If you don't have the skills necessary to get a high-paying job, a basic income won't do a thing to change that.
If you do have the ability to command a high-paying job, there's not a thing stopping you from getting one today. A basic income won't change that.
The guy above made it sound so easy "Want $x a month for luxuries, and have 160 hours of free time a month? Find a job that nets $x/160 per hour." And that's true today: want a job that pays x? go out and find one. Basic income or not, if you have highly-valued skills, you will almost always be highly compensated. Basic income or not, if you have common skills, you will almost never make more than common wages.
I could work a second job to make even more money than I make now. Why don't I? Because it's not worth it to me to trade more of my free time for more money.
NANCY PELOSI: Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar—you name it, any condition—is job locking.
This is the world you're supposing will exist.
When I saw what she had said I thought to myself: "I've always wanted to be a professional basketball player, but was held back by a lack of health insurance. Obamacare is going to let me live my dream of being a professional basketball player." I told my friends and family that, and they laughed. I said if Nancy says people can feel safe pursuing their dreams of being an artist or a poet, why can't I play professional basketball?
Now it seems that the real thing stopping me from being a professional basketball player is a lack of a basic income forcing me to be a wage slave.
Really? It's not my complete and utter lack of height and skill? It's not that no one in their right mind would ever want to pay to see me play basketball?
I took some solace when I realized that it costs almost nothing to put up a hoop in my driveway and play anyway even if I'm a shitty basketball player who could never survive on my basketball-related wages. Just like it costs almost nothing to write poems or paint pictures even if you're a shitty poet or painter turning out shitty poems and shitty art that no one would ever pay money for. