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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.
We ran out of other people's money.
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.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "U" stands for Universal. You would get it too.
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)
AND...paid for by the tax payer.
That isn't how UBI is supposed to work. This "pilot program" fucked it up on purpose by making it needs-based.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Properly managed fiat currency is based on production. When you can produce more with less people, then what?
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Oh, I see. Yes. Instead of UBI, we can just gas anyone who is not smart enough to design a robot. Much better idea.
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.
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.
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.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Ken
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.
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.
Ken
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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?
And take jobs from honest people?
Lump of labor fallacy
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.
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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 $1000/mo to everyone is IMO way way way overboard. Plus no state can fund that. At all. And money doesn't grow on trees.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
People today probably just don't like it being called UBI.
Point in case: I do web development which these days means simply maintaining massive blobs of very complicated pieces of software that are available for free or some silly minimal annual fee. It mostly involves clicking on links and watching the WordPress Update Spinner go in circles. My deployment server is a rented service because I really can't be bothered fiddling with Jenkins or Travis for months on end till I get it right when I can get a nice and shiny UI ready to run my tasks for 5$/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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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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.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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.
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor