well, they seem to be quiet about the ever increasing deficits. I guess I'm old fashioned and don't like negative spending though it sure jacks up the economy for a while.

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[ShanghaiBill]

$10 trillion in new debt was printed and then given to people who should've gone to prison instead.

Baloney. QE (Quantitative Easing) and the bank bailout were two completely different things. QE did not result in "new debt", since for every dollar spent, assets were purchased. There are two sides to the balance sheet. QE was not "given" to anyone.

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[Train0987]

Those numbers represent a small subset of the overall bailouts. The nat'l debt was about $8 trillion before the crash in 2008. It increased to $18 trillion by 2016 as a direct result of the bailout(s). Most of that money then went to reinflating the equities bubble, mainly stocks instead of housing this time. That's where the money came from that was used to "repay" TARP.

Long story short, you were lied to and believed it.

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[ShanghaiBill]

Not bailing them out would have been the better way. It would have restored moral hazard.

We tried that in 1929. It didn't work out so well.

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[omnichad]

Or perhaps you think itâ(TM)s easier to get all iPhone users to change their behaviour than it is to get /. to fix their shitty code?

Clearly the former is true. It's been 11 years.

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[Train0987]

QE inflated the stock market instead of allowing it to correct. It reinflated the bubble. That's how the nat'l debt went from $8 trillion to $18 trillion in 8 years.

There really is no point in having a discussion about economics with a group who believe in UBI anyways, so carry on.

Re:Translation.

[Mashiki]

Translation: You don't live in Ontario. You didn't see the fucking mess that the Liberals of Ontario left the province in. You didn't see the policies that drove middle-income jobs out. You didn't see the collapse of the middle class created by those policies. You didn't hear the bullshit promoted by the liberals saying 'service jobs are the future.' You didn't see masses of people lose their jobs when the minimum wage was spiked from $11/hr to $15 in the span of a couple of years. You didn't see the outrage when people found out that the sex-ed curriculum was mainly written by a pedophile that fucked young kids, forced them into sexual acts, advocated the same, and produced graphic child pornography and the liberal parties attempt to white wash it - he was really just a good guy(yeah, you read that one right). You didn't see the number of people working three or four part-time jobs, because there are no full time jobs. You didn't see housing prices go from $320k to $1.6m in less then 7 years. You didn't see the provincial government(liberals) hand out free shit to illegals, while people couldn't afford to pay for electricity. You didn't see that same government kick the poor out of low income housing(really hotel rooms) for illegals and dump them in the street. You don't know that the average waiting list for low income housing is between 6 and 8 years in most of Ontario today.

You don't know why family doctors refused to do hospital rounds(hint it was because the government stopped paying them). You don't see the massive shortage of available hospital space for surgeries. You didn't see then cuts to healthcare, but they sure could find money for trans surgeries(lots of money btw). You didn't see the cut and gut to mental health care, but they found plenty of specialists for again those trans folks. You didn't see the mass imbalance of suicide support groups or the lopsided funding for female suicide support groups(never mind that men make up the majority of those). You didn't see the government fawning all over a half-dozen native kids on a reserve committing suicide, and promising lots of money, lots of job help, lots of people to help them do stuff. But you didn't see them offer a fucking penny, person, or even a word when 18 kids killed themselves in the span of a month in Woodstock, Ontario.

You didn't see your electricity prices go from $0.04-0.07kWh to $0.185 in the span of a few years. You didn't see the malfeasance, election tampering, vote buying, illegal document destruction(related to vote buying for a NG power plant) or general corruption of them taking money from special interest groups to pad their coffers, then declaring it illegal to do so after they got those kickbacks.

Seriously. Fuck and you. Ford got elected because all of that happened under the Liberal Party of Ontario that was in power for 15 years.

Re: Translation.

[Train0987]

Except the problem is even bigger now and the consequences of the 2008 bailouts will be 10x worse. Allowing the failed banks to collapse in 2008 would've allowed new, clean banks to start. The disruptions would've lasted a few months and as the parent said the principle of moral hazard would've been restored. There really isn't a parallel to 1929 and the Great Depression because we know much more about economics now and safety nets are in place to withstand short-term disasters that didn't exist then.

All they did in 2008 was sell our grand-children into debt slavery.

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[sarren1901]

If living in poverty is not motivation enough to try to better yourself, I do not know what is. If you are making minimum wage in the fast food industry, why would you not want to attempt to get some education and get out of that job?

Heck, after working fast food for a year, you ought to have enough customer service skills that you could apply at insurance companies. A neighbor of mine just mentioned the starting pay was about $18 an hour. That's a lot better then $11-12 that minimum wage is in San Diego.

So really, I would say working in a shitty job should be the ultimate motivator.

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[Train0987]

That "you-want-fries-with-that" job isn't meant to be a career unless one chooses it to be. It's meant to develop a work ethic, learn new skills and begin the process of career advancement.

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[JackieBrown]

They haven't been. Trump has been pretty frustrated with them because they are not automatically just agreeing to the budget deals.

They just don't get a mic anymore because Trump says such outlandish things and gets the whole spotlight.

A tea party conservative is still 100 times better than a standard republican.

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[Luckyo]

On the other hand, it's completely unsurprising to me that people like you are utterly blind to reality when it doesn't match their ideological tenets.

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[Train0987]

Oh please. They had to pretend not to need it otherwise their stock prices would've collapsed even more. Do you remember when the White House erected those big sheets to obscure the view of who was coming and going during the crisis discussions?

P.S. DeutshBank has $58 TRILLION in derivatives sitting on their books right now. That's the GDP of the entire fucking planet. At one bank. They're "perfectly healthy" too, if you're silly enough believe them.

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[Mashiki]

Maybe it's the news sources you're using that are quiet about it? When was the last time a media source you used, quoted the freedom caucus for example? Which has been quite vocal on the budget. Besides, there's lots of RINO's left but are getting primaried by tea-party type people. The neocons got run out, funny though that they were welcomed with open arms by the left, progressives, and democrats.

I've yet to year a reasonable answer from the democrats, progressives, etc., on why they openly welcomed people like David Frum and have been spouting his bullshit, especially after their staunch anti-war stances for years.

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[Rhipf]

All of southern Ontario already thinks they are the only part of the province that exists. So Toronto thinking it should be a province by itself doesn't surprise me.

Most Ontario road maps (ya I'm old enough to have seen paper road maps) had southern Ontario on one side and northern Ontario on the other side. They made it look like the two areas were equal in size. The problem was that the scales were different. The northern Ontario side was about half the scale that the southern Ontario side was.

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[Mashiki]

perfect example of 'tyranny or the majority'

It is. There are 124 seats in the provincial legislature. The GTA has around 50 seats, you need 63 seats to form a majority government. If you lock the GTA, you can win with nearby regions, along with London and Ottawa or a couple of larger counties.

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[Mashiki]

Strange, having lived in Southern Ontario most of my life, I've yet to see anyone who thinks that's the only part of the province that exists.

Might also be, because Southern Ontario has a denser population in turn require more map area for the number of cities. The scales have to be different, because there's "more stuff" in southern ontario then northern ontario. Just like how the GTA takes up 2-3 pages on a paper map. Most of northern ontario is wilderness, or isolated roads.

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[MrLogic17]

And this is exactly why the US has the Electoral College.

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[Opportunist]

I suspect you never were in that situation that you have to manage a family besides such jobs. You simply don't have the time (or energy) to find anything better, simply because your day only has 24 hours and you should spend some of them sleeping if you don't want to go bananas before long.

A shitty job would only be the motivator for me to find a gun and go have fun, to be blunt.

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[Opportunist]

Unfortunately life doesn't give a shit about "meant to be". Some people think they're meant to be rap stars but guess what, it ain't gonna be.

I have no work ethic. I have a job that pays more money than I can spend but work ethic? Please. Yes, that's unfair. And I understand anyone pretty well that thinks that way too and would ditch such a meaningless, idiotic job faster than any bozo manager can yell at him.

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[WECSooperGenius]

Do you actually know anything about African aid or have worked with people doing relief in Africa? Throwing money at kleptocracies to help the people is like squirting gasoline on a fire to prevent a building from coming down. Any foreign aid at any level barely above a person-to-person level gets subject to a 90% (or greater) skimming by those at the top, and opposed locally (by death threats, poisonings, and the like) by those in change of the local status quo. One can be fortunate to be able to find small organizations just below the radar and been able to help without the top level siphoning effect, but still face local opposition when things like "micro entrepreneurship" programs threaten the monopoly of privilege for those traditionally in power. Engaging this at the level of a nation state with the budget of the DoD... you'll create sound and fury, but like the billions poured into Haiti after the earthquake and hurricane, signify nothing.

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[datavirtue]

Don't forget the revitilazation of our nuclear arsenal that is underway--without debate. Projected to cost 1.2 Trillion.

We can still stop it.

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[Opportunist]

I guess I was under a wrong impression. I thought it was something like "by the people, for the people", not "by the people, for the money".

A country is no company.

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[fred6666]

I know enough to know that the return on investment in the US military is orders of magnitudes worse than throwing money randomly in Africa.

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[bondsbw]

I want to believe you, but I need you to provide a credible source for the statement that is at the foundation of your argument:

It increased to $18 trillion by 2016 as a direct result of the bailout(s)

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[WECSooperGenius]

I know enough to know that the return on investment in the US military is orders of magnitudes worse than throwing money randomly in Africa.

So in other words. No. You don't know anybody directly working with the issues personally, nor have you been exposed to it. I have. Close friends, organizations with whom my children have lived and worked . I recommend you do so. You might learn why the Peace Corp kids spent 8 hours a day holed up at the AIDs Orphanage and School that a US church group had established in cooperation with the village elders (and still got death threats for teaching village families to start bakeries and raise chickens).

It will change your life and your outlook.

ROI is an impossible term w.r.t. military expenditures, because you're trying to estimate costs of "the path not take" which are unknown and/or the costs of "black swan" events which are unpredictable, rare, and unknown, but potentially large. (better US military involvement might have prevented the Rwandan genocide... but that's the path not taken and a black swan to boot)

I'll give an example of the depth and breadth of the problem. There places in Africa where, when you have to bribe the police officers to avoid bogus arrest or traffic citation and don't have the correct denomination of cash.... they will make change. When the corruption is that normalized and dispersed, any addition of large scale cash infusion just gives chum to the sharks.

Re: Translation.

[jofas]

The new Ontario Premier and his mega-conservative provincial government is basically dismantling all of the previous administration's programs. The motivation may ostensibly to satisfy some budgetary reason, but in reality it has nothing to do with any fiscal issue. This is not the first, nor the last social program Doug Ford will chop.

Re:Translation.

[bondsbw]

This sounds like UBI funded via variable rate flat tax (which is described in an earlier thread). It's still UBI, since UBI isn't defined by how it is funded but by how it is distributed.

Re: Translation.

[Shotgun]

I've been in that EXACT situation.

Fought my way through community college, and then a BS degree, while supporting a wife and two children.

You are a whiney little apologist bitch. Grow a pair, get off of your ass, improve your skills, and quit your bitchin'. It's lame, and we don't want to hear it.

Re: Translation.

[Shotgun]

Worse still, the "aid" my just as well cause the collapse of local industries. The few people that once could offer mediocre jobs can now offer none at all. 'Aid' only helps if it builds up a countries infrastructure.

Re: Translation.

[fred6666]

So in other words. No. You don't know anybody directly working with the issues personally, nor have you been exposed to it.

Says who?

Re: Translation.

[fred6666]

You don't seem to get the magnitude of the US military expenditures. It is on the same scale as the GDP of the poorest countries in Africa, combined.

Re:Translation.

[bluefoxlucid]

A variable-rate flat tax is the tax system many imagine our progressive tax system is: rather than taxing income in a bracket at a rate (as our tax system does now), it taxes all income at the bracket rate.

The tax rate for the Dividend is fixed--it's a 12.5% FICA, technically a social insurance premium (like the OASDI tax that feeds Social Security's retirement and disability benefits). It never changes year-to-year or per-person. There is also a progressive tax system (not variable-rate flat tax) next to this to feed the general fund.

The difference from a UBI is there's no calculation that determines how much benefit you should receive: you aren't entitled to an income sufficient for your basic needs, or anything else. There is so much money (income), and you're entitled to a piece of it. That makes it a form of demogrant, although it still falls outside what many people envision as a UBI today.

UBI is often defined simply as a demogrant (money given to everyone), which means UBI can mean literally anything involving giving everyone money. When the Federal government gave everyone $300 that one year, that was an unconditional demogrant; if they did that every year, that would be a universal basic income. $300/year isn't what anyone would really call a "Universal Basic Income".

The Dividend is a descendant from the common idea of a UBI by being a universal grant of a piece of all income, but not a grant of some specific buying power. It's not assistance to cover housing, food, or anything else. If the economy experiences a recession and GNI-per-Capita drops by 20% somehow (how is your economy not dead?), the Dividend likewise drops 20%--there shall be no intervention; deal with it.

My observation is that the Dividend strongly impacts localized recession (concentrated poverty) and rebuilds the economy around those in need, allowing welfare to keep them afloat while we bring them jobs and the general means of survival. It's not designed to hold you up on its own, nor to be the only social insurance in town. It is therefor enough for it to be what it is, and the humans can tinker with the other social welfares when necessary.

tl;dr: it's technically a social insurance, like unemployment or Social Security Disability benefits.

Re: Translation.

[Whorhay]

The sad fact is that our economy hasn't worked like that in a very long time. Even 30 years ago I can remember seeing plenty of older people working low pay, hourly, menial jobs. There simply are not enough better jobs for workers to move up to. So you end up with over qualified mature workers filling a lot of those crap jobs because they usually have responsibilities and will simply accept what they can get to keep from becoming homeless. And frankly these kind of jobs have never been meant for any purpose other than to wring what profitable work can be gotten out of a person to the advantage of the employer. The only time when what you say would have been true would be when apprentice systems were in place for most professions. Sure people might tell themselves those things but that is more about making the work palatable, because management past the front line supervisor sure as hell doesn't care one whit about their minions career.

Re: Translation.

[HornWumpus]

Those people are a walking warning to the young. Don't make the life choices they did.

They serve a valuable purpose, too bad it sucks to be them, but that's life.

Re:Translation.

[HornWumpus]

The bank bailout gave the Ds an excuse to hand out money to all the usual suspects, who squandered it as usual. 'Shovel ready' my ass.

Re:Translation.

[HornWumpus]

Totalling the nominal value of derivatives just proves how _clueless_ and indoctronated about the subject you are.

Derivatives are 'bets', if one pays off, the other doesn't, it can't.

Stop repeating derp you don't understand, it just reveals your stupidity.

Re:Translation.

[HornWumpus]

Duh, 51st staters mostly live as close as possible to the USA. Can't blame them.

Re:Translation.

[HornWumpus]

And it's exactly the same as US states like NY or CA.

Look at how LA just takes water.

If CA breaks into many states, LA goes dry.

Re:Translation.

[Z80a]

At larger scales the thing get weirder.
Like soylent, money is made out of people, and the less people you have doing things for the money, the less the money worth.
But things get even weirder if you consider that the megacorporations can replace people at the job of "giving money value", but as you do so, you give em more power.
A "working" UBI scheme is most likely a total monopoly of a corporation that will do everything to rip the UBI money out of the people's hands with the least effort they can put on, because they have no other choice.

Re: Translation.

[pnutjam]

Did he stutter? Conservatives want to throw money at companies instead of people. They are worried about stockholders.
They also love running around with guns pretending to help, never mind the legions of American's forced to grow up on the military teat, never learning to stand alone.

Re: Translation.

[pnutjam]

Sure, no help from family or social programs, your a god damn hero.

Re: Translation.

[pnutjam]

No mod points today, but your spot on. These jobs aren't apprenticeships and they don't act like they are anything other then a method of wringing cash out of a resource.

Re: Translation.

[pnutjam]

Gee, it's too bad the US has never done anything like that before, or have you never heard of the Marshall Plan?

Re:Translation.

[j-beda]

People are so angry that when a person running for I think it was mayor or counselor claimed that Toronto should be it's own province, people started cheering for it. Oh it wasn't the people in Toronto, they have this idea that us rednecks will starve to death without them. It was rural, and rural-urban voters who were cheering this idea on, after nearly a generation of being literally fucked over by a single city getting all the money they wanted because it's such a gigantic voting block.

If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.

Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.

Re: Translation.

[Opportunist]

Wait, kids in the US can choose what school to go to? More importantly, they even KNOW that there are other schools and they are able to determine which ones are good or bad at the age of 6?

Talk about growing up early!

Re: Translation.

[Opportunist]

You see, the problem is that people don't tend to accept that. Before he's starving to death, someone would rather bash your head in for the 10 bucks in your wallet so he can eat again.

That's the main problem here.

Re:Translation.

[Mashiki]

Well it couldn't have anything to do with Canada being mostly wilderness with winters that make it the Russia of North America or anything too. If you live in Southern Ontario, you're spared most of that minus the snow from the lakes. You don't see many -40C winter days(usually 0, and I only ever remember one from when I was a kid). Lot's of -30C to -35C days though. You also don't deal with the long daylight/long winters either. I can't blame people either, I worked in the far north a bunch of times and lived in the far-north living zone(250km south of the arctic circle) a couple of times while working on heavy industry jobs. The whole perpetual summer daylight was nice, at times but sure fucked with your sleep.

Re:Translation.

[Mashiki]

If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.

Likely richer, more taxes go into Toronto then they payout, because provincial taxes offset Toronto's lower property taxes. Those are offset by the ontario general revenue fund. The rest of the province is farming and industry, depending on the year they make up between 50-70% of the GDP of the province.

Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.

The reality is, in Canada it wouldn't matter. If Toronto became a new province and the rest of Ontario came up short on income it would be offset. Canada has a monetary policy called "country equalization" meaning areas that generate more money, pay for the services of the poorer parts of the country. So when Ontario was rolling in manufacturing jobs for the better part of 80 years, they paid the offset of nearly the rest of the country besides Alberta. When Alberta was rolling in so much money back during the oil price spike, they did the same.

The worst, I mean best is that we'd see a significant drop in the amount of bureaucracy in the province. Depending on the numbers by whatever company looks it up. Between 17% and 30% of the province(depending on year) is directly employed by the province itself. That's a lot of people.

Re: Translation.

[Mashiki]

The cleanliness and nice manners really got to you, eh?

Toronto is one of the dirtiest and shittiest places in Canada, the only place that comes close is Vancouver. It's also on track for being one of the most violent places in Canada, and has it's own ghettos now. You want clean and nice manners? Head to small cities.

Re: Translation.

[Mashiki]

FYI Canada doesn't have a "stand your ground" law. Our law fundamentally is built around "surrender or flee." It's not working very well as the increase in violent crime is coming from people who aren't native Canadians these days, but people imported from poorer parts of the world.

Upside: The laws(via case law) are slowly changing, it's not quite to that point but getting very close.

Re:Translation.

[Luckyo]

Let me see if I understand your utter failure at basic logic. You are saying that because you have observed growth of governmental debt, and you have observed government spending money on bailing out banks, the only thing that government spent money on is bailing out banks?

Do you understand just how stupid this statement makes you look? Government spends money on a tremendous amount of different things. All at once. "x+y=z" is not the same thing as "x=z", unless "y=0".

Re:Translation.

[j-beda]

If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.

Likely richer, more taxes go into Toronto then they payout, because provincial taxes offset Toronto's lower property taxes. Those are offset by the ontario general revenue fund. The rest of the province is farming and industry, depending on the year they make up between 50-70% of the GDP of the province.

Thanks, you clearly have a better handle on provincial finances than myself.

"Toronto's lower property taxes"? Lower how?

Does Toronto have lower "tax dollars per square foot", or "tax dollars per resident", or "tax percentage of assessed value", or some other metric?

Clearly if more of the provincial GDP is generated outside of the GTA than inside, in the long term the GTA is a "net drain" on the province, but the tax system does not always directly match the GDP distribution across a region, particularly when the tax revenue comes from a variety of different systems (property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, etc.).

Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.

The reality is, in Canada it wouldn't matter. If Toronto became a new province and the rest of Ontario came up short on income it would be offset. Canada has a monetary policy called "country equalization" meaning areas that generate more money, pay for the services of the poorer parts of the country. So when Ontario was rolling in manufacturing jobs for the better part of 80 years, they paid the offset of nearly the rest of the country besides Alberta. When Alberta was rolling in so much money back during the oil price spike, they did the same.

The worst, I mean best is that we'd see a significant drop in the amount of bureaucracy in the province. Depending on the numbers by whatever company looks it up. Between 17% and 30% of the province(depending on year) is directly employed by the province itself. That's a lot of people.

I suspect that splitting the province would see an increase in people employed by the two new provinces compared to the one old province. We could divide some of the existing departments between the two new provinces, but some positions would need to be filled with new people (the current person who decides on the menu for the provincial legislature lunch cafeteria would probably not work for both new provincial legislature cafeterias, even if each new cafeteria can get by with half as many cooks, for example). Maybe one of the new provinces would have a "leaner" bureaucracy than the old one had due to differences between the size of bureaucracy needed for the different economic structures of the two provinces (maybe farming bureaucracy is more or less labour intensive than banking bureaucracy), but I can't see how dividing a region would produce overall efficiencies. Usually people talk about economies gained by scaling up rather than down.

Re: Translation.

[kenh]

I think the previous poster conflated 'quantitative easing' with the bank bailout. The former involved creating money out of thin air, the later were conventional loans that were paid back.

Re: Translation.

[Shadowkahn]

That argument would have more merit if we had only helped "people" (corporations) like that once. But that's not the case. We did it over and over again. We continue to do it. We continue to give them, and their uber-rich leaders, massive tax breaks, massive givebacks, and we even pass laws requiring the purchase of their products (see: ethanol).

And I note you deftly omitted his reference to waging wars, which we do constantly and to great expense.

If we can afford to bomb brown people and run welfare programs for billionaires, we can afford to feed our own poor people. We simply choose not to, and that paints a pretty clear picture of what kind of people we are.

Re: Translation.

[Shadowkahn]

Yeah, except they repaid the bailout money with money they got from the government.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...

Financial shell games don't count.

And that's not touching on the fact that the TARP bailout made sure the banks were on solid ground while the people the banks had screwed were rendered homeless. TARP was a bad program from the get-go, and it was designed specifically to maintain the powerful's wealth on the backs of the powerless.

Re: Translation.

[willgill]

The Constitution does not guarantee happiness, just fertile ground for you to create your own. If you find yourself whining about other people's benefits and losing sight of your own, you have night homework of reading Luke 15:11–32.

Re:Translation.

[SSA-Ed]

Not all of the banks who received TARP money have repaid the loans. ... But, the fact remains, due to interest, dividends and other revenue streams, the government has received more money back ($266.7 billion, according to the Treasury) than it handed out to banks under the bailout law ($245.2 billion).Oct 25, 2012 . GM repaid the loan portion of the automaker bailout ahead of schedule, with interest. It used TARP money it had already received but hadn’t spent. And taxpayers are still stuck with GM stock that isn’t worth what was paid for it. And regarding military spending, would you prefer speaking Japanese or German today?

Re:Translation.

[Mashiki]

Toronto offsets property taxes, because the provincial government gives them the different out of the general revenue funds. That means if you live in a normal burb of Toronto, your property taxes might be say $5400/year on a $1m/house. While the same house in London, Ontario would cost you $9k-10k/year in property taxes. Ontario has always been a bit...weird. 25 years ago, a single county in Ontario generated 10% of the GDP of the province. It was manufacturing heavy, paying work was good, good benefits, and so on too. With the collapse of industry from NAFTA though it makes barely 2% now.

I suspect that splitting the province would see an increase in people employed by the two new provinces compared to the one old province ...

That would really depend. Toronto is already classified as a municipality, or simply put a "city state" within Ontario, like Kitchener-Waterloo, London and Woodstock/Oxford County. In those cases, they have their own administrative structure separate from the government already to handle all the day-to-day affairs. Most of the stuff already exists in Toronto's case because a bunch of years ago, the provincial government offloaded everything directly onto the various regions. That means that taxes are supposed to "stay" in the region, it doesn't happen in Toronto's case, they're the odd one out and get more out of the new reorganization then anyone else did.

The real reason why people would want the Toronto area separated from Ontario is because of voting, nothing more. With the number of MPP's(~50) you can basically win the entire province with a bit of leg work. You only need 63 to have a majority government. People see the entire situation as unfair because "what toronto wants, toronto gets" they want a new subway? Government throws money at them. They want special environmental thingy? Throw money at them. But if a municipality like Woodstock/Oxford County needs a new hospital? Nothing. It was federal grant money that the city/county got, nothing from the provincial government. And they'd been raising money to build a new one since the late 1970's, finally built in 2011.

Re:Translation.

[j-beda]

Toronto offsets property taxes, because the provincial government gives them the different out of the general revenue funds. That means if you live in a normal burb of Toronto, your property taxes might be say $5400/year on a $1m/house. While the same house in London, Ontario would cost you $9k-10k/year in property taxes.

By "the same house" do you mean a $1m/house in London (which clearly is not the "same" as a $1m/house in Toronto) or do you mean a physically similar house? The average price for a home in London seems to be $343,939 while in Toronto it looks like it is not quite three times the price. Thus if Toronto has a property tax rate of about one half the property tax rate in London, I could see one arguing that Toronto home owners are paying MORE than similar home owners in London.

These London homes look much fancier than these Toronto homes:

https://www.homesinlondonontar...

https://www.kijiji.ca/b-house-...

I had forgotten how much responsibilities the "municipalities" got downloaded on back in the early 2000s - I think you are right that much of the "provincial" infrastructure is probably already there.

As for the difficulty of political representation - it certainly is a tough problem to solve . If half you population is concentrated in one region, there is some logic in putting a whole lot of your resources and services in that region, but then again it is important to give everyone else reasonable access to all those services too. Putting the province's only cancer hospital up in Kenora wouldn't make much sense, but having all of the "only one in the province" services in Toronto doesn't make much sense either.

Re: Translation.

[Opportunist]

That's one of the worst parts of the ad brochure. It essentially tells you that you can be an asshole all live long and as long as you repent before dying you're forgiven. So why bother being a good Christian all life long when all it takes is saying "I'm sorry" just before croaking?

Re:Translation.

[Mashiki]

MPAC determines the property taxes in the cases like this. A $1m house is "less" then a house in Toronto, then London. But according to the entity itself, property taxes are to be determined on market value and the "upgrades of the building itself." Remember that there's a big swing in Toronto determining a $1m house too. If you're a block off the danforth, a 600sqft house could be $1.4m, but if you're in a northern area a 2500sqft house can also be $1.4m but the property taxes remain the same.

As for the difficulty of political representation - it certainly is a tough problem to solve . If half you population is concentrated in one region, there is some logic in putting a whole lot of your resources and services in that region, but then again it is important to give everyone else reasonable access to all those services too. Putting the province's only cancer hospital up in Kenora wouldn't make much sense, but having all of the "only one in the province" services in Toronto doesn't make much sense either.

Equal access to help is really a big issue in this, if you live outside of Toronto(and in Southern Ontario) a lot of people commute a very long way for specialists. I travel 300km round trip to see my neurologist(chronic migraines), every few months. Sadly the problems become more obvious, the more you look at what's happened over the last 15 years. Money for core and important infrastructure never happened. It was more important to say blow millions on electric car charging stations then repairing collapsing bridges that span the 401.

Re:Translation.

[dinfinity]

I can't say I have looked into the specifics, but 3.5% profit over a period of ~7 years (as per the numbers in the CNN-article) isn't great. If you take inflation into account, it's even a net loss.

Getting a much, much better (direct) ROI on that money (just repaying debt would do the trick) would be easy. Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not saying the bailouts weren't necessary, but they definitely weren't great investments regardless of the financial crisis. They were great investments only because of it.

See also here: https://www.nationalreview.com...
(not my favorite source of news, but it's about the points made)

Re:Translation.

[magzteel]

I can't say I have looked into the specifics, but 3.5% profit over a period of ~7 years (as per the numbers in the CNN-article) isn't great. If you take inflation into account, it's even a net loss.

Getting a much, much better (direct) ROI on that money (just repaying debt would do the trick) would be easy. Don't get me wrong, though: I'm not saying the bailouts weren't necessary, but they definitely weren't great investments regardless of the financial crisis. They were great investments only because of it.

See also here: https://www.nationalreview.com...
(not my favorite source of news, but it's about the points made)

Thanks for the article. Unfortunately it's a gross oversimplification.

The comment I was replying to was about bank bailouts. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is poorly understood, or just intentionally misrepresented. TARP was a plan for the government to buy from the banks the "troubled assets" (mortgage backed securities) that were killing their balance sheets due to mark-to-market reporting rules. But it never happened, for a couple of reasons. (1) it was impossible to price the assets and come up with a fair price to pay for them, and (2) Warren Buffet invested $5 billion into Goldman Sachs in exchange for perpetual preferred fixed dividend stocks and stock warrants. Britain had a similar approach.

The Treasury followed Buffet's lead and morphed TARP into the "Capital Injection Program" (CIP). All the bank deals were structured to make a profit, very similarly to Buffet's, except the dividend paid would grow over time as an incentive to pay back early. A total of $245 billion was invested in banks, of which most was paid back with interest in under two years. The Treasury made $1.4 billion in a year on Goldman Sachs alone. Besides the sliding dividend scale the banks were in a rush to pay it back because Congress started adding new conditions after the fact. Never do business with the mob or the government.

Other TARP funds were hijacked for other purposes, such as propping up GM, Those deals were not structured to make a profit, and they have lost money.

See this for a breakdown of disbursements and repayments:
https://www.treasury.gov/initi...

See this for a good explanation of the program, how banks were forced to be part of it, and how the terms changed after the fact
http://archive.fortune.com/200...

Re:Translation.

[dinfinity]

Although informative, you haven't touched upon the core of the argument. Even if profitable to some degree, in its entirety (again, when disregarding the massive ensuing issues if no financial backing had been provided) it was by far not as profitable as investing the money elsewhere would have been.

If you only look at the 'Bank' category in your first source, 12.7% profit over a period of ~7 years is still pretty shitty.
The '1.4 billion USD on Goldman Sachs alone' is just 0.57% of your own quoted figure of what was invested in banks. In absolutes it sounds like a lot, but relatively speaking, it isn't even the bare minimum any financial investor should be making in a year. A savings account does better than that.

Again, I'm not saying the government should have not provided the financial backing (AKA 'bailouts') and invested their money elsewhere. Let's just not pretend that the endeavor turned out to be some great money maker.

Re:Translation.

[magzteel]

Although informative, you haven't touched upon the core of the argument. Even if profitable to some degree, in its entirety (again, when disregarding the massive ensuing issues if no financial backing had been provided) it was by far not as profitable as investing the money elsewhere would have been.

If you only look at the 'Bank' category in your first source, 12.7% profit over a period of ~7 years is still pretty shitty.
The '1.4 billion USD on Goldman Sachs alone' is just 0.57% of your own quoted figure of what was invested in banks. In absolutes it sounds like a lot, but relatively speaking, it isn't even the bare minimum any financial investor should be making in a year. A savings account does better than that.

Again, I'm not saying the government should have not provided the financial backing (AKA 'bailouts') and invested their money elsewhere. Let's just not pretend that the endeavor turned out to be some great money maker.

The point is, it's not 7 years. Most of the money was returned with interest in two.

The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years. The 10 year treasury rate was under 3% back then, so bank accounts were probably .25%. If fact, one of the reasons mortgage backed securities were so in demand was because they paid a fixed rate around 8.5% and were thought to be safe.

Personally I wasn't in favor of TARP or CIP. I preferred to let the healthier banks devour the weak ones. But the deals Hank Paulson structured were unusually good for the taxpayer. The dividend-paying perpetual preferred shares gave the taxpayers a high fixed return, a fixed stock price, and first place in line in the event the bank went under. The warrants gave the taxpayer a big payback when the stock price went up. I'm not aware of any better deal before or since.

Re:Translation.

[dinfinity]

The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years.

Sure, and some of my portfolio does well, some of it does not. You shouldn't cherrypick like that if you want to make sound financial decisions.
The overall numbers won't change and you are intentionally missing the point. Good day.

Re:Translation.

[magzteel]

The Goldman investment represented a 1.4 billion return on 10 billion invested, or 14% , in well under two years.

Sure, and some of my portfolio does well, some of it does not. You shouldn't cherrypick like that if you want to make sound financial decisions.
The overall numbers won't change and you are intentionally missing the point. Good day.

The overall numbers DO change if you accurately take into account the duration of the investment. As the chart shows, most of the payback + returns happened in 2 years, not 7. Like I wrote earlier, people either don't understand it or intentionally misrepresent it.

Re:Translation.

[dinfinity]

Alright, that is a fair point. The calculation does become more favorable if you take that into account.

Broadly speaking:
Using the treasury.gov graphs, the average invested amount between 2008 and 2010 is roughly 300 billion USD, and between 2010 and 2015 about 100 billion USD. That averages to roughly 170 billion invested on average over 7 years. ~15 billion USD profit on that average is still less than 1.3% yearly. If we're generous and ignore the invested money after 2010, it's still only a 2.5% yearly profit.
Although the latter is admittedly not all that bad a number, being at least roughly equal to or above normal inflation, I believe my claim still stands.

Re:Translation.

[magzteel]

Alright, that is a fair point. The calculation does become more favorable if you take that into account.

Broadly speaking:
Using the treasury.gov graphs, the average invested amount between 2008 and 2010 is roughly 300 billion USD, and between 2010 and 2015 about 100 billion USD. That averages to roughly 170 billion invested on average over 7 years. ~15 billion USD profit on that average is still less than 1.3% yearly. If we're generous and ignore the invested money after 2010, it's still only a 2.5% yearly profit.
Although the latter is admittedly not all that bad a number, being at least roughly equal to or above normal inflation, I believe my claim still stands.

My math isn't great so I can't calculate the ROI accurately. In April of 2009 there was 238 billion invested. By December there was 80 billion. I just dont see how it makes sense to say "170 billion averaged over 7 years"

I also can't tell from your numbers how much you think the Treasure invested.
According to their chart on https://www.treasury.gov/initi... they disbursed 245.1 billion total.

Easy to dis

[Anonymous Coward]

Cue all the comments about how obviously stupid this idea is. More interesting (and harder) would be ideas for dealing with the transition to a society where work is not, in fact, required (thus making jobs scarce). Going to happen? Who knows? But it would be better to prepare for it than to deal with the catastrophe that will result if it does happen and we are not prepared.

Re: Easy to dis

[catchingallspam]

This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.

Re: Easy to dis

[themusicgod1]

Unemployment is very low in both the US and Canada.

Not in Thunder Bay and surrounding reserves, where programs like this might actually help.

Re: Easy to dis

[alvinrod]

While this is true, improvements in productivity mean that it has become (and will continue to become) much less expensive to sustain the life of a person with no or little input from them.

I would rather replace the ugly ball of entitlement programs we have now with a UBI. Many are badly designed and incentivize people to avoid getting off welfare, not to mention the administrative overhead. Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.

However, just as with any other program, a UBI can be badly designed. If we want to implement one it needs to ensure that bad behaviors are not incentivized. Reducing payments for working is one such example. Letting parents siphon off any income from their children would be another.

I am a proponent of some form of UBI, not because I believe that it is morally right or good for us to redistribute wealth, but because since we have already decided to do that to the current degree, we may as well do it as sanely as possible.

My other reason for supporting it is that I suspect it would also lead to reductions in abject poverty and crime, the externalities of which likely start costing a significant portion of such a program when you factor in the economic activity that must be directed to dealing with the problems caused by such. I cannot verify it, but I recently read that some city was spending some tens of thousands of dollars per person on dealing with the homeless in the city. Think of how much is spent on the criminal justice system as well. If a UBI can lead to reductions in those problems outright it reduces the cost and size of government further.

Re: Easy to dis

[bistromath007]

How the hell is the idea as old as society itself when we didn't even have printed circuit boards until the turn of the last century?

People who believe that we will always need people to work really need to get a fuller understanding of the history of labor. Will there always be some people who need to do something? Probably. However, the proportion of people doing the hardest work will shrink, drastically. That's how things have always worked, and it's the root of your argument. We need almost nobody to be a farmer, so we invented a million new jobs.

The thing about general automation is that we're coming close to a point where thinking is the job. If we can automate that, and we're already starting to, then automating jobs where you don't need to think, which is most of them, will be a breeze. The only obstacle to it this very moment is how expensive a good robot is. If their cost drops below what workers demand, that job is dead to human hands.

Humanity will always serve a purpose. How could we not? We impose purpose upon existence itself, that's what we do. When what is considered "work" that human beings are needed for is so different from what it is now that it is no longer demeaning, unhealthy, or necessary to keep a roof over your head, this argument will be pointless.

Re: Easy to dis

[Kjella]

This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.

There'll always be an endless demand for things we could want done, but it does not mean there'll be an endless supply of capable workers. I know people who are on mental disability today who'd be working 100 years ago doing "Take ax. Chop wood." kinds of work. And there's far more who can't even make it through high school without dropping out, who could be a burger flipper or taxi driver but hardly a doctor or engineer no matter how many scholarships and free tutoring you give. They're not bad people, many are honest hard working men and women but they're not made for complex abstract problem solving. Unfortunately their kind of jobs are rapidly being automated and the halo jobs they create are usually advanced development/maintenance/repair work. And we're trying to automate that too.

Re: Easy to dis

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think those things could be automated in the future? Because my bet is that yes, it's just a matter of what your time frame is. Robots already weld and there are 3d printers and robots that are building rudimentary buildings. It's not hard to believe that those needs will be met by robots at some point.

Re: Easy to dis

[bistromath007]

Oh, I see. Yes. Instead of UBI, we can just gas anyone who is not smart enough to design a robot. Much better idea.

Re: Easy to dis

[bistromath007]

Learning useful skills is its own incentive. People don't refuse to become electricians and shit because they think it's boring. They refuse to do it because we keep pushing people into four-year colleges and then shunting all the people who can't go from there to med school or law school into pointless desk bullshit. Now they have a bunch of debt so they can't learn a trade. Oops.

Re: Easy to dis

[ShanghaiBill]

Replacing current programs with a UBI would give everyone around $7,000 annually

This is only true if Social Security and Medicare spending are absorbed into UBI. So current SS recipients, who paid into the system for their entire working lives, would see their monthly checks dramatically reduced so able bodied young people could receive the same check that they do.

Do you seriously think this would be politically acceptable? There would be a firestorm of protest, and wholesale defeat of any incumbent that supported it.

If you leave SS out, then the numbers don't work. At all.

Re: Easy to dis

[bistromath007]

Due to having substantially lower overhead, the program would cost less than Social Security does. Medicare could stay, I think; health insurance is a different kind of thing. Those "able bodied young people?" They have old relatives. They'll be fuckin' fine.

Re: Easy to dis

[kenh]

Social Security retirement payments in the US costs the government *nothing* Yet.

Current SS retirement payments are made from current collections and a small amount from the so-called SS Trust Fund. In 20 years or so, the so-called Trust Fund will be depleted and payments from workers will not be enough, then the program will start costing the government money.

SS currently collects 6.75% of everyone's income for the first $100K (give or take) from the employer, and an equal amount from the employee.

Every dollar paid into SS in 2018 will be paid out to SS beneficiaries in 2018.

Re: Easy to dis

[ShanghaiBill]

Due to having substantially lower overhead, the program would cost less than Social Security does.

Administrative overhead is a negligible amount of social security expenses. It is less than 1%.

The numbers don't add up. Not even within an order of magnitude. You can't just hand wave that away.

Those "able bodied young people?" They have old relatives.

Not every old person has young relatives to support them.

Re: Easy to dis

[rikkards]

Buddy's wife works for the Canadian Privy Council which essentially determines long term policies. She has a doctorate in economics and has said it isn't if, it is when. Pretty much every single western country is looking into how to get ahead of it. They are hoping that it is far enough out that they can get ahead of it. Essentially if they don't the rich are going to end up with their heads on pikes.

Re: Easy to dis

[cmseagle]

$7,000 annually. That would be sufficient to subsist if doing nothing else.

I'm skeptical. Most studies consider an individual to be facing housing price pressure if they're spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Even if we allow for these UBI recipients to be spending 50% of their income, you're talking ~$300/month. I know that there are places where you can rent a room at that rate, but it's going to require either relocating those who are living purely on UBI, or an additional housing benefit.

That brings me to my next concern about the practicality of relying on UBI. What happens when someone takes their UBI, their spouse's UBI, and their kids' UBI and blows it at the casino (or on your vice of choice)? What does society do in that scenario to prevent the kids from ending up on the street? Do we create a whole new system of safety nets and monitoring systems to make sure we don't have people falling through the cracks of the UBI system? Or, do we simply accept that individuals have a right to spend their UBI as they see fit, damn the consequences?

I know that this is the minority case. I believe that most recipients of UBI would use it to take care of themselves and their families. Some tiny minority would not, and a society that wants to implement UBI either needs to implement additional safety nets for when UBI fails, or live with the consequences of not doing so. For moral and ethical reasons, I don't think the altter is tenable.

I agree with the principle behind your arguments for UBI but I don't see how it can be implemented in the real world. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

Re: Easy to dis

[hazardPPP]

That brings me to my next concern about the practicality of relying on UBI. What happens when someone takes their UBI, their spouse's UBI, and their kids' UBI and blows it at the casino (or on your vice of choice)? What does society do in that scenario to prevent the kids from ending up on the street? Do we create a whole new system of safety nets and monitoring systems to make sure we don't have people falling through the cracks of the UBI system? Or, do we simply accept that individuals have a right to spend their UBI as they see fit, damn the consequences?

I know that this is the minority case. I believe that most recipients of UBI would use it to take care of themselves and their families. Some tiny minority would not, and a society that wants to implement UBI either needs to implement additional safety nets for when UBI fails, or live with the consequences of not doing so. For moral and ethical reasons, I don't think the altter is tenable.

I fail to see how this is a "new" problem that arises specifically from having some form of UBI.

Most western countries already have some sort of welfare/social assistance program that involves giving the recepients a sum of money. The government doesn't go out and do these people's shopping; it writes them cheques and lets them do it themselves. Therefore it is already possible (and the case in, as you say, with a minority) that people take money they've recieved as assistance from the government and blow it on drugs or gambling or whatever, instead of feeding themselves and their families. The difference between conventional welfare and the UBI is not that the government is giving people money; that happens in both cases. The difference is that with the UBI, the government gives everyone the welfare check, without first going through complicated procedures to see if they qualify, as is the case with conventional welfare systems.

Furthermore, what is the difference between blowing money from welfare/UBI on gambling instead of feeding your kids and blowing money earned at a job on gambling instead of feeding your kids? In both cases we have neglected, unfed kids and bad parenting. The source of the money does not change the effect, and people with a job can be bad parents just as the people without a job can be.

So, the problem of neglected children exists already, regardless of a UBI, and most countries already have this "safety net" you speak of to take care of the children neglected by their parents (employed or unemployed). It's called Children Services, Family Social Services, and such, varying from place to place, but all doing basically the same thing.

So, the point you raise is irrelevant to the discussion of whether UBI should or could be implemented or not.

Re: Easy to dis

[The Cynical Critic]

The problem with most UBI programs is that they don't require it's recipients to look for work and thus encourage people to be passive and not bother looking for work. Previous programs are the way they are exactly because they're supposed to prevent abuse, i.e people getting benefits they're not entitled to like unemployment for people who have no intention of being employed. Reductions in overhead costs mostly stem from the removal of systems intended to prevent abuse and when added to an UBI pram, the program will be just as inefficient and complex as the programs it's supposed to replace.

On a fundamental level most of the benefits programs that we have today are supposed to be financial assistance programs for those that need them and the complexity in them arises for the most part from attempts at preventing abuse of the programs by people trying to get benefits they're not entitled to. UBI basically just throws all of these safeguards to the side and assumes people won't abuse the program when the safeguards were originally put into place exactly because people were abusing the old systems.

Thus any UBI system that isn't implemented in an incredibly naive way will inevitably end up being pretty similar to already existing benefits systems. Not that it wouldn't be an improvement, but it won't be the revolution people are hoping UBI systems will bring about.

Re: Easy to dis

[cmseagle]

Many of the suggestions for funding UBI depend on generous assumptions about how much money can be saved by replacing every other social safety net program with UBI. My point is that it does not, or at least not to the degree that is often suggested. You'll still have administrative overhead of going through complicated procedures to determine whether a UBI recipient also qualifies for the supplemental safety net program.

My point is not at all that this is a UBI problem. It's a "societies which have decided that it's bad to have neglected, unfed kids" problem. I'm just trying to point out that it;s a pipe dream to think that all welfare programs can be made unnecessary by simply cutting every citizen a UBI check.

Re: Easy to dis

[Pieroxy]

So, what make you think you deserve other people's money flowing your way? Your suffering is somewhat more worthy than other's?

Also, if success is now the exception, please explain who is going to pay for these $1000/mo ?

And last, throwing money at the poor does a lot of short term good. That's true. But it doesn't solve the root cause and actually aggravates it as it removes a lot of incentive to the poor to get out of their misery. It's hard to say but someone with an empty belly usually works harder.

So finding a balance is important. Giving flat out $1000/mo to everyone is IMO way way way overboard. Plus no state can fund that. At all. And money doesn't grow on trees.

Re: Easy to dis

[registrations_suck]

Because the quality of life likely wouldn't be as good as if you worked. If everybody receives a check for $24k a year for doing nothing, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to lead a good life on that, you'll be able to afford food, shelter and medical care and probably not a lot else without working.

So, if you like to literally hang out at the beach every day, that might work, but for any hobby that involves much money you'll need another source of income.

I agree entirely. However, how does this apply to the current crop of welfare degenerates who are not working now? Every one (actual disabled people excluded) of them COULD have a better life if they bothered to clean up their act, get educated, and get a job. But that's too much WORK!! Plenty of them will not even CONSIDER doing ANY of that, provided that they can get free resources from people who do.

What's more, the days of large numbers of people working are drawing to an end. Which shouldn't be a surprise given how much time is wasted on pointless bullshit at work.

That's a great argument for having less people.

Re: Easy to dis

[hazardPPP]

I'm just trying to point out that it;s a pipe dream to think that all welfare programs can be made unnecessary by simply cutting every citizen a UBI check.

You are pointing it out using a rather contrived example (the neglected children). I have never seen anyone suggesting that childrens' social services be replaced with UBI. I think that is a rather wide definition of "welfare". I mean are services for the mentally ill (including insane asylums/long-term care mental hospitals) also a "welfare program"? By your definition, I would say yes. However I have yet to hear someone saying the the mentally ill should be released from government funded institutions and be cut a UBI cheque instead.

Similarly, your example included someone blowing "their spouse's UBI" on gambling. That would seem grounds for divorce and a lawsuit in most jurisdictions, wouldn't it? Is the justice system now also a "welfare program"? Is the police? Again, you are casting too wide a net.

The vast majority of UBI advocates want to replace government cash payments (and their cash-like equivalents, think food stamps, or special discounts and tax credits for the poor) with a UBI. I haven't seen anyone advocating the replacement of all government social services (which are not the same as welfare programs in the narrow sense) with a UBI. The calculations are not based on eliminating childrens' social services. In countries with government-funded medicare, UBI advocates typically leave that out as well - from the proposal and from the calculations.

Re: Easy to dis

[squiggleslash]

$7,000 a year isn't going to pay rent in most of the country. Plus, the US CoL is insane - to buy groceries in most of the country and go to the bank means either owning a car (looking at $10,000 a year in amortized costs, maintenance, and fuel, for something on the cheap end) or spending the entire day traveling. (When I've suggested this could be avoided by, you know, letting developers build high density/mixed use developments if they want, so that people, if they want, can live there, it's usually been replied to with howls of "YOU'RE FORCING ME TO RIDE BUSES" so it's a political non-starter, and will be for as long as people confuse choice with force, and think being forced to use one form of transportation is choice.) So $7000 minus $6-12,000 in rent, minus $12,000 in utilities (God forbid you live in Florida...), minus $10,000 in transportation, minus $2,500 in food... leaves someone unable to work with not a lot of money. Many will choose to spend $350 of that $7,000 on a shotgun instead, which they'll proceed to "eat".

Here's the big problem with UBI. It's a one-size-fits-all thing for something that won't fit. It's a proposal to replace all benefits, from unemployment through welfare to disability. Politicians will see reasons to cut it during times of high voluntary unemployment and will have pressures to increase it during times of high job shortages. Within a few years, the fact this model is broken because it assumes that people are unemployed solely due to work availability and prospective wages, rather than things beyond their control like disability or parenthood, is going to become readily apparent.

And how will that be fixed? The only way to fix it will end up being to reintroduce many of the benefits that UBI was supposed to replace, thus undermining the whole "We give everyone money and save in bureaucracy!" argument.

When I was in my 20s, I thought UBI was a good idea too (yes, it's not a new idea, although it wasn't something anyone was talking about, I genuinely thought I had come up with the idea myself!), but as you get older, and see how the world works, and that it's not simple, you realize it's not going to work as advertised.

It'll never be enough to live on, and it'll always be too high for those paying for it.

Re: Easy to dis

[squiggleslash]

I fail to see how this is a "new" problem that arises specifically from having some form of UBI.

That's not the new problem. The new problem is that you're taking away the old solution to the old problem.

Re: Easy to dis

[Highdude702]

I love my career choice as an electrician. I wouldn't rather do anything else.

Re: Easy to dis

[tbannist]

The problem with most UBI programs is that they don't require it's recipients to look for work and thus encourage people to be passive and not bother looking for work. Previous programs are the way they are exactly because they're supposed to prevent abuse, i.e people getting benefits they're not entitled to like unemployment for people who have no intention of being employed. Reductions in overhead costs mostly stem from the removal of systems intended to prevent abuse and when added to an UBI pram, the program will be just as inefficient and complex as the programs it's supposed to replace.

The key words are "supposed to prevent abuse", the problem is that often in trying to prevent abuse, the systems actually mandate abuse. I was on unemployment once. I lost my benefits for 3 weeks because I worked for 3 days and earned too much money on my (very) short term contract. By doing actual work, I ended up with less money than I would have had if I hadn't done any work at all. I also had to be careful about accepting a job because if the job didn't pay enough and it didn't work out, my benefits could be lowered permanently or gone entirely. Never mind that I had been paying into unemployment insurance for years, already.

UBI basically just throws all of these safeguards to the side and assumes people won't abuse the program when the safeguards were originally put into place exactly because people were abusing the old systems.

The UBI throws away all of those safeguards because it assumes that the things that people thought were "abuses" no longer matter if everyone is getting the same amount of money. You no longer care if people are working or not because benefits don't end when someone starts working. You no longer care if someone is sick or not, because benefits don't end when someone is no longer too sick to work. You no longer care if someone is hiding their income because you don't reduce their welfare benefits when they start making too much money. The biggest abuse in a UBI program is, I think, collecting someone else's benefits (either by fraud, or by coercion). The rest of it doesn't matter as long as the basic income is actually universal. When you start trying to tailor benefits or claw them back, it becomes just another of the programs that it was supposed to replace.

The key thing here is that you have to trust that left to their own devices, people will generally choose to be good rather than bad. If you can't believe that, then you will never be able to support a UBI. If you do believe that, then everything else is implementation details.

Re: Easy to dis

[mr.mctibbs]

So your solution isn't to outright murder people you have deemed genetically inferior, but to eliminate them by sterilization and forced medical experimentation.

I'll bet you get offended when people call you what you are.

Re: Easy to dis

[JackieBrown]

Wow - this just makes me want to lock people up, not give them more means to kill me.

Re: Easy to dis

[CanHasDIY]

If everybody receives a check for $24k a year for doing nothing

... a gallon of milk would cost $400.

Re: Easy to dis

[king neckbeard]

The problem with most UBI programs is that they don't require it's recipients to look for work and thus encourage people to be passive and not bother looking for work.

UBI doesn't 'encourage' anything. That's kind of the main point.

Reductions in overhead costs mostly stem from the removal of systems intended to prevent abuse and when added to an UBI pram, the program will be just as inefficient and complex as the programs it's supposed to replace.

That's why you don't implement anti-abuse measures. Policing abuse costs more than abuse, so it's not worth doing.

UBI basically just throws all of these safeguards to the side and assumes people won't abuse the program when the safeguards were originally put into place exactly because people were abusing the old systems.

No, it assumes that just giving people enough money to cover their basic needs is just as effective as other social safety nets, while costing less.

Re: Easy to dis

[king neckbeard]

Or, we can just accept that some people just want to get high and binge watch Netflix. Much less risky than major changes to the gene pool.

Re: Easy to dis

[aquacrayfish]

UBI doesn't 'encourage' anything. That's kind of the main point.

Some people are happy to live with minimal expense and not do much. The majority, I would think, with some disposable income, would take risks and train/look for the job they want, rather than taking a job that might pay enough to survive based on current expense.

Personally, I would love to see what would happen to the dirty jobs. How many basic maintenance jobs, like janitor or sewer laborer, would see a dramatic increase in pay if people didn't need those types of jobs to survive?

Re: Easy to dis

[HornWumpus]

Trust fund is just IOUs from the government to itself. If any private enterprise tried it, they'd be thrown in jail.

Re: Easy to dis

[HornWumpus]

^^ This is what commies actually believe!

what did you expect

[layabout]

2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do

Re:what did you expect

[LynnwoodRooster]

Or a 3rd possibility: Ms. MacLeod realized that there simply is not enough tax revenue to provide a UBI, without dramatically increasing taxes to a point that is unsustainable.

Re:what did you expect

[sjames]

No. It was a fixed scale test where the costs were known up front and already budgeted.

There was no sudden realization behind this, only a reneged campaign promise.

Re:what did you expect

[sit1963nz]

right up until you get to the point where it is significantly cheaper to give these families a UBI rather than have any of them end up in prison.

Re:what did you expect

[bistromath007]

If it was actually a basic income you would be getting it, too. The point of UBI is to bring equality of opportunity. $20k a year is a meager living, but it's good enough that you can take some risks with it and actually try to do the entrepreneurial dream we're all told about.

Re:what did you expect

[sit1963nz]

And yet I bet you are one of those that keeps demanding longer prison sentences for lower levels of crime.
That approach costs the tax payers 5 times what welfare would.

And then you also ignore economic theory which demands a certain level of unemployment, too much unemployment negatively impacts the economy and drives down wages, too little unemployment drives up wages and also harms the economy.

Re:what did you expect

[SirSlud]

Since it's local politics that you're probably unfamiliar with, it's pretty simple. It was already budgeted. It was also a campaign promise not to end this program, and now it's being ended, and Ms. MacLeod fully admits it's a campaign promise they're completely reneging on because it plays well to their populist base.

Re:what did you expect

[LynnwoodRooster]

I think that is more damning about the money we spend on prisons than UBI. It should not be more expensive to house a prisoner than to provide a living income. Just the cost of housing alone should be much cheaper.

Re: what did you expect

[catchingallspam]

Of the long list of stuff Ontario voters have been lied to on various campaign trails, this one ranks pretty god damn low I'd say.

Re:what did you expect

[youngone]

There's actually a lot of money to be made out of imprisoning people.
I mean, obviously not for poor people, they're the ones we're putting behind bars, or paying a pittance to be the guards, but for rich people, it can be a great thing.

Very profitable.

Re:what did you expect

[youngone]

The "U" stands for Universal. You would get it too.

Re:what did you expect

[registrations_suck]

right up until you get to the point where it is significantly cheaper to give these families a UBI rather than have any of them end up in prison.

That is entirely dependent on how your prison is run.

Re:what did you expect

[sit1963nz]

The prisons require at least 3 shifts of staff.
Staff numbers per prisoner need to be high enough for safety.
Prisons just cost a LOT to build, maintain, and run.
And then there are the demands to lock people up for longer to "teach them good".
So they same people who begrudge anyone a liveable benefit seems happy to pay 5 times the amount to lock people up.
And this is in addition to all the other social issues and costs that causes (fatherless children, etc et etc etc)

Re:what did you expect

[sit1963nz]

AND...paid for by the tax payer.

Re: what did you expect

[bistromath007]

That isn't how UBI is supposed to work. This "pilot program" fucked it up on purpose by making it needs-based.

Re:what did you expect

[youngone]

Oh, yes. That's the other great thing about private prisons.

We must remember to earmark some of that sweet, sweet taxpayer money for more propaganda about what a bad thing Socialism is though.
Those poor people might start getting the wrong idea.

Re:what did you expect

[Anonymous Coward]

Both unemployed people and job vacancies simply represent liquidity on both sides of the labour market. Such liquidity enables a range of employment events without which an economy would be less efficient.

A labour market with 0% unemployment is akin to a bitcoin market with no bitcoins for sale; one simply wouldn't expect to see this.

As for countries with less than 1% employment, the above logic really addresses the case of 0% but the figure seems low nonetheless. Drawing on the bitcoin analogy, I would expect a higher level in a free market economy. Perhaps there are rules in place which depress unemployment or perhaps the reported figures are inaccurate (e.g. people who have been out of work for a long time are no longer considered unemployed).

Re:what did you expect

[bistromath007]

Properly managed fiat currency is based on production. When you can produce more with less people, then what?

Re:what did you expect

[Zaelath]

If that was the case then they'd jack up my tax by (at least) $17,000/year, so take with one hand, give back with the other. Still effectively zero.

Not that I think that's a bad idea, by the time people were earning $35,000/year they're much less likely to jump through the hoops to claim another $17,000 and by the time they're earning $70,000/year they're paying themselves and someone else.

The alternative is to have people that are unemployable stealing $50,000 of shit/year to make $10,000. It's much cheaper to just give them the $17,000 in the first place.

Re: what did you expect

[bistromath007]

Ah! So this was just a huge scam to get a bunch of disabled people to give up their benefits. Genius shit.

Re:what did you expect

[ShanghaiBill]

Are you saying people in prison should be slowly starved to death or something?

No, just that most of them don't belong in prison. We have technology like tracking anklets and subcutaneous RFID chips that allows non-violent offenders to "serve their time" outside of prison. For instance, they could be sentenced to clean bedpans in a nursing home for 60 hours per week. Or a white collar criminal could teach finance or computer skills to low income people.

There are plenty of better options than prison for most offenders. Other countries have a tiny fraction of our incarceration rate, and end up with lower recidivism rates. Prisons are extremely expensive, waste human potential, and generate more crime than they deter.

Re: what did you expect

[Kokuyo]

That has always been my point. I don't see how you can test a UBI on a subset of the population. Of course I may very well lack the in-depth knowledge on how this thing is supposed to work, I'll grant you that any day...

I think to really know whether the UBI does what the proponents says it would, you have to have it for everyone that shares the same borders and general tax code.

You might get away with switching a whole state in a federation like the US or Switzerland. However, a very real concern is the influx of people from outside who want nothing but free money. So we're back at controllable borders. Which, come to think of it, makes Switzerland unviable what with free migration in the EU and all that.

As an aside, I'd like to ask you about your signature. I have read his document, found that he came to similar conclusions I have and presented them quite fairly. You say that his "fans" only have the argument that any opponents just haven't read it... let me go at it from another side and ask you to explain to me where I misunderstood his document so horrendously to arrive at my conclusion.

As it seems to me, the basic difference here lies primarily in how you go at it. Do you expect him to be a bad, white, privileged male and interpret the document accordingly or do you rather think he had the real intention of making things better for everyone, including or even especially the women in his company.

I get the sense it was the latter... you obviously don't. I would really like to find out why that is.

Re:what did you expect

[ShanghaiBill]

And take jobs from honest people?

Lump of labor fallacy

Re:what did you expect

[hazardPPP]

2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do

Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and the new premier of the province, is, like his late brother Rob Ford, the antic-ridden former mayor of Toronto, convinced that "government waste" is the source of all problems and that everything can be fine, i.e. that you could increase spending and reduce taxes and borrowing just if you could eliminate the waste and "find efficincies".

Now, of course there is government waste, of course there is corruption and embezzlement, and of course there could be some "efficiencies": but the reality is, the scale of the money that can be saved in this manner is nowhere near what is needed to put finances in order (not to mention funding all the nice things you promised in the campaign) without making hard choices. However it's a great pitch to voters: we can give you everything you want (more goodies from the government AND tax cuts) if we just end the corrupt "gravy train" of the current administration.

Once reality hits you, you start looking for ways to look tough on "government waste" and the "gravy train" to at least justify the fact that you won't be able to deliver the goodies and the tax cuts simultaneously (or neither, perhaps). The easy way out is that, beyond the mundane (e.g. whether a government department should order expensive designer office chairs or get cheap ones from IKEA), "government waste" is usually a very subjective, ideological thing. A UBI test program, which is percieved by many as "giving free money to some lazy slobs", is not something that is ideologically dear to the Conservatives. Hence, it's very convenient to proclaim that it's "waste" and should be eliminated. Cap-and-trade (for carbon), renewable energy subsidies, windmill projects for example all fit the same bill. We don't like it ideologically hence spending money on it is waste, look at us, we're ending the gravy train.

Re:what did you expect

[hazardPPP]

Or a 3rd possibility: Ms. MacLeod realized that there simply is not enough tax revenue to provide a UBI, without dramatically increasing taxes to a point that is unsustainable.

I highly doubt it.

This was a time-limited, area-limited test program: it started in 2017 and was supposed to last three years. It was not permanent. It was fully budgeted and the costs were known up-front, and they are and were small in comparison to the Ontario budget.

If Ms. MacLeod was so sure the that the program was not scalable, she could have let it run to the end (to 2020) and just expire without renewing it; and then, use the data obtained to clearly show that it's not the right way forward. She could say, OK, for X people this cost Y money, if we scale it up for everyone it clearly doesn't work.

No, this smells of just ideological preference: the project was cut short just a bit over a year in (out of three), so there could be no risk of the program actually giving a positive result. If you read TFA, you would see that the minister provided no data or reasons, just general qualifications ("not sustainable", "clearly not the answer"). If there is no meaningful data from the program, people who dislike the idea of the UBI can keep on arguing about how it's bad and how it will be the end of productive society safely, based on abstract reasoning and FUD. Governments (left and right) do this all the time, they cut short test programs (for whatever) they don't like, since their ideological preferences are more important to them that practical results.

Re: what did you expect

[hazardPPP]

That has always been my point. I don't see how you can test a UBI on a subset of the population. Of course I may very well lack the in-depth knowledge on how this thing is supposed to work, I'll grant you that any day...

This is an important point and the reason why most UBI experiements to-date have been flawed. It's not the same when a subset of the population receives the money and when everyone receives the money. Sure, you can study individual motivations and effects, but you cannot see the potential large-scale changes in the economy (or lack thereof...). Maybe, it could work if you picked a fairly remote region with a stable population (little migration in and out). Some remote part of Scandinavia or Canada, or some Pacific island nation or territory. Perhaps an inward-looking and small third-world country.

I think to really know whether the UBI does what the proponents says it would, you have to have it for everyone that shares the same borders and general tax code.

You might get away with switching a whole state in a federation like the US or Switzerland. However, a very real concern is the influx of people from outside who want nothing but free money. So we're back at controllable borders. Which, come to think of it, makes Switzerland unviable what with free migration in the EU and all that.

To me at first, immigration was also the biggest problem with UBI: won't people just arrive en masse to get free money? Even if every place on Earth had a UBI, it would be different in different places, so won't people "shop around" to get the best UBI/cost of living ratio?

However, when I thought more about it, I concluded this is not a difficult thing to solve: just like with other government services, you would have to qualify via a citizenship and residence requirement. For example, Ontario gives you "free" health care, but not everyone that happens to be in Ontario at a given time gets it: you have to live in the province legally (as a citizen or non-citizen permanent resident) for a certain time (I think it's 6 months). If you're away for more than that time, you lose access to the health system (for "free"). UBI could work in a similar manner: for example, it would be available only to citizens. This doesn't even require controllable borders, just controlling who you make a citizen. How quickly an immigrant would be able to collect UBI would depend on how quickly he can become a citizen (in Switzerland, for example, it takes about 10 years).

Re:what did you expect

[layabout]

governments don't print money, they issue bonds which are bought by bankers. bankers create money out of thin air by adding another line in their ledger.

Re:what did you expect

[cascadingstylesheet]

2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do

Um, what?

1. This is Canada.

2. "Progressive" "conservatives"

Re:what did you expect

[registrations_suck]

Sure, but you can't run a cheap prison in a civilzed country.

Oh, sure you can. Just treat prisoners as prisoners instead of hotel guests and college students.

Re:what did you expect

[sinij]

Sure, some people do belong in jail. This doesn't mean that everyone who is currently in jail belong there. This is especially true for US, that has massive incarceration numbers.

Re:what did you expect

[MrMr]

The problem is the gap between the UBI support level and the lowest wage for a job, not the highest. Around here we had long term support that was about 20% below the lowest wages. In practice many people turned out to prefer 365 days of paid vacation for that price.

Re:what did you expect

[JackieBrown]

Are public prisons in the US cheaper to run and safer?

Re: what did you expect

[JackieBrown]

Then it's good it was canceled, right? Doesn't keeping it just warp how "great" UBI is?

Re:what did you expect

[sjames]

After saying pre-election that they wouldn't.

Re:what did you expect

[king neckbeard]

So, you trust the word of the government on its face?

Re:what did you expect

[wardrich86]

Which really shouldn't have come as a surprise to anybody... I'm still not sure how he managed to win the election. The guy was so full of shit that my TV smelled every time he opened his mouth on camera.

Re:what did you expect

[LynnwoodRooster]

No, what I'm saying is how to rationalize higher costs to provide 3 meals and 3 square meters to a person, rather than living income outside prison? Cafeteria food is considerably cheaper to make than individual meals (scale of economies) - it's why buffets can earn a profit at $8/person, all you can eat.

Re:what did you expect

[HornWumpus]

Only if you shot them at graduation. Lawyers are a huge social liability.

Re:what did you expect

[iggymanz]

sure, no real world country has 0%

However, there are places with better economies, even higher average income, than the USA with much lower unemployment rate.

Once you throw free money at unemployed, those people become part of the "illiquidity" of which you are so fearful, the same as employed. You're destroying liquidity.

Spouting your econ 101 book without understanding or common sense is what you and other person are doing. You learned a little thing and imagine yourself an expert.

Re:what did you expect

[layabout]

2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do

Um, what?

1. This is Canada.

They still have mean spirited conservative politicians

2. "Progressive" "conservatives"

oxymoron??? google's description leads me to believe they are likely mean spirited..

Re:what did you expect

[Zaelath]

Yeah, but that long term support is like this pretend UBI; it punishes you for getting "some" work.

If you tell someone you'll give them $330/week but take 50c back of every dollar they earn, that looks like a 50% effective tax rate. If you want long term unemployed, that's how you get long term unemployed. Plus these weekly earnings systems always have massive holes in them for people that can get lumpy payments; "oh yeah, I earned $50,000 this week from the sale of the flipper house I've been renovating with my brother. I guess I don't get this week's $330..."

If however you give them the $330 unconditionally, but they have to do some weekly paperwork to get it, by the time they're making $660 a week a lot of them wouldn't bother to do the paperwork or feel it was beneath them.

Re:what did you expect

[Mashiki]

There isn't enough tax revenue. Ontario is broke, absolutely 100% broke, so broke it looks like Greece before their debt crash and I'm not even joking. Nearly 10% of the provinces income is spent on interest payments, and that's right now.

The previous government did everything they could to push industry jobs out(we've lost nearly 350k industry jobs in the last 5 years alone). That's well paying jobs where the average wage was north of $67k/year. This isn't FUD, the previous auditor general under the Liberal Party of Ontario said exactly the same thing, not only that but she ripped them a new asshole and explicitly stated that the entire UBI scheme was an attempt at vote buying, and the money would have been better off fixing the issues with disability and workmans compensation.

FYI: The average person on disability in Ontario gets $9200/year. That's YEAR not month, and that's all you fucking get.

Re:what did you expect

[Mashiki]

Did you read the last auditor general's report? The AG was a liberal appointee. She openly blasted the UBI plan as vote buying.

Re: what did you expect

[Kokuyo]

No shit, Sherlock... However, there's Schengen...

Clearly not the answer?

[Target Drone]

"clearly not the answer for Ontario families."

Except it isn't clear that this isn't the answer. That's why this was a pilot project in the first place. Ontario should just spend the money (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget) and prove whether this works or not. If it fails then move on and try something else.

... Unless of course you don't care if UBI works or not you just oppose it on philosophical grounds. Then the best thing to do is cancel the pilot.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[Target Drone]

I find it a little suspicious that an account with a 7 digit UID that has never posted a comment before suddenly posts 3 comments in this story. Sorry, but it makes you come across as a shill. If you're a legit new user try spreading your comments around particularly in less politically active discussions.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[bistromath007]

You would be part of the "people" getting something for nothing. You, and all the thousands of others like you, who all say the same shit. All you people who hate UBI would be getting UBI. It very easily does much more good for you than it does the people who actually need it to stay alive. People like you, who enjoy doing things, would have an ample safety net to try to make your own businesses, pursue higher education, or just take the vacation you know damn well you've earned ten times over that your employer constantly dicks you out of. You could have that, but you don't want it, because some people who don't have jobs would use it to buy a pot to piss in. Please try to convince me this isn't total jerk bullshit.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? What would the point of a shill be on /.? It's one of the various trash sites around that has 0 influence full of opinionated people who think they know better than everyone else already. You're a classic example of why the general public elects idiots. You just cant even notice your own illogical conclusions.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[boulat]

Small people are greedy and incapable of thinking beyond their own condition.

You don't deserve to live in a society that has UBI, universal coverage, and all the best kind of perks that life has to offer, because you are selfish, greedy, and small.

And people that offer you this option are entirely too generous and willing to actually work even if some people will benefit without putting in any effort.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[loonycyborg]

In a practical society there is insane amount of giving something for nothing. In fact, commercial transactions are an exception rather than rule, and merely take own niche. Only thing that differs between UBI and current social wellfare is that government requires lots of red tape before getting to actual payments. UBI merely is removing this red tape saving money for everyone. So basically you're opposing any form of social wellfare. And this is really not a future proof way of going forward. Even if social wellfare is abolished, people still be able to give money for nothing. In practice it will lead to clan based societies, because most of free stuff will be given from parent to child. So you could get screwed simply by being born in bad family. And people from good families won't have much incentive either. Because their future is secured no matter what. They already have their UBI. Only way is to extend that UBI to everyone, because otherwise the cross-section of people who have a chance to become a contributor to society will be too small and will be getting smaller with time leading to decadence and civil wars.

Re:Clearly not the answer?

[thegarbz]

Ontario should just spend the money (which is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall budget) and prove whether this works or not.

No. Personally I think it's good they killed it early. But let us advertise the correct reason for why this was good. We want to see a trial of UBI, what was happening was a trial of I.

a) It was means tested and adjusted based on income, therefore not Universal.
b) It was graded with different rates based on conditions, therefore not Basic.

There's no point in testing if UBI works by running a trial that isn't UBI in the first place.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Said by some one who can't do math. Do the math. It just doesn't add up. It requires at least 3 time the current TOTAL taxation just to cover UBI at the rates paid in this pilot program. Every time I present the numbers people start arguing about everything but the funding. How will this be funded is the question otherwise it would be the same as printing $1million for everyone and just handing it out.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[hazardPPP]

I'm not convinced such a short and limited test would prove anything about UBI. Personally I oppose it on principle and am glad they cancelled it. I don't believe in giving people something for nothing. And it's not the cost of social programs which will bury this society, it's our massive healthcare system that will do it. So yeah..nobody wants to discuss the huge elephant in the room. They wanna throw free money at people who don't wanna put in anything but the absolute minimum effort in life. I don't think this results in a positive outcome for our society.

"Something for nothing" is a very malleable term. I'm sure we can find lots of cases where you, for example, received something for nothing. Ever got a birthday gift from someone? Isn't that something for nothing (why is the date of your birth special and deserving of gifts?)? OK, you can easily rationalize saying that people who give you birthday presents expect something in return (even if they are not consciously aware of it, or deny it). Is giving to charity "something for nothing"? Or maybe the charity-giver gets something out of it (feeling better about himself, or morally superior to others)? Similarly however we can come with rationalizations why giving people a UBI is not "something for nothing". So this is a slippery slope which philosophically and empirically, is not very well defined.

Furthermore, in any society which has decided that letting people starve on the street is not acceptable (and this is the case with basically all Western countries), you will have some amount of people leeching off of others, either via government assistance or voluntary charity. Some will do this legitimately (as they are objectively unable to work, e.g. they have a disability) while others will be lazy bums of the type you despise. However, history shows that they will always be there (no amount of government bureaucraucy, incentives etc. will eliminate them), but also, that they are generally a tiny minority. Since society has generally decided that it's more humane to bear these people rather than to execute them (according to legend, this is how Vlad Dracula solved the homeless and beggar problem in his time), they'll be around - in any system, UBI or not.

