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The First Basic Income Experiment in Germany Will Start in 2019 (basicincome.org)
Basic income is going to be tested in Germany next year. From a report: The setup of the experiment will be similar to the one now ending in Finland, which means there will be an unconditional cash transfer to 250 randomly selected people among those already receiving benefits (250 others will act as the control group), and evaluate the impact in terms of labor market behavior, health and social relations. Behind this initiative, to be initiated in May 2019, is the Sanktionsfrei organization, a non-profit managed by volunteer professionals from administration, IT-tech, communications and law. Sanktionsfrei (meaning "free from sanctions"), with headquarters in Berlin, specializes in helping sanctioned citizens by the Hartz IV social security system in Germany. It will conduct this experiment in Berlin, for a 3-year period, accepting volunteers who may apply for it through their website.
You can't tell how it actually works unless everyone gets it and the society is given enough time to adjust to it.
The people who run the world have announced their intention to starve us to death..
Nonsense. I'm sure every Tuesday will be soylent green day. Om nom nom!
It's always a rope held by someone, whether honestly or not, whether accountable or not.
I'd rather have someone who could be held accountable and isn't above the law.
I'd rather a rope of high quality because all resources were put into just the one, than a hundred million rusty ladders that are still being held but could collapse at any moment. Especially as the screams of those falling from the ladders are getting worse.
You're welcome to your choice, just don't get in the way of mine. I'm tired of do-gooders telling me my choices are wrong, my culture is wrong and my philosophy of efficient, compassionate, cooperative societies is wrong.
I don't like their views either, but I'm not into trying to deprive them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oh how lovely.
Give the masses just enough income so that they do not take notice of your ill gotten wealth and tyranny and rise up and hang you in your guilded enclave. We can not allow people to actually contribute to society, work and profit from their own endeavors and be independant could we?
Oh heavens forbid no!
Merry Xmas slaves and Happy New Year!
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Is a sensible, logical, rational, cheap way to run a society, and gives the electorate the power to hire or fire those controlling the supply.
It doesn't make people lazy, all evidence says the opposite. Every scrap of evidence shows that crippling people's ability to work is what makes people lazy but that UI facilitates work.
It also facilitates good work, employers can't risk unsafe or abusive conditions. Furthermore, healthy people with adequate resources can - and probably will - work harder as a result.
Real work is about feeling fulfilled and productive, deep inate human needs, not about surviving to the weekend and dying young from work-related conditions.
There are other philosophies. Other countries are welcome to them, so long as they keep them to themselves. Every country should be free to live as it pleases, not as some other country's pet.
Will Germany's program meet the requirements? Doubt it. It's not a scale invariant concept, the numbers aren't statistically useful, the Germans are too rightwing to think collectively.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
FTFA -- it's not the best translation but doesn't feel like a translation issue:
Participants will receive unconditionally the amount from whatever sanctions they will be subject to by job centers (e.g.: by not responding to certain job offers or refusing to get suggested training actions); Sanktionsfrei will always try to recover the sanction money through legal action, and if it does, the participant will transfer the contested amount back to Sanktionsfrei. Otherwise, each participant gets, for the whole time period of the experiment, the full amount of their social security benefits, no questions asked.
It would be really interesting if two people who disagree on the likelihood of success could agree on how to measure the success of this experiment.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to measure success of this experiment in a year or two or three, such that those who think it's a good idea AND those who think it won't work can both agree it's a reasonable way to measure success?
Posts above mine claim that all UBI studies have failed, and that UBI proponents always say "the study had to fail because not everyone in the country got it". If that's not true, is there any UBI proponent here who can imagine any way this study could support their position? What outcome of this study would you consider "success"?
Personally, based on history I think UBI is a really bad idea, but I'm open minded enough to look at the results of a study. What positive results should I be looking for? If you make a reasonable suggestion, I might agree that the result you suggest would in fact indicate a degree of success.
Doesn't self-selection - or even preliminary self-selection - ruin such trials? Your sample doesn't then reflect the average population and you can't extrapolate from it accurately.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes, they are failing by design. Have you paid a sliver of attention to the structure of these things? They are always built with limits and targeting that make them not at all similar to UBI except for the "free money" part. The entire point of these trials is to discredit the concept of UBI through misdirection.
If you think there is any skill that won't be automated in the next five to twenty years, you are insane. There will still be jobs, but they will be fake jobs in which the wealthy are "assisted" by AI rather than replaced by it, to justify their continually rising status. If we don't start shooting soon, income inequality is going to be allowed to increase until there are two types of people: the ones going to Mars, and the ones who will die of orbital bombardment a generation later.
