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Finland's Basic Income Experiment Shows Recipients Are Happier and More Secure (yahoo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Unemployed people derive significant psychological benefits from receiving a fixed amount of financial support from the state, according to a landmark experiment into basic income in Finland that highlights the disadvantages of the country's existing means-tested system.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit. Thursday's set of additional results from the social insurance institution Kela showed that those getting a basic income described their financial situation more positively than respondents in the control group. They also experienced less stress and fewer financial worries than the control group, Kela said in a statement... They had more trust in other people and social institutions, and showed more faith in their ability to have influence over their own lives, in their personal finances and in their prospects of finding employment
Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
financial security makes people feel financially secure.
An unemployed person SHOULD be worried about money.
"were no more and no less likely to work than their counterparts receiving traditional unemployment benefit" So UBI will cause people to act like they are getting money for not working.
In my 50s and looking to retire early. I have plenty of money so I will take that deal and let you pay for my retirement.
Fuck the next generation. I do not care that you will have to pay for my retirement and that you will have no choice.
That is socialism you incel faggot left wingers.
It's a fascinating study and i applaud Finland for this experiment. But i wonder if the psychology of these people will change as they get use to this basic income, and then, over time, they take it for granted and even forget it is there. In other words, will they return to a state of depression over time?
Get a job you boring basic bitch.
I'd be happier if people gave me money too. Particularly when you give me but not others money. And when you remind me of the fact that you are giving me money right before asking me how happy I am.
Sorry but this whole study is flawed and the results are useless.
2k participants from a cherry-picked sample set is not a national level test.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Unfortunately the experiment was rushed, lasted too short a time and wasn't really seen as a success story, really.
If they really want more concete proof one way or another, the experiment needs to be re-run with different parameters.
The assumption is that a radical program like the UBI won't change the economics of the society in which it's implemented. Who's to say that the productivity that allows for implementing a UBI will remain sufficient to keep a UBI working in the long term?
I wouldâ(TM)ve thought that the government giving people more money would either lead to prices rising (as people have more money and can therefore afford to pay more) or the currency going down in value (as there is more of it) or probably both of these things.
The only representative experiment would be if they would offer:
- a living wage,
- until the end of their lives,
- for minimum wage workers.
The amount of people who quit their jobs should tell you if UBI is feasible at all, or not.
with the psychological reasons for fasting as part of many religions (there are separate health benefits as well). You don't know what you have until you lose it. Perhaps having a periodic once a year lapse in UBI (with the difference spread across the 'normal' months.) would help remind people what it is like to live without it, while still providing the social net, but also a healthy respect for it being offered.
Like everything else in life, the true reason for moderation is not just to avoid overindulgence, but to help give you an appreciation for what you are given, or what you have access to.
They take money from me and then give it back sans what they give to other people who aren't working - and, of course, a processing fee.
As automation improves and less work is needed, we need to get over this ancient idea that one must work to make a living. Work is necessary for our mental health, but meaningful work - work that we find interesting and engaging - is what makes us happy.
And it funny how many people have a problem with lower class people not having to work, but a someone who inherited billions and site back and does nothing and collects dividends from their investments in say student loan lenders is A-OK: they still aren't working.
Wouldn't it be wonderful that instead of taking that job in corporate America that just continues to damage society in order to make a living and pay student loans, we can actually do something that helps society?
I knew quite a few law grads that dreamed of working for environmental causes only to end up at ExxonMobile because they got to pay those loans. Or wanting to help people who got screwed over by Wall Street only to have to work for them.
Or graduate with that CS degree wanting to be a FOSS dev only to have to sell your soul to facebook because the loans to go to Stanford are killing you.
This live to work attitude in the US is just twisted. And one day, you wake up old fat and sick and cast to the curb because your employer doesn't want you anymore. Oh, entrepreneurship is no easy street. For every successful person out there, there are many who failed and lost it all and now are working a second job cleaning bathrooms are WalMart - thanks to the new banking laws that makes failure a lifelong burden.
UBI will actually boost the economy because it will allow more people to take risks and increase the chances of new organizations that will hire people - increasing the tax base for cool social programs like this and single payer healthcare. Which is another topic: Let's change it so that medical care isn't a luxury like it is in the USA.
Until it tells you "no"
Now bend over.
This is at odds with the need for a steady supply of desperate workers, ready for exploitation by the wealthy. Sorry, wealth creators I mean.
Attention UBI fanboys: UBI will not scale up, it would completely bankrupt a nation, and breed generations of completely useless, entitled people with no drive to accomplish anything whatsoever, who would whine and cry every year that the payments are TOO SMALL and should be MORE. GIVE IT UP, it's a fantasy, you will be working the rest of your lives. Tough shit for you, deal with it.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants . . .
Whether people receiving UBI are more or less happy is irrelevant. Giving away free money to 2,000 people is easy. Giving it to 100 Million people, not so much.
Giving a meaningful amount of money to a large percentage of the population is unsustainable. Period.
That's not what incel means....
...how do the taxpayers feel about it?
I mean, why is it that when Donald Trump got rich he kept doing business deals? It's been shown that if he just stuck the money his dad gave him in an index fund it would have outperformed his business deals by a sizeable margin and with less risk.
Why is it only poor people getting financial security that ends all drive to do anything else? I mean, nobody ever calls the Job Creators out for that behavior because they don't do it. It's almost as if yes, you can motivate people with starvation but, no, you don't need to.
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If you did, you'd still be stuck with VB6
Seriously, why is this a thing that keeps showing up on slashdot? There are have been many articles about this, showing that unshockingly it does not work. It is not some profoundly new idea. It is merely welfare, with a new name. While welfare can really help people in the short term, what is found is that people need more than just food, they need purpose. UBI fails at this.
So I have to ask: Given all this, why does it keep coming up on these forums again and again. This seems to be a classic case of the NPC meme, where some just repeat what some influence tells them. No thought is given, just that someone with supposed authority says so. I find that immensely sad on these forums. We are better than this. We are supposed to be source of good ideas, not a parrot repeating stuff.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
"free" money is fine...until you keep TAKING money away from the people who EARN it, the corporations that EARN it. In the latter, they can LEAVE the country, but most people cannot.
Just giving a couple of people some money called UBI instead of a similar amount of money as "unemployment benefit" is not "a test of UBI at the national level". UBI in different incarnations has many implications, and without adding it all together the test doesn't really test UBI...
Why are people always so concerned with what 'others' are getting. It doesn't matter to you.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It was too expensive because they didn't do it right.
Yeah, just like REAL socialism or communism has never ben tried either!
Nice to have another one to add to the list.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gee - people like free money. Duh.
I've chosen not to work since 2008. I don't get any govt assistance and have been living off savings though I'm below the poverty level.
I'd love free money, except my morals won't allow it because I'm able to work, if I wanted. It might not be a job I'd enjoy, but that's why they call it WORK.
Get off your ass. Get a job.
Initial results of the two-year study had already shown that its 2,000 participants . . .
Whether people receiving UBI are more or less happy is irrelevant.
It very much is not. Takes 2 braincells to rub together to see that and you are obviously lacking. People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
the angry, inbred uneducated incels scream obscenely at literalte society about all the ways happy security is teh evul socialism that will sap our precious bodily fracking fluids...
Spoken like an AC without an actual argument
The people who are proposing the radical program are the people who must explain why they are correct to take resources from people at the point of a gun in order to redistribute them.
That makes them happy, and more secure. How is that news? ANYONE wants to get money for doing nothing. The problem is paying people for doing nothing, and the required people that have to do something in order to pay for people that sit around and have kids that again do nothing.
He said "essentially no benefit", not just "no benefit"; your rebuttal is a straw man, as usual.
Improved happiness or security is not sufficient—a claim made objective by the fact that the study was stopped for being too expensive.
Why would people quit their careers when they know it's a transient research project? Hell, many participants might want such a program to look successful, and thus keep their jobs for that purpose.
I swear. This is why socialism fails; you people refuse to acknowledge the existence of self-interest. In contrast, try a philosophy that embraces self-interest, and seeks to direct it towards behavior that profits all of society (e.g., Capitalism).
" They see people almost being denied a supreme court seat because they once had a beer while in school." - No, he perjured himself under oath. It's not the beer, you lying faggot. IT'S THE LYING, YOU LYING FAGGOT.
YOU TELL A LIE UNDER OATH AND YOU ARE A CRIMINAL. That he basically ATTEMPTED TO RAPE A CLASSMATE also didn't really rise to the occasion of a lifetime appointment to the SCOTUS without investigation.
But with TRAITOR SUPPORTING DISHONEST FAGGOTS LIKE YOURSELF in charge? He sailed right through anyway, to lie another day.
Dry your eyes, traitor. Your little perjurer didn't get caught - yet!
https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13577626&cid=58274188
When I am young and trying to decide a career path, it is very important for me to know "what others are getting," so I can choose a path that optimizes the rewards. And while on that path, it still matters, as I need to use that as a check to see if I can better my lot by switching jobs.
Some valuables, such as land, are purchased by bidding wars. If others are making significantly more than me, they can outbid me, and I can't get the house I want. In order to make sure that sort of deprivation doesn't harm me, I need to know what others are getting so I can make sure I am on-par.
Heil!
I wonder why this post has way more anonymous cowards commenting than typical. Are they afraid of people knowing that they're against social safety nets? Maybe they are yelling into the void, so as to assert their opinion without being challenged to support it.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
It also shows they didn't go out and find jobs because of it.
Here is a better article about this experiment:
https://medium.com/basic-income/what-is-there-to-learn-from-finlands-basic-income-experiment-did-it-succeed-or-fail-54b8e5051f60
What are the strings attached to "traditional" unemployment benefit in Finland?
Participants were no more and NO LESS likely to look for work than those receiving traditional unemployment benefits. So the incentivisation designed into traditional welfare systems has zero effect, but has a high cost to administer. So we should remove it, because it makes no difference and society would be just as productive, plus happier, without it.
People that are happier are less sick and more willing to buy stuff, both which are of significant benefit economically.
If you give away a trillion dollars, of course the people receiving it will be happy and spend it.
But the people paying the taxes to fund it will be less happy and have less to spend.
We had a trade deficit of $621B last year. That is the gap between what America consumes and what we produce. "More spending" is the last thing we need especially when much of it is going to Asia. We will just have less investment and even bigger deficits. Incentives to be productive would do a lot more good than incentives to consume more.
Means test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Working? No UBI unless income falls to poverty level.
Part time work? No UBI unless hours fall and income is reduced.
Not working for any reason? UBI.
Gov approved education? UBI and extra support.
Citizenship tests for all UBI payments. UBI only goes into an approved new type of bank account with photo ID and gov ID.
No getting the UBI outside of the nation.
That would reduce costs to the working tax payers of a nation and let people with no ability to work have the UBI security they need.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
the wealthy show that people can and will do things even when they don't have to work to survive. Complete Ne'er do wells are the exception among the wealthy, not the rule.
The only thing the constant threat of death does is keep people in their place. It drives people to be conservative (that's little 'c' conservative, i.e. opposing to change, not "Politically Conservative", meaning far right wing and leaning towards or outright celebrating authoritarian leaders in the oligarchy). This lets the folks at the top cow tow us all and keep on taking 50, 60, sometimes even 80% of all wealth generated by society for themselves. And even with all that it's not enough, they want more.
Humans will do things even if they don't have to. A scientist is just plain going to get bored sitting around all day. They're not scientists out of fear, they're scientists out of curiosity. Once we started down the path of automation that was mechanical farming we started making the non-stop struggle for existence obsolete. At this point we're just doing it out of fear, hate and short sightedness.
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Where's mine?
Liberal beta male?
This concept only works until they run out of other people's money. As more and more people decide they don't "need" to work, there will be less and less people working and less and less money. TBH, I hope some country will really try to implement this at full scale - that way, we can all watch and applaud as it collapses. This is just more "free stuff for everyone" propaganda from politicians trying to trick the uneducated lower class people into voting them into power.
With iron-clad reasoning and command of the facts such as this, you can tell the world is in very good hands.
aww... their feelings are so valuable to us a society, and also their art, that will put us out of the solar system!
The article is both meaningless and misleading.
Of course people with a safety net are happier and feel more secure. Anybody who needs to do a study to find that out is brain-dead.
BUT... this is NOT the first national-level UBI system to be tested. Their neighbors in Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s. For practical purposes it was a UBI: if you were not working, you simply got a check from the government, basically no questions asked. And it was a decent, living-wage amount, too. A Swedish employee of our company said, "Man, you people work HARD. I like that. Back home, if someone doesn't want to work, they just don't. They get a check from the government anyway."
As a result, over a period of about 20 years, Sweden's per-capita GDP went from 4th in the world to 14th.
This illustrates that a short-term "test" is probably insufficient for a real measure of the program.
And lest anyone doubt it was cause-effect, in the 90s they realized that their system was causing productivity issues, so they cut it way back. Over time (about another 20 years) their per-capita GDP went right back up where it was in the early 70s.
Lesson learned. Or it should be, anyway. All other trials of similar systems have resulted in a conclusion of "unsustainable".
Agree with Bill.
Plus, offshoring of manufacturing and so on not only leads to trade deficits, but a notable secondary effect is loss of jobs in the same industries at home.
For some reasons most economists don't talk about that one very much, but it's very important.
It doesn't matter how cheap your goods are, if you don't have a job to pay for them. Yes, employment is booming now, but part of that is because many manufacturing jobs have been brought back home.
Vote $2000/month in 2020
President $2000/mo has your back, bro.
Sure, it's going to more than double the budget, but with MMT (Magical Monetary Theory) having been conclusively proven to be legit by that eThot in Congress (AOC), it's a problem for somebody else, right?
Until the rents rise an average of $2,000 as people are willing to spend more of that extra money towards it. Then that basic income will start to feel like $2,000 less than the minimum.
There's this thing called the hedonic treadmill, and having extra money doesn't tend to make you happier over the long term, but it does wonders over the short term.
Things tend to be such that you're either a saver or you're a borrower. Doesn't matter what your income is, people making over $200k a year are often living paycheck to paycheck, just as people on minimum wage are often savers. It all depends on whether you choose to live above your means or below your means.
Uh....it will all get spent. Macro wise it is a net gain.
Y A N G G A N G 2020
Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s. For practical purposes it was a UBI: if you were not working, you simply got a check from the government, basically no questions asked.
That's not UBI. The "U" means universal, which means you receive it even if you work.
The fake UBI that you described doesn't give anything to working people, which results in perverse incentives. Be a lazy bum and everything's good, but if you put in some effort, the system stops helping you. It actively discourages people from working.
You have to consider that the UBI won't exist in a vacuum and will most likely get distorted by the mega corporations to reach their goals.
So the first question you have to ask is, "what exxon mobil will try to use it for?".
I think they will try to use it as a bludgeoning tool to remove smaller corporations from existence by erasing jobs that can be automated, but only if you're a mega billionaire company with budget to spend on this automation.
It's not actually hard to do it. In Finland, significantly higher transfers than that of ~600EUR per month occur to millions of people, in the nation of just five million. It's just that much of it is in money budgeted in services rather than just money itself. So the easy way would be "cut the budgeted services, and just give people the difference".
Effectively none of the problems are in the process of giving itself, provided nation has low corruption rates. High corruption, yes, that would hamper those efforts into effective impossibility. And none of that has anything to do with sustainability of UBI. That is simply a different topic.
It helps to know the meanings of the words you use before you use them.
Broken window fallacy?
No sig today...
Slashdot needs to buy a spam filter. How hard can it be to block racism and hate?
The quality of the comments have gone down the drain. I was a daily /. reader for over 15 years, the idea that I would see a swastika in the comments would not even have occurred to me before. I rarely read the comments now ðY
All the while we heard UBI experiments being carried out in Western countries such as Sweden, Finland, Canada.
How come no one even bother to try experimenting UBI in places like Iraq, or India, or Libya or Syria?
Why not?
The complaint was always and only that "If you get money for doing nothing, everyone will sit at home and DO nothing, and I'll have to work my ass off to pay for it!!!!!". NOT "It might not improve the chances you find a job". Fucking idiot.
Because every time the free market fucks up, it's blamed on the government interference and NOT "CAAApitalism". So when is REAL capitalism going to be tried in the USA? Somalia is trying their best, but it doesn't look like it works for a non-US country. When will YOU try REAL capitalism?
YOUR burden is to prove it is invalid or incorrect or provide a counterargument that shows it is a bad thing. And your private ownership is protected by government at the point of a gun in order for you to exclude others from it. You're fine with THAT, though, because you're an indoctrinated idiot who is told what to believe and does so.
If you really want to test it, pick a small city and implement it there, with it being funded entirely by only the city's working population. And even that won't be a truly accurate test since the people will know the test will end, and will be reluctant to quit their job for fear of having difficulty finding a new job when the test ends.
The closest thing to a real national test of a UBI that I can think of is Venezuela. The government there has promised all its citizens a certain level of free social services. The rampant inflation there is a result of the country's productivity level falling below the amount of productivity necessary to provide those services. Productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed must be produced. When you're producing $100 worth of services but people expect to receive (consume) $200 in services, the economy corrects the inequality by devaluing your currency so the $100 you're producing is now priced at $200 thus equaling what people expect to consume. But since productivity hasn't actually increased (only the pricing ofthe currency has), the people are still receiving $100 worth of services, it's just priced at $200.
There were no fewer people working with the UBI than without, and before you complain, their sample was if anything biased to those who were most likely to laze about if they got "free money". So, yeah, the test proved that your hypothesis fails.
I also notice you did a bait-and-switch there. Your first sentence claims WORKING, the second one talks about PRODUCTIVITY. But if we're talking about PRODUCTIVITY, then that will have been higher. It claimed a definite increase in happiness and wellbeing and many other studies show that a happy workforce is a productive one and an unhappy workforce is less productive.
So which is it? Work or productivity? Because the first one shows now detriment, the second one is better with a UBI.
What a UBI *will* do is remove wage slavery. For those companies running off stealth welfare (their wages are reduced so that their workers still need government aid, saving the company money but increasing welfare costs without increasing the number of people unemployed), they may find they have to pay more or close shop. Then again, if they only exist because of government handouts, they should not be operating anyway.
At most they'll put it overseas in a tax haven. Even if it's invested, that money comes back with interest, so they've stolen the efforts of another who actually used that money to do something productive and provided none of their own effort, their own sweat of the brow, to that endeavour.
What you're doing is the fallacists fallacy, and pretending a case that doesn't exist.
It clearly says that people DON'T stop working if they get a UBI. Moron.
If it's saved overseas it isn't GPD. So stop with the fallacists fallacy.
I don't remember UBI in any of Orwell's work and all of us are dependent on the state to some degree.
that people who work for slave wages will stop working for slave wages and that the corporations you love and adore will have to offer a wage comensurate with the unpleasantness of the work demanded or the CEO will have to clean the shit out of the lavatories themselves.
where it proved that pushing back against corporate overtake of government and rampant capitalism can be VERY bad for your freedom...
Language evolves, get over it. Les brun sum bokhs.
First your description is off, second you draw conclusions not supported by your "data". Was going to post some real information but then realized who you are - no reason to waste any time.
> Finland is the first country in the world to test universal basic incomes at national level.
That's simply not true. France has created the RMI more than 30 years ago (1988), which is basically equivalent to an universal income, except it was not only for 2000 people but for anyone aged 25+ (1.3 million people benefited from it in France in 2010). It's been replaced by the RSA in 2009 and is now at 559,74 €, identical to Finland's universal basic income (more if you're in a relationship or you've children). The difference with the RMI is that the RSA now forces people to actively seek work, which has always been the goal in the first place.
You have to remember that Slashdot became a clickbait shithole; the only reason you still see old timers is because we're creatures of habit that can't quite understand the sites time is long past. Try an experiment - imagine the same articles and comments on a site not called Slashdot, with a different look. Would you visit such a site, or steer well clear?
It's great for the people who receive UBI.
How about those that have to work to ***pay*** for other people's UBI, perhaps at the expense of their or their family's well being? What about *their* stress levels?
Or was that not even considered?
It's becoming about promoting communism more and more, and less about stuff that matters for nerds.
... They ended the experiment.
Of course, they're happy, I would be too. But what if the whole nation decides to sit on their arses and not work ? Who supports it then ?
Yep. This is the first comment I've even posted on slashdot in a long time. I stopped years ago because the site had already fallen to the forerunners of these fascists pretending to be libertarians. It's sad, slashdot used to be a place to get fantastic comments on interesting articles.
No, people are not featureless interchangeable spheres of uniform density. Taking 2000 from a dude with 1,000,000,000 and giving it to a dude with 10,000 means it will get pumped directly into the retail economy and benefit lots of people in the short term, as opposed to being pumped into the financial product casino, where it might benefit people over the long term but will more likely be chipped away into the pockets of other already rich people and serve primarily to make their net worth dick measuring contest tick over here and there, only occasionally entering the economy in a meaningful way.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
If you think happiness is irrelevant you have failed to understand even the very basics of running a civilization. Most people are not like you. Your system, to be elegant, has to account for that.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
My_earnings - my_taxes = my_income
If UBI can be funded through my existing taxes, via a reduction in admin costs then I am all for it. If my_income is reduced by implementing UBI then I am opposed. People receiving UBI may be happier but I will be less happy, since more of my effort is directed to their happiness and not my own. I already pay for other people who are selfish enough to have more children than they can afford.
Don't give them fish, teach them to fish.
Maybe someone will invent some sort of gas that can drug the populace to calm people and weed out aggression. Nothing could go wrong from that.
I live in Sweden. Some of the highest taxes in the world. I made a good amount of money and always paid my taxes. Then I got ill with ME/CFS. Chronic fatigue syndrome, and I rarely work more than 5-7 hours/week. The reason we accepted high taxes was to get help when we needed it, but the social structure for this type of assistance is run quite poorly. I still get money but it was very difficult to get, took a very long time to get, and I still have to put effort in monthly. I was also without income for close to a year. Getting a sick pension is almost impossible. This would be excellent for a lot of sick people.
You do realise that trade deficits and deficit spending are entirely different things, don't you?
Abraham Hitler, you just did a lot of unpaid work.
https://abettereconomy.org/ check it out
It is already spent. We are talking about shifting the SAME DOLLARS OF WELFARE from Means Testing to UBI.
The economic benefit of removing overhead can only be positive.
Just go and donâ(TM)t come back, winging cry baby comments are almost as annoying as anything else.
So giving them free money to buy "stuff" helps the economy? LOL thanks for the ECON-100 lesson, AOC.
"but *real* socialism has never been tried before"
Determined to learn the hard way.
It makes no difference. The money is being stolen from the working population. You are merely giving someone there money back whom is working. The fact you aren't getting that money in the old system is disingenuous because it merely means you didn't pay it in the first place to the government. A certain percentage of people are still being incentivized to not work. This won't be true for everybody- but merely a certain percentage of the population. You are undermining your economic system. You do not want your economic system to collapse the way the different communist systems have collapsed or otherwise undermined the prosperity of the people. You can call it democratic socialism, but at the end of the day it has the same core problems that communism had. The people become dependent on the government and are incentivized from working hard creating inefficiencies that result in worst economic conditions across the board for everyone.
The real test is AFTER the first recipients have become secure. The following generations are what derive success or failure. Having the money when youâ(TM)re used to not having it vs having it and expecting it are two ENTIRELY different psychologies.
Expert calculations show that very little additional taxpayer money will be needed and it may also come down to none at all. The idea that this requires a significant raise in takes is a red-herring. Who do you think currently pays for all the social programs that become obsolete with an UBI? Who do you think pays for the vast administrative overhead? Who do you think pays for people turning to crime, being homeless or getting sick because they do not have money? Right.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Welfare in the USA currently produces a strong incentive to not work because once you start making enough money, the welfare stops. A universal basic income keeps flowing regardless of your income, so at the very least it's less of an incentive to not work than the system which is already in place in the USA.
We're the ones with the money, don't worry, we did years ago; let the knuckle draggers infest the gooey corpse, I'm sure the advertising demographic of pulls-legs-off-animals teenagers and low income no-lifes is reaping dividends for BIZX.
Forchan?
State should ideally provide UBI and promote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
That is the very best contrarian point I've heard made about a ubi to date.
We don't know how it would effect people who haven't experienced wage slavery yet.
Still don't think it's a bad idea but this actually does warrant more study.
What is relevant is that people who receive free money were no more likely to stop working than the control group. That means the system is more likely to succeed than fail. This is, IMHO, a very positive step toward a brighter future for humanity. ~S
BUT... this is NOT the first national-level UBI system to be tested.
Oh! Interesting.
Their neighbors in Sweden implemented a very similar -- but not exactly the same -- program back in the 1970s.
No, they must definitely did not do any such thing.
Source: I am Swedish.
The rest of your post and the developments you talk about have nothing to do with UBI.
It's never universal. Making it so is impossible without extremely fast inflation.
Working people are taxed to pay for the UBI. That tax is UBI they didn't get. When they pass a critical point* you no longer get a UBI because what you paid in taxes and what you get in your UBI check are equal. Beyond that, you're simply paying into the program.
This is just standard welfare with extra steps and a nice sounding name.
*This would depend on the size of the UBI. The more money in the UBI, the less money you'll have to make working to totally burn away the benefit for you.
Expert calculations? Ha..ha...oh... You're serious? American people are expected to buy that it will take the same or a little bit more... maybe? First thing any sane American will ask is, "And you're talking about the government staying on budget, right?"
But B.S. posts like this made me realize it might be a real possibility. And what will happen are two classes, those on and off UBI. There well be AARP style promotions and other freebies, some government assisted too... This will only work if we pretty much all embrace it and encourage each other to really have a gig economy, that is a nation of entrepreneurs and computers handling our cont(r)acts. This is the only way I'll get behind it... and those that facilitate and help should be the most successful...! But of course we could do this now...
it does me heart good to know somebody out there picked up on this idea.
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it's _not_ human nature. Humans have no trouble finding reasons to do stuff, especially really smart ones. The greatest discoveries in the world weren't made by billionaires unless you stretch back so far that only the ultra wealthy had access to even books let alone time to think about something besides food, shelter and war for the king.
Warren Buffet makes a lot of money, but what he doesn't do is advance civilization in any meaningful way. For that you turn to a few tens of thousands of folks at Public Universities making around $120k/yr if they're lucky. Those same guys could go to Wall Street for 10x the pay. Money and survival don't motivate anything but fear, which isn't, as it turns out, all that useful.
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Giving a meaningful amount of money to a large percentage of the population is unsustainable. Period.
"I don't understand UBI" would have been much clearer and more to the point.