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Alaska's Universal Basic Income Doesn't Increase Unemployment (businessinsider.com)
With Alaska's gubernatorial election coming up, Business Insider brings up a report from earlier this year which finds that the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend -- the only large-scale universal basic income program in the U.S. -- doesn't increase unemployment like many feared. An anonymous reader shares the report: The vast majority of Alaska's roughly 740,000 citizens support the dividend, which gives virtually every citizen an annual check of about $1,000 to $2,000 (that's $4,000 to $8,000 for a family of four), and both political parties in the state are in favor. Alaskans' feelings about this universal cash transfer are supported by the findings of a working paper published in February that was written by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professor Damon Jones and University of Pennsylvania School of Public Policy and Practice professor Ioana Marinescu -- the annual dividend does not realize fears that such a program would lead people to quit their jobs, lowering employment.
An additional $8,000 for a family is certainly not going to replace a livable income, but, as Jones and Marinescu noted in their paper, studies around a cash assistance experiment in the 1970s, lottery winnings, and a permanent fund dividend for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reduced earned income, and critics of any universal basic income programs have pointed to such findings as proof that anything on a larger scale would be a disaster. But Jones and Marinescu found instead that the larger scale of the program is what allows it to work, and not dissuade people out of the work force. More specifically, Jones and Marinescu determined that part-time employment increased by 17% only in the non-tradable sector (jobs whose output isn't traded internationally), and that overall employment wasn't affected because more spending money results in more demand, and thus more jobs.
An additional $8,000 for a family is certainly not going to replace a livable income, but, as Jones and Marinescu noted in their paper, studies around a cash assistance experiment in the 1970s, lottery winnings, and a permanent fund dividend for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reduced earned income, and critics of any universal basic income programs have pointed to such findings as proof that anything on a larger scale would be a disaster. But Jones and Marinescu found instead that the larger scale of the program is what allows it to work, and not dissuade people out of the work force. More specifically, Jones and Marinescu determined that part-time employment increased by 17% only in the non-tradable sector (jobs whose output isn't traded internationally), and that overall employment wasn't affected because more spending money results in more demand, and thus more jobs.
You demonstrate why leftists cannot be trusted to run economies.
Guy with $0 goes out and turns raw materials into wealth creating value out of nothing increasing the amount both people have. He does not have to have the government take money from the $100 guy in order to eat. You leftists are so fucking stupid you are unable to understand how economics actually works.
"Nobody will go against the will of the government "
People have gone against the will of the government since the country was founded.
The money paid out each year to Alaskan citizens is not a "Universal Basic Income". The money is the result of legislation that provides Alaskan citizens with money generated by the Alaskan oil drilling. It was an attempt to satisfy those who had environmental concerns about allowing oil companies to extract oil.
The bonehead who wrote the article plainly stated that the money paid out was not enough to live on. If it is not enough to live on then why would people quit working? Why would you expect unemployment to grow?
The "Universal Basic Income" will never happen. It would be funded by taxes. The people who would continue working will never put up with their taxes being used to pay for people doing nothing.