That would perhaps be because there has never been a UBI program, and this is not one?
Or to you not understand what Universal means, and cannot read: 'which means there will be an unconditional cash transfer to 250 randomly selected people among those already receiving benefits'
This is just 'giving more to those already receiving government money' - ie: those least likely to use it well (note I am not commenting on their need, just their likely motivation/ability to work).
Why is it not a TRULY random selection of 250 people? Because the people designing it want it to fail. They cannot accept the possibility that they will lose control of the state dependent level of society where they can basically buy votes in return for welfare.
Simple, really.
besides the desperate struggle for survival. Sure, you might be shallow to want any of them, but what about the rest of us? Folks who can be content to study, read, play video games, write music, paint, write software.
There's this Puritanical belief, crammed into your skull by various ruling classes, that the only thing that gives meaning to human life is desperately working to survive. We'd shook it off in the 60s and 70s, at least in the nerd community, and were looking forward to a life without constant toil and desperation. And somehow, against all odds, we sucked it down again.
I don't get it. In 2018 we shouldn't be struggling to survive. And we sure as hell shouldn't be romanticizing a desperate struggle for survival. I mean, I get that it's easy to fall for propaganda (that's kinda D'Souza's thing, he's a propagandist) but you'd think we'd have grown out of that too. It's not like we don't know what it is.
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What continuously astounds me is people who dont understand that true UBI is actually a right wing/liberal concept.
Most people forget that UBI involves the REMOVAL of almost all other state payouts.
No pension, no unemployment, no housing, no sickness/disability benefit, no parental benefit, etc, etc.
State medical care is a gray area..
That is the reason UBI can function, because it removes a huge amount of corruption, bureaucracy, fraud, and inefficiency from the system and replaces it with something almost trivial to administer and deliver.
It removes the punishments for trying to succeed.
Politically, Socialists generally HATE UBI (at least those who understand it) as they believe the state is the best at decising how everything is distributed, and UBI is exactly the opposite of that.
Unfortunately it ALSO removes the states ability to reward and punish based on cash payouts to voters.
That is why it is never actually tried, and probably never will be, at least by a state - since it lowers their control.
I am fairly certain that other countries having recovered from WWII, while they stayed neutral in the conflict, had nothing to do with it right?
Technically speaking, these are not experiments, these are trial runs to gauge impact and outcomes in order to establish the best method by which to handle automation. Clearly labour concentration camps which you are no allowed to leave unless you have a job to do for the 1% will, well, no matter how hard they try and how many they imprison and how many they kill, will not work, they will fail, they seem to have finally accepted this. Though they still demand to live in opulent, extraordinarily wasteful and exceedingly polluting life styles, as individuals they consume and pollute at thousands of times the rate of the normies, the average, basically putting the psychopathy of the 1% on public display as a virtue, this image managed and protected by corporate main stream media. Plus of course the message to the normies, that they deserve to have bugger all and it is their fault.
It was never about the money a society had to spend, that is a lie, it is about the resources they have to share and how those resources are shared and in the case of lack of resources, how surpluses of resources within a society can be traded with other societies for resources that are insufficient. This of course has been wildly perverted by psychopathic individuals to enrich themselves at the expense of the societies no longer served but simply exploited. Exploiting societies for resources, flooding cheap resources from exploited societies to crush resource production in other societies, crippling labour markets, disrupting economies on a major scale, impoverishing societies on both ends of that deal, to enrich the psychopathic individual. Clearly an overhaul is required, probably the first smart move, find the psychopaths and remove them from position of governance, control and influence because they will corrupt them, not sometimes but every single time.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I believe something needs to be done to keep society functioning if, as many expect, automation will lead to a fall in the demand for labour.
But I am skeptical of universal basic income, and there are aspects that for some strange reason never seem to be discussed:
1. Whose definition of basic? Is it subsistence, or some minimum of material comfort?
2. There are people with light mental illness who will still need social workers intervening in their management of adult responsibilities.
3. What happens if there's a change in technology or other societal change (could be global warming, or something else) that leads to a massive labour shortage?
4. Will there be inflation? Will changes in housing costs force people to relocate against their will?
5. Will people really be able to lead meaningful lives without employment? (Maybe you will, but will everyone?)
that finding meaning is remarkably easy. Especially in a civilization where so few are needed to do actual work .
Also, you have completley misunderstood basic income. BI means giving everyone enough for food, shelter healthcare, education and a modicum of entertainment. This has enormous society consequences. Here are a few:
1. People don't have to live in major cities just to have work. Housing prices will drop as a result.
2. The wealthy can no longer leverage their wealth into power as easily. They lose the threat of starvation and death from lack of medical care.