Finally, you seem to assume that anyone on any kind of social assistance is some kind of lazy bum. Many people at "the bottom of society" so to speak are hard-working, and ambitious, and put in a lot of effort, but just don't get the reward. Often, it's just bad luck. Luck is a lot more important than people are willing to admit (because it lessens the value of their own achievements in their eyes), but often, shit is just random or beyond a person's control. Other times, people are trying but just not good enough. So who is more "morally worthy" then, the genius making a million a year due to his natural talent, with very little effort, or the not-so-bright person struggling to make ends meet despite garguantuan efforts on his part? It's not like incomes in the economy reward only effort - far from it.

Re: Clearly not the answer?

[king neckbeard]

The funding of UBI is simple. It basically amounts to moving everyone closer to the mean income. People below the mean pay less than the UBI in relevant taxes, and people above the mean pay more.

It didn't work because you wanted it to fail.

[bistromath007]

What you did is not a basic income. It's a garden-variety welfare program, with all the stupid overhead that comes with it, that you called a basic income. This way you can point to this bad joke and use it to discredit anyone actually advocating a basic income. You are deceitful garbage and I hope one day a mob of homeless push you into the sea.

Re:It didn't work because you wanted it to fail.

[themusicgod1]

Which is exactly why Ontario screwed up. They *didn't* implement a universal basic income, and didn't seem capable of pulling it off even if the funding was available. They had a hell of a time signing enough people to take their handout money, and even when that was going on were busy trying to invite people who were long dead to take part. Turns out no one, or at least not the feds, knows who lives in Thunder Bay.

Re:It didn't work because you wanted it to fail.

[lazarus]

Don't go recruiting your mob of homeless people just yet. Your anger is directed at a minister who just walked into the job, and she is killing a project that you disagree with. Perhaps you should let her live.

Re:It didn't work because you wanted it to fail.

[thesupraman]

Exactly, this was not even distantly related to UBI, it was simply being labeled that for political reasons.

Re:It didn't work because you wanted it to fail.

[bistromath007]

No, the homeless people definitely need to get moving. I just need to figure out who the actual architect of this huge scam was and send them that way instead.

minus half of any income he or she earned.

[quenda]

Doesn't "minus half of any income he or she earned" replicate the biggest problem with existing welfare programs, and defeat any purpose of the trial?
This is not basic income.

50% marginal tax rate for a minimum-wage worker is a massive disincentive for formal work.
It is a huge incentive for cash-in-hand work. Or for using your time for non-taxable work.
Minimum wage in Ontario is only $14/hour, so this drops it to $7.

Do you work for $7/hr, or use that time to find clothes in thrift stores, do all your own repairs and maintenance, etc. ?
You can save a lot of money buying quality second hand goods, and DIY, at the expense of time.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[ahodgson]

No. Existing welfare systems actually cause you to get less money if you work, either by completely killing income or getting rid of other benefits like free dental / vision / childcare / all the other things we do for people on welfare. Getting to keep half of what you make on top of the UBI means it's actually worthwhile to work, at least up to a certain point where it would make more sense to get off the welfare completely.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[bistromath007]

If it's UBI, there is no reason to get off it ever because it's UNIVERSAL.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[bistromath007]

As somebody who has both worked at McDonald's and had real jobs and been on disability, I can tell you that while I'd really love to be able to keep a real job in the long term, I will absolutely take a meager living for nothing over making slightly more to work some entry-level unskilled horseshit. No human being should have to do that kind of thing just to buy food.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[bistromath007]

Since I can't edit, I'll add it here: that UBI is problematically inflationary has not been established. Accepting it on a theoretical basis only works for a naive approach to the topic. There are several confounding factors; the greatly increased overall productivity of society through automation, the fact that most people want to use part of their life to make other peoples' lives better, the fact that people whose basic needs are met can spend whatever extra cash they do get on frivolities. All of these contribute to an understanding of UBI as recycling income, rather than creating it.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[bistromath007]

The money in a fiat currency system ultimately comes from production. What happens when you take a whole lot of humans out of the production loop? The money is still there. UBI suggests that everybody should get some, instead of just the people who built the robots.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[bistromath007]

You have completely misinterpreted what I mean by "taking people out of the production loop." I am talking about producing the same or a higher amount of shit with less people. That is what is happening, and more of it will happen.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're lucky in Quebec. You can stay on welfare with a job. You'll keep dental, vision and childcare coverage even if you do enough to be off the system. The only prerequisite is to have an unstable income and to drop under their max allowed income from time to time (less than once a year if the job have an history of unstable income, like a taxi driver in a small town).

So here, you can and should go work as much as you want/can. This will improve your situation. And will give you access to other programs at the federal level that require you to have access to employment insurance.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[king neckbeard]

Yeah, the real confounding variable that might actually screw things up is that our current society depends upon certain lousy jobs that have lousy pay, and those jobs could not be filled at current rates by workers who aren't desperate.

Keep in mind, though, that the shift would actually be to what would be more "correct" costs, but the transition might be painful.

Re: minus half of any income he or she earned.

[king neckbeard]

Productivity growth is absolutely due largely to automation.

As for labor, you've kind of got things backwards, dirt cheap labor is letting us undervalue human time, which is holding up the growth of automation and freedom from the need to work.

50% income tax

[l2718]

Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.

Re:50% income tax

[bistromath007]

Oh what the fuck. That's exactly the "deal" I get from being on disability. Spoiler alert: until just a few months ago, I never even tried to work for more than decade because that system is such garbage. And now that I am working, the SSA isn't accepting my attempts to report that income, so I'm scared I'm going to have my whole ass stolen from me.

Re:50% income tax

[bistromath007]

You need to work on your reading comprehension, dude. I'm not complaining about getting the money. I'm complaining about the structure of the program disincentivizing me doing the amount of work that I can. I want to work. Until very recently, I've been afraid to, because if I were unable to keep the job for whatever reason, it would cause catastrophic hardship for me for at least several months afterward. A few months ago, I ran into troubles that left me with no choice in the matter, and as a direct result I am facing imminent catastrophic hardship due to bureaucratic error.

Can you get this through your skull? I want to be useful. I want to be closer to self-sufficiency, and to pay back into the system which has graciously allowed me to live in frightening poverty for the past decade, because I genuinely do see how good that is compared to not eating or sleeping inside. The problem is that the way the program works is completely idiotic, seemingly designed to keep people with problems exactly where they are. I haven't been avoiding work because it's hard, I've been avoiding it because it's not worth the risk. That risk is now manifesting itself before me, even worse than I predicted. This system is shit.

Re:50% income tax

[l2718]

One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.

That you receive a rotten deal doesn't mean others should also

.

Re:50% income tax

[bistromath007]

You don't need to convince me, I'm a UBI advocate. What I've been pissed off about is that this bullshit in Ontario isn't UBI.

Re:50% income tax

[Anonymous Coward]

bistromath007 If you're in the US look up expedited reinstatement. I did the work, relapse dance and got it all restarted in under 45 days

Re:50% income tax

[bistromath007]

Yeah, I'm on top of shit. I haven't actually received a letter alleging overpayment yet, so step one of this dumbass process hasn't even fired off. I'm just, you know, a bit peeved that my attempts to report my earnings have all apparently fallen behind somebody's desk.

Re:50% income tax

[bistromath007]

I knew that was the point

it was also my point

really confused about how people got confused about this

Re:50% income tax

[Jack9]

> That defeats the point of the whole programme.

That's just one approach and it's does not "defeat the point", since it's a general solution to multiple problems. There is no single point.
I would go so far as to say the program was pointlessly generous.

You have an income and working should reduce it 1:1, if you choose to do so. This would have a double effect of setting a minimum wage that any employer would have to exceed to retain employees. The experiment had problems, but that particular tradeoff was just a characteristic of the experiment.

Re:50% income tax

[quantaman]

Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.

Alternately, the tax would significantly reduce the cost of the program, allowing you to give more help to the people who can't work full time. And the disincentive of the 50% tax might not be as significant as you think, they're still making more money by working, just not as much as they would have otherwise.

One of the beauties of a pilot project is you actually get some real data to test your assumptions. Everyone has talked about this pure form of the basic income until now but it's all just theory, maybe this design is the one that works better in practise.

Re:50% income tax

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

on welfare, if you make money, you lose welfare entirely. This is actually substantially better than current programs. but yeah 50% *income tax* is still stupid for people in near poverty.

Re:50% income tax

[Kjella]

One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.

If you make money then you pay income taxes also after UBI, what they label it doesn't matter so I don't see the problem. A 50% income tax is not a perverse incentive. A perverse incentive is if by working more you could end up earning less because you get bumped to a different tax bracket, lose eligibility for various programs or the ability to go back on benefits if your income falls again. This could for example be that you earn more but lose subsidized housing, food stamps, tuition waivers, medicare etc. or that a short burst of work make you lose disability benefits, unemployment benefits that you don't automatically regain afterwards. Arguably if your own expenses for transport, child care etc. exceed your income that too could be a perverse incentive. But as long as you're making any money at all it's incentive and not disincentive to work.

Re:50% income tax

[king neckbeard]

The issue is that you reach the break-even point quite a bit before reaching the per capita income.

UBI would be accompanied by higher taxes, but this is putting too high a tax burden on too low of an income level.

It's Expensive..?

[whoda]

Who thought just handing out money was cheap?

What about the data?

[king neckbeard]

I think it's more constructive to have the data ourselves, so it can be assessed independently. A politician may define success very differently than we would, and I'd prefer my own judgment.

Re:What about the data?

[CanadianMacFan]

There isn't much data to release. The first payments started last October and the last participants started just a couple of months ago. It was supposed to last a couple (2 or 3) years so anything collected is pretty much worthless. You have at most 9 months of data on part of the sample. Even that is tainted because they were making plans and spending based on the original time. They would have behaved differently if they knew it was going to end now.

Re:What about the data?

[king neckbeard]

Granted, there isn't much data. But the fact that someone ideologically opposed to it ended it when the obtained power suggests that the data itself might be quite promising.

Re:What about the data?

[CanadianMacFan]

The Ford government has been busy in it's first few weeks taking the axe to things that it (or Ford) doesn't like.
- First to get the chop was a program to subsidize clean energy, home renovations to make them more efficient.
- They reverted the sex-ed program that was introduced in the past couple years to the previous 20 year old one because the new one had things in they didn't want children exposed to.
- They are wanting to cut the number of city councillors for Toronto (the provincial capital and largest city in the province).

I believe that cutting the basic income project is just another idealogical cut and nothing to do with any data that may have been collected. I wouldn't be surprised to see many more programs cut because of ideology or just because the previous government started them.

Re:What about the data?

[Mashiki]

You mean ideological programs that the liberals put into place? The first was to chop the program called a "carbon tax" that drove the price of energy up. The second was reverting a sex-ed program that was mainly developed by a pedophile who fucked little kids, forced little kids into sexual acts, and manufactured graphic child pornography. The third was cutting the number of city councilors to the same number of riding seats. Reminder that the number of councilors is determined BY the province.

You can believe whatever you want, but if you live in Ontario then you already know we spend 10% of our budget on interest payments for that $340B of debt that's crushing us, just like it crushed greece.

Re:What about the data?

[CanadianMacFan]

And now Ford setting up his little propaganda "Ontario News Now" social media news site because the journalists aren't covering him like he wants them to. Ontario needed a smart leader to get us out of the mess the previous government got us into. We got a Trump wanna be instead.

They realised..

[thesupraman]

Translation:

'We realised that UBI reduces governments ability to grow its control over peoples lives, grow is bureaucracy, and make small changes every electoral round therefore trumpeting how we have fixed everything this time. With this in mind we have dropped this like a hot potato, because its not best for US'

Totalitarianist governments, left and right, HATE UBI because it reduces their power, hence it will never happen.

Re:They realised..

[Pfhorrest]

Or, you know, give everyone $1000/mo and tax the average (mean) person that much back, and everyone else proportional to their relationship to the mean. So poor people keep more than they pay and rich people vice versa.

Re:They realised..

[Pfhorrest]

A flat tax plus a UBI creates an automatic progressive tax curve, so you wouldn't be raising the tax to fund the UBI on the normal tax curve.

If you want to give everyone $1000/mo, calculate what is $1000/mo divided by the mean income. Fund that UBI by taxing everyone that resulting fraction of their income, flat, everyone pays the same percent. If you do that, people making the mean income pay nothing and get nothing in net; everyone below the mean income benefits some in net (the more the further below the mean their income); and everyone above the mean costs some (the more the further above the mean you are). In the US, around 75% of people make below the mean income, because of how incomes are right-skewed, and the bulk of the 25% above it don't make very much above it, so an UBI funded this way benefits more than a supermajority of people, and costs most of the remainder fairly little. Because the vast majority of wealth is held by a tiny tiny fraction of the populace, who are the ones who drag the mean so far above the median (creating that skew), and so are the ones most affected by it.

Re:They realised..

[The Cynical Critic]

More likely it was "The program didn't have the intended effect of getting more people on benefits to take on part time work or start their own businesses, so we shut it down" or something along those lines.

I'm not completely familiar with the Canadian trial, but the heavily publicized one here in Finland really has the primary goal of improving employment rates by removing barriers for people on benefits from participating in the labor force. Normally people on benefits who try to work have to worry about earning too much to get benefits, but not enough to actually pay the bills and will hence reject job offers for part time work on those grounds. Some even reject applications for full time work on the grounds of said work not brining in enough additional money compared to just being on benefits.

The main complaint about particularly the Finnish UBI program is that it removes the requirement to show that you're actively looking for a job and thus people will just try to live on it with no intention of actually getting a job, full or part time, hence achieving the exact opposite of what was intended. It's not even that far fetched when you already have people who work very hard to game the system by actively sabotaging their job seeking with things like sending in intentionally bad applications or intentionally failing job interviews. Hell, even the guy who's basically become the public face of the Finnish program and been interviewed by dozens of foreign media outlets went from pretending to look for work to just happily living on it with no will whatsoever to look for a job.

Re:They realised..

[barc0001]

>'We realised that UBI reduces governments ability to grow its control over peoples lives, grow is bureaucracy, and make small changes every electoral round therefore trumpeting how we have fixed everything this time. With this in mind we have dropped this like a hot potato, because its not best for US'

Oh, you're giving the Ford government too much credit for nuanced thinking. Doug Ford is a regressive, pure and simple. Anything that "gives money away" is bad in his eyes and will be seen as something to be cut. He's like a slightly more intelligent Trump and will probably do as much damage to Ontario before he's gone as Trump is doing down south to the US economy.

Re:They realised..

[tbannist]

No, you can say many things about Doug Ford but he's definitely not a Totalitarian. He's closer to a small government conservative. He ordered the program cut because it was doing the unthinkable, it was giving money to poor people and it appears that it was actually working.

It had to be shut down before it produced conclusive results that the new Ontario Progressive Conservative government would have to cover up because it doesn't fit into their preferred narrative that the government can never help anybody for any reason.

Re:They realised..

[swillden]

Put some numbers to it. Mean per capita income in 2017 was $50,392. So to fund a $12K per year UBI you have to add a 24% flat tax (ideally you should be able to offset that by cutting the progressive tax because of the other welfare programs you can cut, but let's ignore that -- particularly because this program wouldn't replace all of them.).

Assuming two-adult households, no UBI for kids, and no change to earnings (which would not be true, see below), here are some numbers for pre-UBI income and net UBI income (income plus UBI less UBI taxes).

$0 -- $24K
$10K -- $32K
$20K -- $40K
$30K -- $47K
$40K -- $54K
$50K -- $62K
$60K -- $70K
$80K -- $85K
$90K -- $93K
$100K -- $100K
$110K -- $107K
$120K -- $115K
$150K -- $138K
$180K -- $161K
$200K -- $176K
$250K -- $214K
$300K -- $253K
$400K -- $329K
$500K -- $405K
$800K -- $633K
$1M -- $786K
$2M -- $1.55M
$3M -- $2.3M
$5M -- $3.8M
$10M -- $7.6M
$20M -- $15M
$50M -- $38M

Not bad. Of course, the big wildcard is the assumption that people stick with their current jobs / incomes. We don't really know what would happen there.

We're probably safe to assume that in the short term some people would stop working and live on their UBI while they go to school to move themselves up the income ladder. Others might quit their current jobs and start businesses. It seems likely that there would be some changes at the bottom of the pay scales (I'm assuming that the minimum wage would be abolished with enactment of a UBI) as employers might be able to pay less because their employees would need less... but maybe not too much less because employees would feel more freedom to walk away from jobs they dislike.

Some percentage of the low-income population might well decide that the UBI is enough for them and just choose not to work any more. I don't think this group would be large, but we can't really know.

Assuming UBI is not available to unemancipated teens, it would have some interesting effects on teen employment, since young adults eligible for UBI would in many cases be willing to work for less than ineligible teens. I assume teens would still be paying the UBI tax.

We really need some large-scale, long-term UBI tests to find out how people really respond, what decisions they make. And these tests need to be performed in different areas, in different cultures, because there's no reason to believe that every culture will react the same.

Re:They realised..

[wisnoskij]

You are wildly switching terminology when those terms means wildly different things.
Wealth != Income.

As a farmer, I am a millionaire on paper in WEALTH, while I live on less than minimum wage INCOME. It is literally impossible to tax my wealth without just repossessing it and taking away my ability to make any income at all.

Other millionaires and billionaires are not much better. They own companies and investments assets which have million dollar and billion dollar evaluations, hold 60%-80% of that those evaluations in debt, and draw 1%-.01% of that wealth as a salary. Companies generate huge wealth on paper, but in reality take 99% of that wealth to pay their employees. They are only viable by a few percentage points of profit. It does not matter how huge and profitable the business is, Mcdonalds, Amazon, etc when you start taking away even 1% you make it completely unsustainable.

Also our democracy has protections built into to protect the minority from being subjugated by the majority. Just because you can outvote a group, does not give you unlimited power over them.

Re:They realised..

[TheCycoONE]

It's worth noting that this pilot was not UBI; there was a means test for getting the money, and the amount of money received directly corresponded to income. It was basically a welfare reform pilot using the hot trendy words of the day: https://www.ontario.ca/page/on...

Also it was killed because there was an election, a different party got in, and said different party has been killing every program the previous government instituted on principal.

Re:They realised..

[king neckbeard]

The money is going to be coming from the top, where it is disproportionately allocated. The overall trend is that median income will come closer to mean income.

Re:They realised..

[dryeo]

OTOH, there was the Mincome experiment back in the '70's, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which was pretty successful. Basically the only ones who stopped working were mothers of young children and teenagers who stayed in school.
It also ended when the government changed to the right, which is always going to be a problem.

Re:They realised..

[dryeo]

Also it was killed because there was an election, a different party got in, and said different party has been killing every program the previous government instituted on principal.

This is always going to be the problem with UBI programs, especially today where a change in government seems to mean making a 180 degree change in direction.

Re:They realised..

[Pfhorrest]

Your point is true, but beside my point. I meant only to speak of income and what I said is true of income: “wealth “ waa just misspeaking. Nothing I suggested would takke land from farmers or anything like that.

Re:They realised..

[Train0987]

What happens after you've taken all the money from those at the top?

Re:They realised..

[king neckbeard]

Then you'll presumably have a GINI coefficient of 0. Not that this would be at all relevant to the conversation, since that scenario would require an existing infrastructure where the GINI coefficient is 1. Although I'm sure you do think in such binary terms, that scenario doesn't exist in reality.

Re: They realised..

[datavirtue]

China is working on this very thing. We should pay attention to their burgeoning survaillence state and how they use it.

Re:They realised..

[bondsbw]

You wouldn't.

Re:They realised..

[Pfhorrest]

Under my proposal that can never happen, because the closer the top gets to the middle, the less the effect it has on those on the top. It basically puts a center-ward pressure on all incomes, in proportion to their distance from the income. As incomes get more disproportionately distributed, it automatically pushes harder; as they get more evenly distributed, it automatically pushes less. If incomes were naturally distributed fairly evenly, my proposal would have very little effect on anyone at all.

Re:They realised..

[j-beda]

More likely it was "The program didn't have the intended effect of getting more people on benefits to take on part time work or start their own businesses, so we shut it down" or something along those lines.

That at least would make some sense. But if you were a "making sense" type of person you would probably not kill a pilot program that only had about 4,000 participants only a year and a bit into its three year scheduled trial, because then you wouldn't really be able to draw very reliable conclusions about the actual impact of the program.

Killing the program at this point seems more like: "We are philosophically opposed to the entire notion and we don't have any interest in the potential that the results of the trial might be counter to our expectations, thus it is a waste of resources."

I personally was not very fond of the Ontario program, as it did not really seem to me like a very good trail of a basic income system, but it does seem pretty stupid to kill it off before we could get useful info from it.

The fact that all the Ontario political parties said they would finish the trial when it was first implemented, and that the winner of the recent election pledged to keep the pilot running during the election makes this decision a little extra irritating. Saying "we are going to kill this program and our new program will be great" rather than waiting until the new program was read to be released also seems a bit wonky.

This article from February https://www.thestar.com/news/g... seems mostly positive, but really one can't draw any strong conclusions until all the data is in.

UBI is NOT a cashless society. ffs.

[thesupraman]

WTF does this have to do with a cashless society, and why are you bothering to comment when so very uninformed?
This was not even UBI, but UBI has exactly zero to do with a cashless society.

I suggest you go back to step one, and perhaps learn just a very few very basic facts about subjects you want to discuss with adults. It will help.

Re:UBI OK if no voting and reproduction rights

[bistromath007]

UBI is an increasingly reasonable option because we live in an increasingly automated world. By 2030 at the latest, around 90% of people will be completely useless compared to a robot. We can either let them starve and make some of the robots into "riot control" units, or we can feed them and let them smoke weed, play videogames, take up woodcarving, fuck, learn geometry, or whatever other kind of shit they like.

Re: Unemployment is very low

[presidenteloco]

Ever heard of a "dead cat bounce"?
That's what we're in right now regarding employment numbers.

Pretty soon, the AI and automation are going to be more cost-effective than people at many jobs, way more types of jobs than can be replaced by new jobs. What new jobs there will be will be for cognitive top 5% geniuses.

Other jobs which can't be totally replaced will be modified to be hybrid AI/automation + person jobs. The person will probably get paid less than now, since they're only doing part of the work. Many jobs like that will be modified slightly to be more amenable to AI/automation integration.

If you don't see that this time it's different, because the AI and automated systems are approaching/surpassing parity with human capabilities, then you have blinders on, and you live on a river called denial.

Re: The labor market is ever present

[presidenteloco]

No. The market for "physical manipulation capability, physical skills, and cognitive capability" is ever present.
What I have in quotes sounds a lot like labor, but is more general than human labor.

That market is increasingly being supplied by AI and/or complex, flexible automation, and the pace of that change will be faster than linear, as the technology continues to improve rapidly and cover more of the "labor" pie.

Also, easy to support

[Okian Warrior]

This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.

The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000.

This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend. And they would get another one next year. If you restrict it to adults, that figure goes up by another third.

The rise appears to be exponential, with the "doubling time" roughly 16 years, more or less depending on the growth rate of the economy in past decades. You can easily see this in the Google chart by tracking down to half the current amount (1995), half that amount (1981), and so on.

A few moments though should convince you that exponential rise is the expected outcome - increases in productivity tend to beget more increases in productivity.

For a sense of the time periods involved, note that the US has about 4% of the world population, so if the per person GDP continues to rise as shown, the US will be able to supply the world population with twice that amount in four doublings, or 64 years from now.

Also: other countries are on this same curve and are not accounted for.

By the end of this century we will be at the utopian ideal seen in many science fiction novels, and kids today will live to see it.

...if that wealth can be equally distributed.

As mentioned, we could distribute $58,000 to everyone in the country today, or we could wait 16 years (one doubling) and distribute $58,000 to everyone and still be on that exponential curve.

At some point we will simply have so much wealth and so few jobs that it makes sense to reinvent our economy to compensate.

UBI seems inevitable.

(*) I realize the OP is talking about Canada, but US is the info I have at hand. It should be the same there as here.

Re:Also, easy to support

[bistromath007]

The reason we have all that production, and the reason it will continue to double, is automation. Robots don't need incentives.

That aside, why are people convinced that humans need incentives? Most of them really like doing things. UBI is meant to solve the problem of having more people that want to do things than there are things to do.

Re:Also, easy to support

[kenh]

The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000 [google.com].

This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend.

Do you have any idea how stupid this sounds?

You imagine, as a single example, that LeBron James will do what he does for $58K/yr, just like thetwenty-something kid who claims he can't work and gets an identical $58K/yr?

Will Apple engineers work for the exact same wages as the barista in the company coffee shop?

UBI doesn't scale to everyone, because for the government to give 320 million people $58,000/yr will cost $18.56TN/yr, about 4x the current federal budget.

Re:Also, easy to support

[serviscope_minor]

UBI doesn't scale to everyone

Yes it doesn't, you have misunderstood how it works.

You don't take tht exact system you have now and give an extra $58,000 to everyone.

What you do is give $something to everyone, remove most benefits (generally excludig medical) and then bump up taxes. The median person sees no change in net income.

Re:Also, easy to support

[werepants]

Do you have any idea how stupid this sounds?

You imagine, as a single example, that LeBron James will do what he does for $58K/yr, just like thetwenty-something kid who claims he can't work and gets an identical $58K/yr?

Will Apple engineers work for the exact same wages as the barista in the company coffee shop?

You picked some kind of bad examples. Being great at anything, be it basketball or engineering, means that you are passionate about it. Being able to hold a top role in the field is a reward all its own, so I think even if the compensation was considerably less for basketball players as a whole, LeBron would still be playing. And many engineers would continue to be engineers even if they weren't as well compensated. For me, personally, if money was no object, I might work on different projects, or I might teach some engineering courses, but I sure as hell would continue writing software and designing things, as evidenced by the fact that I (and many engineers I know) spend free time doing just that already.

Overall, though, I don't think the OP's point was that we should lower salaries to $58k - it was to explain just how much wealth is present in our society. We can make sure that nobody earns less than $12k, and still have tons of money left.

Re:Also, easy to support

[JackieBrown]

That aside, why are people convinced that humans need incentives?.

Maybe because we keep hearing that we need to have open borders because we need those people to do the jobs we won't do? Even though we used to do them when they actually paid well

Re:Also, easy to support

[JackieBrown]

Do you also force freeze prices on all goods and services (including property taxes)?

Because once everyone has a base 58,000 then exactly what do you think will happen to prices.

The median person sees no change in net income.

This is unfortunately true. Yet their buying power has been drastically reduced.

Re:Also, easy to support

[king neckbeard]

Because of Calvinist brainwashing. Not working = sin.

Re:Also, easy to support

[Pfhorrest]

This line of argument seems to presume that more equal income distribution, whatever the cause, causes price inflation, which is bad for everyone. That consequently implies that greater income inequality leads to price deflation that somehow benefits everyone. The logical conclusion of this line of argument would be that one person having all the income and everyone else having none would reduce the price of everything to near zero -- which, yeah, it largely would, because nobody would be able to buy anything for more than that -- and that that would somehow be to everyone's benefit, despite that nobody would have the money with which to buy the cheap shit, except the one person who has all the income.

We're not talking about adding more money to the economy. Nobody is printing $58k/person in new bills. Money headed for the top is being redirected to the bottom instead. People around the middle are unaffected. Prices will likely go up, sure, but for everyone below the mean -- which is a supermajority of people, because of income distribution right-skew -- their income increases faster than the prices, resulting in greater net buying power. People above the mean will see their costs go up some, sure. Just like the one guy with all the money in the extreme scenario above would pay more if other people had money and prices went up because of that. But the whole point of this is to help the poor at the expense of the rich, so what did you expect?

Re:Also, easy to support

[JackieBrown]

Did you read the post I replied to?

Re:Also, easy to support

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

You don't take tht exact system you have now and give an extra $58,000 to everyone. What you do is give $something to everyone, remove most benefits (generally excludig medical) and then bump up taxes.

And what do you do about the people who piss their UBI away on things other than food, clothing, shelter, etc. and then need to be supported?

Aren't you still going to have to provide those benefits?

Re:Results

[presidenteloco]

You must have missed the fact that the moron Trump-style conservatives of Ontario, who don't believe in science anyway, killed the program before any reliable assessment of it could be completed.

Today's ultra-conservatives would rather kill research, remember, than face its inconvenient truths.

Ford is a wannabe Trump

[farrellj]

Ultimately, Ford is a Trumpette, and he is going to make the poor pay for the sins of the rich. Gods help us!
As such, anything that helps the poor and disadvantaged, like safe injection sites, social housing, social and disabled assistance, are all going to be on the chopping block. And all his friends are going to make huge profits.

Universal Basic Income works better than just about any other system to help people in need, and get them back on their feet again. All of the current systems out there victimize the those in need before they get the assistance needed. It also encourages entrepreneurship as it allows people to quit substance jobs, and try to create ways to make money beyond such. Of course, Trumpettes don't like that because they lose control of the labour market...in fact, that is why Trump is so concerned about Mexicans. It's because he and his friends lose control of the labour market, and thus their control over people. It's enough to make one barf.

Re:Ford is a wannabe Trump

[Mashiki]

Ultimately Ford is a fiscal conservative and leans social libertarian. If you think he's a Trumpette then you're doing a fine job of regurgitating the NDP, and left-wing media's talking points. Safe injection sites don't help the poor, they hurt them, increase crime, and spill over into other neighborhoods. Ask BC how it's working out. 15 years of the Liberal Party of Ontario has left ALL of the social assistance programs broken. Gutting and cutting of disability. The average wait for low-income housing in most places is now 7 years. But keep going and telling everyone how it's all Ford's fault, not McGuinty or Wynne.

In Ontario, ODSP will cover a large part of your apprenticeship. If you're low income, ODSP will give you the money for training. UBI should be placed at two levels: People on disability, and for people who were fucked over by Workmans Comp. Oh, and in Ontario, workmans comp has fucked over tens-of-thousands of people under the Liberals leadership, including doctors who didn't see the injured workers but denied them anyway. Yeah the guy missing an arm and leg is gonna get right up and go back to work.

Re:Ford is a wannabe Trump

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultimately Ford is a fiscal conservative and leans social libertarian.

So what GP said: a Trumpette. "fiscal conservative and leans social libertarian" is an apt description of the basis of most Trump policies that could be compared to Ford (I mean, can't exactly compare's Trump's military policy and foreign policy to a provincial leader)

Or are you some kind of racist who thinks any mention to Trump is just a slur on the person's character and not his policies?

Safe injection sites don't help the poor, they hurt them, increase crime, and spill over into other neighborhoods.

I love how you accuse the other guy of spewing talking points, but these sound like talking points to me. Do you have any citations? A quick search landed me quite a few links saying the opposite.

https://www.themarshallproject...

https://torontosun.com/2016/07...

Ask BC how it's working out.

One of the first links from my searches: looks like they think it's great and wants to expand it
http://mynorthwest.com/869125/...

And it's not just BC that's been doing it. Rest of the world has been experimenting and researching the results.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

The Forbes article mentions that in absence of government action, private groups are trying safe injection sites themselves. Read: the idea isn't some from big bad government top down, there's a grass roots free market movement for it - so I think a social libertarian like Ford would approve.

But keep going and telling everyone how it's all Ford's fault, not McGuinty or Wynne.

I don't see GP blaming Ford for what happened (the past). He's saying what will happen under Ford (the future). I don't know if his accusation/prediction will be true, but I see no relevance in the rest of your post rambling about the past.

Re:UBI OK if no voting and reproduction rights

[presidenteloco]

this.
exactly this.
It's amazing how many people can't see beyond their noses to see the AI/automation revolution happening all around them.
    /
--/---- you
/ robots

Ontario is...

[JMJimmy]

...not a city

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Run out of tax money?

[AHuxley]

Dont give money to people with jobs.
Means test people and support them. "Social programs in Canada" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Support people who are not working.
The amount of people who then need support is kept low and a normal advance nation with a set number of people needing gov support can be covered by a normal tax rate.
Citizens who cant work, doing education. Retired citizens.
The rest of a nations citizens work and pay tax. No new payments needed for them as they are "working", pay tax and get a wage.

Re:Run out of tax money?

[bistromath007]

We have needs-based programs. They suck ass. They keep people from working when they can. Equally importantly, they have massive overhead. In order to test whether people are legitimately needy, you need a massive bureaucracy. It is much cheaper to just let anyone walk in and get some free shit.

Re:Run out of tax money?

[AHuxley]

Re "and get some free". Giving working people free stuff soon runs out of tax money to pay for free stuff. Who and what is going to be extra taxed to cover all that new "free"?
Oil wealth? Gas exports? Timber exports? Property tax?

Welfare bump

[FeelGood314]

This is what a UBI should be eliminating. The program we had in Ontario was stupid unfortunately as moronic as it was it was better than what we have now. Currently once you are on welfare in Ontario you get all kinds of benefits. The only catch is that if you dare to try and get off welfare and even temporarily get a job you lose all of them. Oh, and while you are on welfare you can't save anything or have any substantial assets. So if you get a low paying job, not only could you be worse off, if you then lose the job you could be homeless and starving.

$17000 is a pretty good amount to live on. You can get a room to yourself for $250 in a student ghetto in Toronto. If you like rice and potatoes you can live on $200 a month for food. Another $50 worth of shopping at the Good Will a month and you can survive. I'm not saying it's great but lots of students manage on $6000 a year. My ex and myself when we had our first child survived on $1500 a month and I didn't even feel that poor. (fuck, even counting inflation, I make that in a day now). I don't think it would break the provinces finances if everyone got a flat check of $500 a month and we killed every other social program.

Re:Welfare bump

[king neckbeard]

Yeah, because there are 36 million people that collectively have at least an additional $120 billion a year to fund it.

Nobody ever does this right

[LostOne]

Let me prefix this by saying that I don't necessarily support implementing a UBI system. However, I have yet to see anything called a "basic income" or "universal basic incomie" pilot program actually do things at all correctly. As other commenters have suggested, these pilot programs seem to be designed so that they must necessarily fail and be examples the politicians can point at and say, "See? We tried it and it failed." I'm not convinced UBI can actually work, but it definitely won't work if it isn't done right.

To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs. That is, it has to replace government programs such as (un)employment insurance, government pension plans not funded completely and directly by member contributions (because everyone would get UBI, the pension plan wouldn't be required, would it?). There also can't be any clawback because someone earned some money outside of the program. Doing that just adds administrative cost to the program and discourages recipients from working. Also, every person should get the same amount regardless of age, marital status, etc., though maybe with a minimum age before it kicks in. Otherwise, you recreate existing complex administration processes.

Now, here's the absolutely critical component. This UBI must not be set at a level where the recipient can afford a car, nice television, nice house, 127 cats, and the like. It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so (which encourages those who won't work to move out of the expensive cities like Vancouver or Toronto and those who want a nicer standard of living to work). It needs to be set such that if you want a nice living, you have to earn additional money, on which you pay taxes. (Also, under a proper UBI system, only the UBI itself would be income tax exempt. There would be no need for low end tax brackets under such a system.)

Limited pilot programs just aren't going to demonstrate anything because they're not going to work exclusive of existing income support programs and are going to potentially unbalance the labour force because the people getting free money can work for less. (That's probably why the clawback had to be there in this case.) To truly demonstrate whether such a system can work, it has to be tried at a fairly large scale and *existing* income support programs must be suspended for anyone participating in such a test.

Now I do understand that there is always going to be someone who isn't well served by such a program. But that's true of all the current options, too. If you're going to insist that it has to be perfect for everyone, then are you willing to give up all the existing social programs that you currently benefit from on that same principle? I thought not. So let's not create strawmen out of extreme edge cases since *every* system has those.

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, if this was done properly, I'm not sure it would be that big of a problem. Whether your annual income is 2 million per year, or zero per year, you would still get your UBI. THAT'S what UBI is. So if I'm making 2 million a year and then bam... catastrophe strikes and I'm in the shitter and go bankrupt... I can at least move into some one's basement and afford to live. Likewise if I'm living in some one's basement, I can afford to live, such that, I have the possible opportunity to turn my life around and maybe make millions some day, if i'm into that. Not everyone actually wants to be insanely wealthy. Some people just want to live decently enough. The science says, here in the U.S., the annual income happy spot is about 80,000 a year, so... with a UBI you've got a fighting chance of perhaps getting close to that.


Whatever is going on in Ontario is not UBI, and that's why they are cancelling it and that's why people are pissed.


The only real disaster scenario with UBI is that if 100% of recipients decided to stop working, the entire country would slowly implode. Or perhaps, well, there is probably mathmatical equation to describe it... If the amount of work done is less than the level work required for the amount of consumption... then... u may have a problem.


I'm not so sure UBI would be that big of a problem, though; if at all. I think it's biggest problem is pissing off people who feel they had to work to get to where they are and don't want others to get a, 'free ride'. I don't think it's a free ride, though, so much as, free admission... the rides are all still really fucking expensive, and the popcorn, and the bottled water, etc... etc..

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[swb]

I'm not convinced you can "test" it at all. Every time I read about a "UBI Test" I wonder if it's actually an attempt to undermine UBI as a concept since it's bound to fail and be used to discredit UBI in the future.

I'd argue that some of the most important benefits of a UBI scheme are network effects that don't kick in unless the program is actually universal and available to everyone.

I don't favor a system that cuts a check to everyone unconditionally, I'm more inclined to favor a system with a progressive negative income tax. Zero work results in a negative income tax or BI payment, with the tax rate rising into positive territory once earned income rises above some threshold higher than their BI income. So if BI is $20k, you can work at a job that pays $10k but only pay something like $2k (these are made up numbers just for examples). This provides all the income incentives for even marginal work without stripping away so much UBI income that there's no incentive to work.

Where I think the network effect kicks in is that lower-wage employers now have a major coercive incentive to improve the working conditions and pay for low wage employment which I think is a major disincentive to work even under our existing "poverty" system of coercive work. It shifts the balance of power away from employers.

If jobs themselves are more appealing, more people will want to work, especially if they have the financial incentive that adding work meaningfully improves their income.

I think this winds up improving work even further up the income ladder where you might make enough that taxation nullifies UBI payments, as people with more established lifestyles may see UBI + low wage work as more appealing than 50+ hour jobs for "good" wages. Employers will have to improve those working conditions, too, or find that employees aren't interested in those jobs, either.

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[LostOne]

I don't think Toronto or Vancouver have a nicer standard of living. I was using them as an example of expensive markets which should not be used as a factor in detemrining what level a UBI should be set at. I'll stick with the city I live in which is much more livable.

I didn't actually say Toronto or Vancouver is a "nicer standard of living" though I can see how you inferred that from what I wrote. I could have been clearer but we can't expect perfect prose from random commenters on /., now, can we?

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[argStyopa]

"To do UBI correctly, it has to go to everybody. And it has to *replace* any income support programs."

Except that's not honestly the goal.

I haven't found a single UBI supporter who will agree with the simple premise stated nakedly "UBI will replace all other programs" because even they know that to do so would be sentencing most of the poor to starvation and misery.

Want proof? It's widely recognized that of lottery winners who win enough to never work again, 90% end up POORER.

If we take the poorest people in our society and instead of hand-feeding them programs which do the planning for them, and instead hand them a check at the start of the month and EXPECT THEM TO BUDGET for food, medical care, housing...they will simply die. Most within a month or two.

The dirty little secret is that most desperately poor people are there because of their own choices. Handing them piles of cash will not enrich or benefit them. They will still make stupid, short-sighted choices, and then if all other supports are gone they'll die starving in a ditch.

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[wisnoskij]

It should provide for *healthy* subsistence in a reasonable market and require careful management of money to do so.

Based on how reasonable your post seems, I was hoping to ask what this sentence is supposed to mean? Due in part to a global marketplace, and fairly reasonable shipping fees. For shippable goods, pretty much everyone on the planet can feed, cloth, etc themselves for similar prices. The majority of the world lives healthy lives on $3 a day. Rice, cheap noodles, and corn products can be gotten for cents a day, and all of these have long histories of providing everything a person needs to live. Similarly, globally speaking, clothing is free. Africa is overloaded with cloths that don't fit any of them, I am sure they would be more than happy to ship some of those back to America for a few dollars a ton.

TL;DR
When you say basic no frills living, do you mean: "average global SoL (something like $300-$1000 a year)". Or something far over that?

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[LostOne]

That's one of the problems with a UBI scheme. Figuring out what that benchmark should be is hard. The idea is that the UBI should give people the ability to subsist without having to move across an international border (because that's difficult or impossible for many people) as long as they're careful with their money. However, that doesn't mean they should be able to subsist anywhere they choose. Just that they can if the are sensible and don't insist on living somewhere too expensive or have luxuries they can't afford. Exactly what that benchmark should be depends on the country in question. (And it really should only apply to citizens (or equivalent) of that country and probably not be offered to citizens living abroad.)

That sort of problem is one of the reasons I don't necessarily support such a scheme (as I said in my original post). I just don't see any variant of today's world that is likely to occur in the foreseeable future where this type of system could work. (There are other issues than figuring out what the basic income should be that make it questionable, and not all of them are with the idea of UBI itself.)

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[Tony Isaac]

Nobody ever WILL do this right, because it CAN'T be done right. The entire concept violates principles of motivation bound up in human DNA.

Re:Nobody ever does this right

[Whorhay]

That's contrary to what I've seen. Usually it's touted as a replacement for all or nearly all current welfare systems. The single exception usually being some kind of disability system to ensure that such people are taken care of.

The lottery example isn't really pertinent in discussing UBI. Sure people are typically very bad at managing money. That fact is evidenced by the majority of households not having enough savings to handle a $500 unexpected expense. I've even seen lots of examples of people I would categorize as rich living hand to mouth. But being handed a million dollars or more out of the blue is such an unimaginable circumstance that most people make poor decisions with it. Those decisions though aren't made in a vacuum, typically there is family and friends coming out of the woodwork begging for a handout. Then there are the scammers and con artists that specifically target lottery winners. The reason all that happens though is because someone has just gotten a small mountain of money that is completely out of the ordinary, UBI would be the opposite.

First, UBI is usually put forward as a very modest or small amount of money, $1.5k or less a month. And while I say per month, there is no reason that it couldn't be distributed on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Second, the 'U' is for Universal, that means everyone gets it. That means you wouldn't see a mountain of people dog piling on top of a recipient trying to beg a piece of the pie. I think we would definitely see some market turbulence from land lords trying to immediately siphon off most of the UBI right at the start in the form of rising rents, but that should even out as everything balances.

You can keep telling yourself that you're better than poor people simply because you're smarter and more hard working, but it's typically not true. Poverty is a trap and begets more poverty. The obvious truth is that as your income increases you have to spend a smaller and smaller proportion on non-discretionary expenses. When you are poor non-discretionary spending represents 90% plus of your income. That leaves you very little room, even when living a monastic lifestyle, to save for emergencies. To complicate matters even more the poor are pushed into or left behind in areas that turn into ghettos of a sort. Property values decline, tax bases shrink, parental involvement at school declines, and so the schools go to hell. People that watched their parents barely eek out a living trying to work within the system, are tempted to try a different route and are less well equipped to try and escape the poverty cycle. On top of all that they're left with working the most menial and physically exhausting jobs with shit schedules. I think about how unmotivated I am too cook dinner after a "long" day of sitting in the office and can only imagine how bad it must be for someone that has to put in a 12 hour day of actual physical labor.

You can definitely attribute poverty to poor decisions but that ignores the fact that people that start higher in the income brackets get more favorable treatment and are often protected from their poor decisions. One of my brothers had a couple encounters with law enforcement as a teenager that would have any child of color in serious trouble, my brother was just warned to behave better. The same brother married a psycho who divorced him and left him with more than $20k in credit card debt. He also blew nearly $40K from an inheritance on a POS truck that fell apart inside of five years. Then there was the five years when he worked for a buddy that was paying him as a 1099, and he didn't bother paying any payroll taxes until the IRS came after him. Today he has a well paying job and a nice house in an expensive suburb, largely because he met a girl who's family networked him a good welding job.

I've known plenty of poor people and only a few of them were in poverty because of their own idiocy. Most of them by and large were victims of circumstances beyond their control.

Welfare for Farmers

[PopeRatzo]

Here in the United States, we have apparently found enough of "other people's money" to give new welfare for farmers.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/po...

Our President, who has a very good brain, will be paying farmers who have been hurt by his tariffs by giving them money that's borrowed from very same countries he levied tariffs against.

That is some 39-dimensional chess shit right there.

Re:Welfare for Farmers

[PopeRatzo]

The fact that you can't stop talking about the US in an article about Canada shows how imperialistic you are.

Wait, you mean Canada isn't part of the US? I thought they were like a colony or something.

Re:Welfare for Farmers

[PopeRatzo]

There is a world outside the US

Maybe. But does it matter?

Re:Welfare for Farmers

[PopeRatzo]

Well, with record low unemployment and an economy that keeps beating growth predictions,

And an exploding deficit and falling wages since the beginning of the Trump regime.

You do the math.

Progressive Conservative party

[astrofurter]

Is that related to the Totalitarian Anarchist party?

Experiments should last their planned time

[FabioA]

It says something about the politicians involved, that such experiments are being shut down before they come to a end. It already happened in Finland, now in Canada: it almost feels like they're afraid of what the results might tell, doesn't it?

Lottery

[SCVonSteroids]

In practice this must have been something along the lines of winning the Set for Life lottery, where you just get a fat check every week for years. I didn't RTFA but I assume the participants were chosen at random? In which case, the ones getting the money probably used the supplemented money to buy fancy toys and the ones who didn't get the golden ticket loathed them.

Dunno, maybe Ontario's people different to the east coast entirely, and I'm judging this poorly, but I doubt it. This was a stupid idea, sorry if that's a little crude.

Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[dskoll]

No surprise that the current gang would end a trial without waiting for the results to come in. They're driven by ideology and not interested in objective data.

Re:Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[Mashiki]

Out of curiosity, do you live in Ontario? Do you know why the Liberal Party of Ontario no longer exists after 15 years of power.

Re: Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[dskoll]

I live in Ontario. I'm not a fan of the Liberals, but even Lisa McLeod acknowledged that the PCs lied: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada...

Re:Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[Imazalil]

Not OP, but, there were other options. Doug was a bad joke as a city councilor (I'm being very generous here), and now he gets to run the province.

Do you remember why the Liberals were in power for 15 in the first place?

Re:Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[SuiteSisterMary]

Do you know why the Liberal Party of Ontario no longer exists after 15 years of power.

Same reason Alberta went NDP: too many parties on one side of the spectrum, not enough on the other. Ontario split their left wing vote between the Liberals, NDP and Green parties.

Re: Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[Mashiki]

Do you remember the part about how "the debt is going to look worse then we believe it is?" That the PC's stated when they were running their campaign? So when we're paying 10% of our income on just interest payments, and now have a debt ratio that's higher then when greece collapsed, where would you start cutting money from?

Re:Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[Mashiki]

Do you remember why the Liberals were in power for 15 in the first place?

You mean the part where the PC's ran effectively a "Liberal in PC clothing" and people refused to vote for them? Because Toronto is a gigantic voting block, and if you snatch those roughly 50 seats, you only need 13 more to form the government.

Re:Doug Ford = Trump Lite

[Mashiki]

Same reason Alberta went NDP: too many parties on one side of the spectrum, not enough on the other. Ontario split their left wing vote between the Liberals, NDP and Green parties.

You'd be wrong, on why the Alberta went NDP. They went NDP because Alberta will never really vote for the Liberals. And people were pissed off with the absolute corruption of the PC's to the point that they no longer exist as a party. In many cases it wasn't "too many parties on one side of the spectrum" in the previous election where they won, the ridings where the split happened it was between NDP, Wild Rose and Liberals. And people voted Liberal because they were unsure about Wild Rose after several fuckups and the gigantic smear job by the media. Wild Rose and the Liberals are ideologically opposite and that's where the vote splitting happened.

Ontario didn't split the vote between liberals, ndp, and green though. Ontario rejected the liberals and went either NDP or PC. In nearly all the ridings where the liberals held, they only got token support from the hardcore base.

we need to lower full time hours and make OT cost

[Joe_Dragon]

we need to lower full time hours and make OT cost more.

Re: Build colleges and subsidize them instead

[dskoll]

Ontario colleges and universities are already heavily subsidized.

UBI will happen either way.

[Qbertino]

People today probably just don't like it being called UBI.

Point in case: I do web development which these days means simply maintaining massive blobs of very complicated pieces of software that are available for free or some silly minimal annual fee. It mostly involves clicking on links and watching the WordPress Update Spinner go in circles. My deployment server is a rented service because I really can't be bothered fiddling with Jenkins or Travis for months on end till I get it right when I can get a nice and shiny UI ready to run my tasks for 5$/Month. That's 10 Minutes of "work" per month at my current rate for someone employed with healthcare, national pension and such.

I'm required to be at the office, but I can do this job on the side, remotely, and not even break into a sweat. I'm employed part time and earn more than most people. I do get to work on mission critical stuff that no one else in a radius of 5 kilometers can do, but that's 40 hours per quarter, maximum.

I'm now moving to automate most of my remaining manual work with custom scripts.

On the other side I have an abundance of spare time, am going to college on the side (College is free in Germany), planning a surf trip and couldn't even be bothered to update my smartphone because it's so powerful. I'm writing this on a refurbished laptop that costed little more than the refurbishment work and shipping +extra RAM & SSD and my main concern is if I will finally manage to get my exercise regime that I have planned going.

The robots are coming ever more and it's only a matter of single digit years until someone replaces starbucks with coffeebots and robots drive our cars and sew our t-shirts and jeans.

Bottom line:
Post scarcity abundance is happening as we speak and - to be honest - I think that's pretty fucking great. If you choose to live a "minimalist" lifestyle like I do (single room appartment, no car, PT & bike, focus on health, education and fun) you can feel it already every day.
And it feels awesome.

My 2 eurocents.

Re:UBI will happen either way.

[wisnoskij]

Yes, all this happened before during the industrial revolution.
We did not get UBI then. All the poor people just died, everyone else lived in abject poverty for generations, and a few globalists made a load of money.

And you are not thinking very much about how coffeebots will be different to to Starbucks.

For the sake of argument, lets say that a Starbucks employs 20 employees at $15 an hour.
Starbucks is now reopening as coffeebots. Those 20 employees are now fired and coffeebots has bought 10 baristabots . They did this because it saved then 3% over having employees.

So now every year coffeebots sends $42,000*10 to the Indian business who makes baristabots and has $900*20 dollars to provide UBI to the 20 homeless and starving ex-employees. Assuming businesses like running at cost to provide UBI to the unemployed, you can still expect the populous to lose over 90% of their income post robot-revolution.

Even if you disagree with my numbers, the robots have to cost something. This is wealth taken straight out of what used to be people's salaries. And then you have a poorer populous less able to buy your products, meaning you generate less profit, and have even less money to give to UBI. It's a downwards spiral.

Explain where my logic is wrong? In what scenario does the automation-revolution do anything but strip 90% of everyone's salaries and give it to business owners in countries not running UBI?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: The labor market is ever present

[LordWabbit2]

The reason things are being automated as much as they are is to solve a very big problem.
That problem is People.
People have labor laws, they have personal issues, they need to take a shit, they go on strike for more money.
Automating them away is a win for most companies.

Let me give you an example. My sister works for a large food retailer in their IT division. Every year around xmas time the pickers (guys in forklifts who load the trucks from the distribution center) go on strike for more money. It's the busiest and most lucrative time of the year for retailers. People get their bonuses, they are on leave (some of them) and it's fucking xmas, so there are presents to be bought and fuckit lets eat some cow etc. so it's important for them to keep the shelves stocked. Empty shelves means nothing to sell, which means no profit. Some stock in the distribution center also has a short shelf life, known as "fast moving consumer goods" and if they are not placed on the shelves within a limited time become garbage (think lettuce and tomatoes, meat etc.) So, when the pickers go on strike over the busiest and most lucrative time of the year it's BIG problem. Which is why they do it. Every fucking year. They get temp workers in who try to keep the shelves stocked, but there is violence etc. from the strikers so they have to then hire extra security to protect the temp workers. All of this costs money and a loss of profit. So they are automating the picking and removing the problem, and the problem is People. They are spending a vast amount of money NOW to remove all problems that humans add to the business in the future. Then there is "shrinkage" which is a nice way to say the fucking humans are stealing shit out of the warehouse. Remove the majority of humans and replace them with robots and theft becomes less of a problem. It's no fucking wonder that automation is advancing so rapidly and spreading so much, it's to remove the problem in the system, which is us.

Also look at who cancelled it

[davecb]

This was shut down by Mr Ford II, who is also making elected jobs appointed and rewriting city charters to dictate what they are to do.

His late brother was the mayor of Toronto, and was the most recent precursor to your Mr. Trump. This Mr Ford arguably thinks messers Trump and Putin are heroes.

Re:Also look at who cancelled it

[Mashiki]

So you're really upset that despite people in Toronto, and the Toronto media for literally years calling for a reduction of the number of city councilors and it's finally happened under Ford. Hey guess what? In Canada, the provinces dictate how many councilors a city is allowed to have. It's in the charter, you do know this don't you?

I can't wait for you idiots to start claiming that the reason why Ford won the premiership was because of russians, and not a decade and a half of the liberal party fucking this entire province up.

Re:Also look at who cancelled it

[davecb]

The Ford brothers have been pushing that for years, on the grounds that reducing the number would work better. The Ontario government currently has 124 members, so it follows that Mr Ford II will consider it unmanageable (;-))

Joking aside, my councilor, John Filion, has argued that we need a committee that only concerns itself with city-wide issues, like the old Metro Toronto council. Trying to do everything in "the committee of the whole" is a recipe for parochialism.

And yes, that's another way of saying "less people", just a different way than the Fords proposed.

minus half of any income he or she earned

[wisnoskij]

Under the project, a single person could have received up to about $17,000 a year, minus half of any income he or she earned. "A couple could have received up to $24,000 per year." People with disabilities could have received an additional $6,000.

That is not UBI. That is is just how workers comp works right now by a different name.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

Why, I don't understand. OT is already 150% of your hourly pay. And on top of that you want to make them have to pay more OT hours to get the same amount of work. Do you hate small businesses?

It is always amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a college age kid years ago, I was as liberal as they come. I wanted free stuff especially since I was only making minimum wage. The rich people can afford it, make them pay for it.

I applied myself in college for something that I was really interested in, computer programming. COBOL was the language of choice in CS at the time, which I used none of because my first programming job for the Federal Reserve Bank was in C. I switched jobs about every 2 to 4 years each time doubling what I was making a year. Well, it has leveled off fluctuating in between 5 and 6 figures for the last 10 years, even though I have changed jobs 3 times in that time period.

But the more money that I make the more conservative I've become because why should I be paying for other people's free stuff?

People that make excuses that didn't apply themselves in school in their teen years are the ones that are crying because they are not getting enough free stuff. I attended a high school reunion this year and it is easy to tell the liberals from the conservatives at the reunion. Everyone that did well in high school came dressed real nice, was in decent shape and drove a relatively nice car. The stoners and football players from high school that never played football after high school were in jeans and pull over shirts. Mostly bald, severely over weight and had problems catching their breath walking from the parking lot and bitched and complained all night long about Trump.

One of the better looking girls from high school that was still in great shape 15 years past hitting the wall, told me that she was surprised that I was the only one left from the class that had all my hair and that it also had very little gray in it. She had also mentioned that it was easy to pick out the ones from class that did well in life based on how well they did in high school.

Bottom line, do well in school in your teen years, learn structure in your life and you will do well and turn out conservative. If not, you will end up bitching and complaining all your life about how you are not getting enough free stuff and end up trying to vote in Bernie Sanders. Only the feminazi wanted Hillary. My own mom voted for Trump just because she couldn't vote for a woman for president. And my mom is well into her 80's. She also never had any contact with the Russians.

Now you are saying "What about disabled people". What about them? I have a disabled son that I fully take care of as should all families that has a disabled person. My mom has helped me out in the past as well as my ex'es parents too with my son and if my dad was still alive so would have he. That is what family is for and the government should have no business in what should be a family matter.

Socialism Fails in Ontario

[njhunter]

That should have been the title.

Re:Good news

[Imazalil]

Sigh. You do know had this trial worked out and maybe was implemented it would create a whole bunch of efficiencies as it would combine all those multiple programs into a single entity.

Even better, had they let the program run it's course, found out that either yes it worked, or, no it didn't, and we'd never have to bring it up again. Now we're going to be stuck going back and forth just we did with the Scarborough subway. Just wasting everyone's time and money.

Medicare / health care needs to be it's own

[Joe_Dragon]

Medicare / health care needs to be it's own as $1000/mo UBI can buy a junk plan and for some it may need $5000/mo for a good plan.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[king neckbeard]

Overworking human machines causes them greater wear and lower productivity.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[bluefoxlucid]

Overtime is 150% of your total compensation, including benefits costs. If you're only paying 1.5x hourly wage, you're committing wage theft and are liable for back pay.

Cutting hours and keeping minimum wage set to an annual wage (raising the hourly wage as part-time hours fall) is a way to reduce job availability. It's one way to increase unemployment, and is useful if you manage to drive the economy into a hyperinflation state where you have a labor shortage.

I've been trying to push policy to effectively cause -12% unemployment, which would be economically destructive and require making consumers poorer: you ensure a strong consumer base can buy, they can buy way more than we can supply with our labor force, everyone is too wealthy, nobody can find workers, and you put a stop to that before employers start doubling wages and prices by inflicting a price increase relative to wages.

You stop that madness by dragging unemployment back up to 3% or 5%, while driving working hours to 28 per week (7 hour days, 4 day weeks). People are still about as wealthy as they started, with the poorest being a good bit better off (higher wages, more stable employment, better welfare services).

It's not the kind of thing you just do because you think we should work less. You have to figure out how you're going to siphon off the wealth gains from productivity into free time instead of additional consumption. I had to solve the problem backwards: I figured out how to improve our economic efficiency, but caused a huge productivity spike (on paper), and needed a countermeasure.

You're right to be skeptical, but you have the reasoning wrong: small businesses will be fine, in as much as our economy will be fine.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[JackieBrown]

People who suggest this never worked a job where OT was offered or did but at a job where the skill level was high enough that it was cheaper to pay OT then to hire a fresh second person.

The hourly jobs I worked that offered 1.5 pay for OT severely restricted that OT. The jobs I worked that OT was paid as straight pay allowed us to work as many hours as we wanted. (That's probably different now due to ACA since they'd be required to offer me insurance)

Requiring less hours while increasing the pay for OT would force people to get a second job. And for you green people, that is more carbon footprint going to yet another job.

Re:Was supposed to go for 3 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the purpose of the study was FOR it to fail, so other liberal minded countries do not try it again? It kinda makes me wonder who sponsored the study.

Re:PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

We'll always have Paris. And Americans will have twenty two Parises.

Re:PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[DontBeAMoran]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I just learned there was a place called "Paris" in Ontario, Canada.

We can't even fucking come up with original names for our own pieces of land.

Warren Buffet has no income to tax

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither did Steve Jobs, neither does Zuckerberg. Seeing a pattern here? They get stock options, which have no taxable value until sold. They use said stock options to take out loans. Loans are considered a liability and they get to live a tax-free, life of luxury.

Congress needs to close this loophole and treat the loans as income. Loans for actual business operations could still be exempt. Loans backed by stock options used to buy up all of your neighbors houses so you can build a buffer zone around your mansion should be treated as income.

More proof that UBI is bullshit

[Rick Schumann]

If you believe UBI can work for 300,000,000 people, then you're clearly and objectively bad at math, and furthermore believe in 'magical thinking'. This is just more proof that UBI is bullshit. Lazy people need to resign themselves to the fact that they'll be working until they drop dead, you're not getting a free ride through life like some NEET.

Re:PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[Rhipf]

There is also a London, Ontario so they have both the island (England) and the continent (Europe) covered.

Re:PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[Mashiki]

Just wait until you learn that naming cities after what the area produced, or the people that settled there from the old world was the norm in quite a few places. Now to really blow your mind: Kitchener, Ontario was named Berlin, Ontario until WWII happened.

Mod parent up

[rsilvergun]

+5 isn't enough. This. So much This.

Re:What's Canadian for 'Duh'?

[dstyle5]

LMFTFY: Who knew that handing out free money would get (gasp) EXPENSIVE, eh!?!?!? ;)

Re: The labor market is ever present

[apoc.famine]

But the flip side is that the reason the system exists in the first place is us. Specifically us buying stuff. With the money we made being paid to be part of the system.

Remove us from the system and the system can't financially exist unless we get paid some other way.

Any Dem who embraces Frum isn't actually progressi

[Phil Urich]

A lot of Democrats are actually just basically neocons who don't hate gay people, or for whatever other reason happened to end up on the other 'team' in American politics. The widespread 'liberal' embrace of Frum show how neoliberal so much of the Democratic establishment is, since anyone actually progressive at all would gag at the idea. There's a reason why Hillary Clinton often used the slogan "America's Already Great"; there's a class of rich assholes who claim to be "progressive" but actually love the status quo, income inequality and endless wars included.

This is awesome for so many reasons

[Falconnan]

Really it comes down to a basic truth: This was an experiment, and while it doesn't eliminate UBI as a concept, this suggests this might not be a good way to do it. And that's FANTASTIC! Because now we know a way something won't work. This is why I want to see this type of thing: Actually anticipating a problem before it arrives, and trying solutions. This isn't a bad thing. It's a brilliant effort to get ahead of the problems.

And now we need to determine the lessons learned. Ideological presumptions have no place in this step.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

I agree. Sometimes I have jobs where we end up doing 7-12's we would get more done with 6-10's in my opinion. I don't always get to make the calls. I don't believe 40 hour work weeks are being over worked.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

"Overtime is 150% of your total compensation, including benefits costs. If you're only paying 1.5x hourly wage, you're committing wage theft and are liable for back pay."

Are you talking salary? I wouldn't ever work a salary job again. I'm talking hourly workers. So I don't understand what you mean by that please elaborate. I didn't read much of your wall of text I'm at work currently so I will respond to it after. This has me curious though.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[king neckbeard]

40 hours is roughly the point where we start to see really deep declines in productivity, but we'd still see greater improvements with even shorter work weeks. And, by shortening the numbers of hours worked, we'd end up with more jobs to go around, and less filling the time between useful tasks.

Re:and the gop healthcare plan is jail / prison if

[pnutjam]

Haha, seriously? Those jails will give you an early release if it means saving on medical expenses. Don't count on them for healthcare.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

Wow, that seems almost borderline crazy.. I think a small nation should try it first, then one equivalent to the USA, maybe canada? before we try it.. but thats just my thoughts.

Re:Any Dem who embraces Frum isn't actually progre

[Mashiki]

And, you've also just answered the question of "why did Trump get elected." I find it funny that people call Trump a racist, but that only happened after he abandoned the democrats and their bullshit and ran on a republican ticket.

Re:Results

[Mashiki]

Well, if you're an ideological shill that thinks that the PC's are "trump style conservatives" boy oh boy, I bet you just fucking cheered on all that debt that the liberals dumped on the province with their ideological pandering. Without of course, any reliable assessment that it would be good for the province.

Re: PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[damien_kane]

I wonder if anyone will figure out where the name "New York" comes from

It was once "New Amsterdam"; Why they changed it, I can't say (people just liked it better that way)...

Ty, TMBG

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[bluefoxlucid]

No, salaried workers actually don't receive overtime pay at all right now for excess hours. Hourly workers are supposed to receive 1.5x their compensation--meaning if your employer pays you $30k ($15/hr) and spends $9k on healthcare and $1k on disability insurance, you need time-and-a-half based on $40k ($20/hr). They owe you $30/hr, not $22.50/hr. If you got a bonus, you also get time-and-half on that.

Many employers get this wrong. Enforcement is practically nonexistent.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[bluefoxlucid]

It's not crazy, just complex and new. We have things like unemployment insurance and disability pensions already; the policy I designed is basically a social insurance. Overall, it's a logistically-purified form of what the Nordic nations do, allowing us to manage means-tested welfares while also taking advantage of an egalitarian social insurance.

The Nordic nations make their basic social insurances more-egalitarian--unemployment insurance, for example, pays quite a bit and you can be on it for something like 7 years(!), while many services simply pay to anyone regardless of income. This is a kind of roundabout way to redistribute a portion of incomes to poverty areas, essentially making all your social insurances and welfare services leak by paying to people who don't really need it because the economy needs it. We can, instead, simply distribute a portion of incomes, and then not worry about the impacts on that when we adjust welfare services (separate the two functions).

Unless you just want to provide full food stamps and HUD housing assistance to everyone making under $40k, and phase it out until about $80k.

All the odd things that pop out are a consequence of improving economic marginal efficiencies. Imagine if your nation implemented an economic policy of raising unemployment and then imprisoning the poor. You raise taxes on the middle-class so they can buy less (fewer jobs), lock people up in prisons, and use the tax money to feed and manage them. Over time, your labor force adjusts (fewer immigrant laborers and babies born), and unemployment comes down from 10% to 5%.

Now: imagine if you elected someone who said, "What the hell are we all doing?!" and then got those people out of prison, provided them welfare, moved them into jobs so they're making an income that can be taxed, and reduced taxes. There's now more income, people can buy more than what they were being supplied in prison, and the prison economy integrates into the regular economy. Those prison people are still consumers of what they were in prison, but also now are consumers of things they didn't produce in prison. They make hardly a dent in unemployment themselves--about 0.2%--but you suddenly need 10% more labor to keep up with the purchasing power of your population, and you don't have it.

That's basically what the Dividend is: it resolves localized recessions and enables greater productivity; the shock is kind of ludicrous. You handle the shock by balancing it against a cut in productivity--doable by reducing working hours and retaining the same minimum annual wages.

But was it really Basic?

[bitterblackale]

"Basic," by definition means universal. For a universal basic income to have positive economic effect, it has to be, you know, universal. Universal Basic Income (UBI) puts some people on the dole, but most use it as a springboard for more lucrative dreams. There will always be some people on the dole, and you just have to accept it. If you want humanity to evolve past the stage of One-Must-Work-To-Live, you have to either eliminate the necessity to work, or expand your definition of work to include anything that promotes communal or personal growth. Did you dig a ditch? Great! Did you calculate your business's income-vs-expense? Awesome! Did you write a poem? You earned your cheque! Did you do nothing but watch YouTube... well, at least you consumed advertising, but try a little harder next time, eh?

Instead of a wall

[vandamme]

... we could build an extension to the Detroit-Windsor tunnel that connects just south of the Rio Grande. Folks could start a new life in the People's Republic of Canuckistan.

Re:Results

[Mashiki]

So dear AC, please explain why the Red Star(sorry I mean Toronto Star) has been advocating a reduction to city councilors for years to match the number of ridings in the city. I'll wait for your answer on this. Now, since we have video and audio of the NDP member mocking the PC MPP, do we hold the left to the same standards? Or are you perfectly okay with "it's okay when we do it." Yes, very Trump style.

That's some nice whataboutism there, comrade

That's some nice, I don't have a coherent argument.

That's also an apt description of Ford's move on canceling the UBI. It's just declared by fiat that this "isn't what Ontarians need"

Oh, so you're the one that's going to cough up the money? He's right though, it isn't what Ontario needs. We need less regulations, less taxes on businesses, and more industry. Why don't you explain how losing 300k+ high paying middle-income jobs in the last few years is "helping ontario" while the replacement jobs are bare minimum wage with no benefits.

UBI to poor people works surprisingly well with

[NewYork]

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs)
Governments gave poor households small stipends to spend as they wished on condition that their children went to school or visited a doctor regularly
http://archive.is/72B2X

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

paywalled. have another link? i would like to read this. i do a lot of overtime some years.. probably not losing out on much considering all the toys i get given, but still curious.

Re: PIPSQUEAK BEAUHD DOESN'T KNOW CANADIA!

[Science]

It was originally settled by the Dutch, thus New Amsterdam. Later the English took over and changed it to New York.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[bluefoxlucid]

It wasn't paywalled when I went there from Google. The paywall goes away if I delete cookies related to the site and then visit it from Google, but not in an incognito tab using a copy-and-paste of the URL. That's a violation of Google's policies.

Re:we need to lower full time hours and make OT co

[Highdude702]

I use safescript so I'm sure it's something with that and that's even more of a reason not to allow their addresses

UBI Paired with Guaranteed Employment

[Only Time Will Tell]

Over the weekend I was just thinking about the subject of UBI and how it might be best paired with a universal job guarantee. Everyone would qualify for a monthly allowance (say $1,000) based upon meeting the job requirements. This could be anything from 8 hours of doing community service (volunteering at the hospital, reading to kids, cleaning parks, painting murals, etc) to working your normal fulltime job. Anyone who wants the UBI just needs to provide some sort of work and would be guaranteed such a position if they don't currently work. Elderly and disabled would be excluded from this requirement, or may only require 4 hours a month or something. Students can still go to college and qualify for some income (8 hours over a month shouldn't be too taxing) and it would discourage receiving UBI without providing a return to society. It could encourage a drop in homelessness (you work your 8 hours and would have enough to cover low-end rent and food, and could even continue panhandling if you choose). It isn't a magic bullet but could reduce our costs in ineffective entitlement programs while still providing humane assistance to those struggling, while not disincentivizing work. This paired with the flat tax example posted further up might be a real option.

Re:Results

[Mashiki]

Please explain how any answer would change the fact that Trump style conservationism includes being fiscally conservative (at least, in regards to cutting lefty liberal things and getting rid of political opponents you don't like)

Also, nice Trump style calling any news source you don't like to being controlled by the evil "Reds" (even though you just gave a counter example of them being biased, but hey, it's also very Trump style to have no coherent argument)

Except that isn't Trump style conservatism. That *IS* conservatism. Protip from Ontario: It's called the Red Star by the majority of people in the province for a reason, and it's earned that reputation all on it's own over the last 30 years. I'll let you think on why.

Nice of you to be honest that you don't have a coherent argument. Again, very Trump style of you ... Please explain how in a discussion on Ford as a politician, you're changing the subject to attack me as a person.

And the first falls into the second, where I didn't attack you. I pointed out the fundamental flaw in your argument.

Another declaration by fiat. Look, you as a private citizen has the right to your opinion, but again, I was discussing Ford and the PCs, and you haven't said anything to refute the fact that they're just declaring UBI to not work, by fiat.

You mean the auditor general right? Or are you saying that her professional opinion is wrong?

No, why don't YOU explain why you keep trying to change the subjecting, asking me to to explain things which are irrelevant to what I was talking about?

No why don't you explain, I'm giving you the opportunity to counter my arguments So far the only response you've had is to flail your virtual arms around.

Re:Results

[Mashiki]

No, it isn't. Real conservatism doesn't just cut things they don't like with little to no rational backing.

We see this in the ending of UBI, the conservatives didn't provide any evidence it is bad, other than their declaration by fiat that it is bad.

Oh, so you're the arbiter of what's "real conservatism" now? Except the part where subject experts had and if you read the AG report you'd also know why. You did, didn't you?

Except it's not by the majority of people. Remember how you like to complain about Toronto area having a majority of the people and thus seats in an election? That's the same majority where the "Red Star" came from, and don't call their newspaper by your slur.

Except it is. Why don't you go for a walk in downtown Toronto, and ask people what their opinion and pet name for the paper is. Boy will you be surprised.

No, I don't mean the auditor general, and you shouldn't either. From TFS, and from me searching around, the one pushing an end to UBI is Lisa MacLeod, Social Services Minister (who's only been at the job for like a month or two), who's declaring it's bad, without referencing the auditor general or any research.

Then you're fundamentally ignorant of the subject matter and should really stop replying about it. The AG who made the report was a LIBERAL appointee.

Amazing. Everything you said there is wrong.

Your statement I was responding to was "Oh, so you're the one that's going to cough up the money?"

Going backwards, it isn't pointing any flaw in my argument, as my argument is not about me supporting or not supporting UBI, but whether Ford is a "Trump style conservative". Whether I'm willing or not willing to pay for a UBI is irrelevant to whether Ford's action (trying to cut it with no rational, only declaring by fiat that it's bad) fits "Trump style".

And since you go the argument wrong, your statement does attack me as a person. You're trying to bring me into an argument that doesn't involve my (or your) personal stake.

And none of this follows from the first. Your first was asking me to explain why "the Red Star" supported cutting councilors, while this comment about money is about the UBI.

Well you've sure offered a non-argument there. So again, are you the one coughing up the money or do you expect the people in Ontario who are already at the breaking point from taxation to pay for it? This is of course the same province that's shed 300k+ high paying manufacturing jobs in the last 7 years. No, my statement doesn't attack you as a person. My statement attacks your profound ignorance on the state of Ontario, it's financial status, it's taxation status, it's high GDP to debt ratio.

And of course it follows from the first. You do understand that the TorStar has for decades supported, and made statements that the cutting of councilors is important? Remember the part where you said "Where Trump tries to "drain the swamp" in DC, Ford tries to reduce number of Toronto councilors in the name of making things more efficient" but you're again fundamentally ignorant of why the largest left-leaning paper in Ontario has been advocating it.

I've explained plenty, more than I had to.

You've danced around, and offered nothing but opinions. On the other hand, I've listed and stated media, and in that media, not only reporters, but opinion writers who've given their views on this. You can find them on your own to read, it's not hard.

You objected to somebody else calling Ford "Trump style conservatives"

I pointed out how Ford displays characteristics fitting for "Trump style conservatisim"

You rambled a bunch of things that don't really refute what I said.

I responded pointing out to you that what you sa