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Y Combinator Plans To Start Doling Out $60 Million Next Year to Study Universal Basic Income (gizmodo.com)
The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. From a report: The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called "Making Ends Meet." Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group. Some of the participants would receive monthly payments for three years and some would get paid every month for five years. Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached" -- in a January 2016 blog post. Altman explained his belief that universal basic income will eventually be implemented across the nation as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."
This. I've known a few people who didn't pay their taxes and the U.S. government never used a gun to force them to pay taxes. I've never even seen them arrested. What the government did do was to garnish their wages. In one specific case they sold their home to get current; they actually sold it to one of their kids who then rented the home to them. I don't think it's really worked out well for either of them but they did mean well.
The reality is that if a government starts demanding taxes like that then things start to break down and everyone is worse off.
You can squeak by miserably on 12k /year. Maybe not where you live but you probably live somewhere with a healthy economy. I know plenty of places where 1000/mo is enough for an apartment or a room, some bus fare, and groceries.
MONEY DOES NOT GROW ON TREES!
Two possibilities here. You are unfamiliar with fiat currency or you are unfamiliar with lumber as an enterprise.
One certainty: Your mind is made up, and you don't want to consider how you might be wrong.
You can squeak by miserably on 12k /year. Maybe not where you live but you probably live somewhere with a healthy economy. I know plenty of places where 1000/mo is enough for an apartment or a room, some bus fare, and groceries.
I'm one of them. Just a few hundred or so over $12,000 for me. It's not much, but it works for the basics.
I'm on disability and I don't work, but if I had UBI instead, I could try getting a job again or even try starting my own business. I don't know if I can handle working because it's been a long time since I've worked. Unfortunately, if I start working again right now, my disability will be cancelled. Before anyone starts chastising me about work ethic or being a leech or whatever, just read on for a bit to understand why this could risk ruining my life.
If I were to have my disability cancelled, I would be giving up guaranteed money (which I need for rent and food), plus basic dental coverage, plus prescription drug coverage (which saves me about $1,500 a month) and trading it for the possibility of a little bit more money (which I don't need, but would be nice), minus all the benefits that I would have to start paying for out of pocket. If I were to lose my job or if my business were to flop before it ever gains any momentum, I'd have to go through months of waiting for approval after reappling for disability. Sometimes this process can take over a year if my application is rejected, because that would force me to go through several bureaucratic stages of appeal. During all of that time I'd have no means of paying rent or eating food.
The end result is that I could become homeless as a result of trying to get employed. That terrifies me, so I'm going to stay on disability and let the rest of my country feed and shelter me until we get a better solution. The idea of UBI doesn't just sound interesting or appealing to me, it feels like my only way back into the work force. I miss work. I'd like to go back to actually earning my money again. It felt really good. This was over ten years ago. The stigma of being unemployed is terrible. Those of you who have a job -- or better yet, a career you enjoy -- consider yourselves fortunate, and please think of the complexities before you harshly judge someone who doesn't work.
I may not be employed, but I'm not stupid. I can do the math and assess the risks. Working simply doesn't make sense for me. It's too much of a gamble.
I unfortunately believe that UBI won't end up being the utopian approach to welfare that many seem to think its aimed at being.
In the UK, since the 1990s there has been a big rise in private landlords who refuse to rent to "DSS recipients" (although its not been called DSS for years, the term these days refers to anyone receiving housing benefit). Yes, its illegal discrimination, but it still happens and its on the increase rather than the decrease.
And you can't really blame the private landlords for doing it, as they have some very good reasons.
Coupled with the rise of refusal to rent to housing benefit recipients is the various changes that successive governments have put in place - and the biggest of them all was the switch from local governments paying housing benefit directly to the landlords to instead paying that benefit to the tenant, who is supposed to pay their rent just like anyone else. It was done as a means of "empowering" those on welfare, to give them more visibility of their money and let them feel more in control.
Unfortunately, it led to a massive rise in evictions for non-payment of rent. A lot of those tenants stopped paying their rent and instead bought big screen TVs, holidays, luxury items etc and then used the courts to stall eviction processes (which can take months), leaving landlords with huge debts that were never going to be cleared.
Housing benefit also hasn't risen in line with other government changes which have made owning property to rent significantly more expensive - for instance, landlords can no longer claim tax relief on income that covers the mortgage payments, so to cover that loss rents have to rise, but housing benefit has stayed stagnant meaning more tenants cannot afford to pay the market rate.
So now its hard to find property to rent if you are on housing benefit, either because no one wants to rent to you or because you are priced out of the market by the very government that is supporting you.
UBI might benefit some astute people, but I think using it to replace normal welfare without checks and balances in place will simply lead to more of the above - a lot of people will treat it as free money for luxury items and we are back to square one.
$1000 / month may turn out to be worth next to nothing at all. If UBI is implemented by the process of the government printing more money, then inflation will rapidly devalue the UBI.
That's why you don't implement it that way, or at least if you do, you continually increase the UBI payments to match inflation. A steady rate of inflation is useful because it encourages investment by devaluing cash reserves. Assets don't devalue because of inflation, only because of depreciation — which can be written off.
A better way to implement it, though, is simple taxation. You tax corporate income, not profits.
That will also make the minimum wage worth far less,
If you have UBI, you don't need a minimum wage. People's basic needs are met by UBI, so there's no reason not to let people pay any amount they want for work since nobody is forced to do it just to stay alive.
The only way UBI can "work" without inflation is if economic value is taken from those who produce it (in the form of taxes), and then redistributed.
You are making the classic blunder of assuming that those who collect the largest share of the profit do the largest share of the work, but that is provably false. The worker's share of the profit has been falling for decades. Most of the profit goes to the people at the top, even though they are not the ones producing the economic value. They absolutely should be taxed more, so that the wealth can be redistributed. If they had been willing to share to begin with, and paid workers a fair share of the profits, then we wouldn't need things like UBI because people would have money, and they would put it into their local economies, which is how jobs are actually created.
The UBI assumes that everyone who receives it will spend it wisely, hence eliminating dozens of other government entitlement programs, and that just won't happen.
It may be necessary to also teach household economics in school. We used to do that, but we stopped. We can start again. While we're at it, bring back cooking classes. Make them mandatory for all students. Cooking saves a lot of money. And hey, why not critical thinking, while we're at it?
UBI only becomes possible if we undergo an economic "singularity" where AI + robotics + cheap energy creates a society where basic food, clothing, and shelter become effectively "free".
We're rapidly approaching that point. We throw away about as much food as we consume, just for convenience's sake. Clothing costs pennies to produce per garment, unless it's made out of cotton which is now threatened by climate change. We know how to make excellent (not just adequate) shelters out of burlap bags filled with dirt, and barbed wire. (You still need a roof, but if you don't build large structures, roofs made of recycled steel are cheap.) It costs more in some locations just to get the permits to build a traditional 1-bedroom house than it does to buy the materials. And then, of course, there's shipping containers; they are literally a problem, stacking up at ports because nobody wants them, which is in turn a result of regulation as well — you need to do certain types of fumigation when going into certain ports, while other ports won't permit containers which have been treated in certain ways into their ports at all. So container re-use is at probably an all-time low... But that leaves them available to build homes with.
And in that case, you'll find that your government-produced commodities will be treated as undesirable assets because "only poor people accept them".
So what? In what way is that a problem? Poor people will still benefit from them.
The real long-term answer to making UBI or indeed any system work is education, but both parties (though mostly the reps) have deliberately attacked educa
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"