3. People can't be frightened into turning on each other by demagogues. Society as a whole becomes more stable.
4. The bad decisions people make when stressed (multiple studies have shown pressure does _not_ make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact) stop.
I can't overstate the impact of #2 and #3. And these are just the most obvious. Keeping our entire society except a lucky few at the top in a constant state of mild terror at the prospect of losing everything has far reaching consequences.
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Germany already has a professional unemployed class who collect "hartz 4".
These people already know all the tricks to keep getting their benefits and to rarely pay rent and not get kicked out.
If you are a property owner in Germany, the first rule is NEVER rent to a person on H4. While they are on H4, you are paid by the unemployment center. If the people get a low paying job or a part time job, then they have to pay you and not the H4 office. Which means you will likely never see a cent.
Then, since they are on H4, it is almost impossible to get them out of your building.
Even if they are literally destroying your building, you still need to start a long and costly legal battle which can take months to finally get them removed.
Then, the parasites move to the next victim.
Are there people who need a helping hand? Of course. Should we, as a society help them? Of course.
But we also need a common sense way of doing it. Why are people allowed to just keep popping out more and more babies so they never have to work?
I know many people who took a chance on H4 people and nearly every single one of them got totally screwed over for trying to help them out.
The only thing more money in their pockets will do is let them buy more stuff. Which I guess is great for the local liquor markets.
The "B" in "UBI" means basic, i.e., enough to pay for what you need, not what you want. If you think getting $400 a month is like getting hooked on meth, then you've obviously never tried meth.
I'm a libertarian who supports an UBI program:
My general plan:
Around $6k/year, paid in monthly installments of approximately $500 per person. This happens to be the federal poverty line for a household of 4. I'll also listen to proposals for $8k per adult, $4k per child(perhaps sliding by age?).
Eliminate all other non-medical welfare payments.
Restructure the tax system. It was neater before Trump changed things up, but basically eliminate the first two tax brackets and bump up the 3rd by 1-2% to pay for it. You don't need the lower tax brackets with the UBI providing initial support.
Payments are limited to US Citizens who are in country for a similar period as required eligibility for the Alaskan PFD. Non-Citizen legal residents and citizens who fail to meet the eligibility requirements get an equivalent non-refundable credit.
The goal is mainly to streamline the welfare system, eliminating welfare cliffs that encourage people to NOT work. With a proper UBI, you are always better off earning more money, as I'm only taxing it back at around 25%, could be as high as 33%, once you figure in state adjustments. Yes, this means that you'd only start paying federal taxes at $24k of income per person, maybe as low as $18k. Remember, this is per person income, not household. So the system is quite heavily progressive.
1. My definition is closer to subsistence. Basically, I'm for $6k/year, which is the federal poverty line in a grouping of four. Since I'm agnostic about somebody's actual living circumstances under the program, obviously some will be able to have more material comforts than others. The way I look at it, paying more for single person households, per person, just encourages people to live alone. The idea is to give them unrestricted money, allowing them to maximize their happiness/comfort with their specific situation, rather than having the government trying to tell them how to live. IE food stamps - you MUST spend $X on food, even if that is more food budget than you need, but you need to fix your car more urgently, etc...
2. This is tricky, I generally toss this stuff over to the medical side. IE you'd get social workers from medicare/medicaid, not through the morass of different welfare systems. My libertarianism is for great freedom and responsibility for competent adults. If they aren't a competent adult, such as you describe, or children, of course they need to be taken care of and protected.
3. Look towards WWII, I guess. Massive labour shortage there. Basically, as long as you haven't indexed the UBI too tightly to inflation, what would happen is that wages would start rising, inflating the cost of goods and services. The relative wages for working would rise, the relative lifestyle solely dependent upon the UBI would fall, and more people would get jobs.
4. Implementing a UBI as I would have the program should result in minimal amounts of inflation. Changes in housing costs forcing people to relocate? Probably. I'm mean like that. I'd compare it to being on a sinking ship, if you can no longer afford the rent you'll probably find yourself being unable to afford the other stuff shortly enough. You SHOULD move in such cases, as it is ultimately better for all. States and cities may, at their discretion, supplement the UBI with their own programs, of course.
5. This is a philosophical question where my first thought is "how many people live meaningful lives with employment?" I'll point out that "employment" is a fairly new thing. Even then, years ago you had around half the population solely concerned with running the household, and many of them found it meaningful. I guess it is up to the individual.
I don't read AC A human right
Same with Electrical. I worry not about robots taking my job. I do however worry about self-entitled people trying to take the money I earned for doing my job.