I see you drank the cool-aid. You should take a basic economics course. Socialism doesn't work the way you think it does. The people who end up paying for it are the ones at the bottom. The elite will flee if you take too much and those at the bottom ultimately will be deprived of there resources via taxation. They get end up getting government services as a result, but it'll come at a higher cost due to bureaucratic inefficiencies. Then the poorest end up having less resources to cover things that might just be more essential than medical coverage. I don't know. Like say a roof over ones head. My partner who was employed in Massachusetts when they implemented socialist health care there ended up getting sick because of it in fact. He got to keep his job- but his ultimate income declined after the mandatory health care law went into effect. He could no longer afford the roof over his head and ended up on the street. Being unable to cover rent he got sick and when he went to the hospital with his government health insurance the doctors office told him they would take it and then a week later they wouldn't see him at his very first appointment. The doctors who 'signed up' to partake in the program ultimately quit because they weren't getting enough $$$. Then the ones who were left only pretended to see patients. I know because my partner literally saw a doctor for less than 60 seconds. They wouldn't do any tests and basically just kicked him out. This wasn't some foreign speaking individual who didn't understand what was going on. He was a middle class kid going to college while at the same time working a part time job. He eventually dropped out because of the whole ordeal and ended up sleeping on a couch of someone kind enough to let him in the door. He proceeded to work for a contractor at $20 hour part time making less than he did working at a grocery store. He was a system admin basically. That $20 / hr contract work ended up with less than $10 / hr of actual pay. The state then went after him for not having health insurance all the while he couldn't even afford the rent to keep a roof over his head. This is what your shitty socialist health care system does. It might work out fine for some, but others get shafted. If he had a parent, a room, food, and other essentials paid for maybe it wouldn't have been a problem. But why should he have to get health insurance, food aid, and everything else when he was fully capable of covering the essentials on his own had the government not intervened in the first place? By the way- he finally just moved across the boarder to NH and his problems went away. They don't have as much of this socialist bull shit here. Though Massachusetts continued to give him shit for years after. He had to "prove" he left the state and all sorts of other bull shit.
Alaska has some of if not the biggest oil reserves in the U.S., and makes money from selling oil to the lower 48 states. Instead of the state keeping those proceeds, it distributes it to Alaskan citizens. That makes it different from a UBI because the money comes from actual productivity. Something of value which belonged to each Alaskan citizen was sold, and they are receiving payment for it. Productive transactions like this are positive-sum (both the buyer and seller benefit), and are what make the economy work.
That makes it different from a UBI where there's no additional productivity. In a UBI, you're just redistributing money among the population - taking from the more productive citizens via taxes, and distributing it to other citizens. That makes it zero-sum (one person wins, another person loses). It can have a positive influence if the people receiving the money were underpaid (what Ford stumbled upon when he paid his workers more) or causes people not to create other costs on society (e.g. not resorting to crime). Or it can have a negative influence if it leads people to decrease their average productivity because they'll get money regardless of whether they work.
Venezuela is the perfect example of the difference between the two. When their oil exports were strong, it generated enough productivity (revenue from outside the country) to support their cushy socialist programs. But when the price of oil fell and that source of productivity dried up, they should've cut back the programs to match their decreased revenue. Instead, they tried to maintain the programs at the previous level. That doesn't work because unlike money, productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed has to be produced. If you try to create the illusion that production and consumption are not equal, the economy usually responds by altering the value of your currency to make the valuations of the two equal.
That's what's driving the tremendous inflation they're experiencing. Basically the country is creating $100 in productivity, but promising its citizens $500 in handouts to consume stuff. When you do that, the currency devalues (suffers inflation) so that it now costs $500 to buy what used to cost $100, thereby keeping production and consumption equal.
Most of you commenting here don't even understand the basics of where money comes from. Banks create money out of THIN AIR every time they make a loan to somebody - most of the money in existence was created by banks (not the Fed - who also create it out of thin air).
https://positivemoney.org/
Where did you think they came from?
Like all things, they came from the efforts of the laborers, and were derived from the natural resources of the land.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with using FOSS as an example of communism is that consumption isn't limited. The method only works for "intellectual property". If I decide to code for free it doesn't matter of 1 person uses the software or half the planet does - my work was still fixed in scope.
On the other hand, if we're talking about vegetables rather than code, as each person consumes, what they consumed must be replaced, and that entails work.
I'm sure if there was some way that we could plant a field harvest it once and nobody would ever go hungry again, you'd have plenty of volunteers. Sadly, that just isn't the case.
That aside, this whole premise is laughable. This isn't UBI - $1000 per person annually is basically less than a lot of people get as a tax refund each year. It doesn't increase unemployment because IT'S NOT ENOUGH TO LIVE ON (this is also side-stepping the issue that generally unemployment is a measure of the people without jobs who are LOOKING for a job - so it's not a good metric anyways since the fear with UBI is that people wouldn't even want to look anymore, leading to them technically not be "unemployed").
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain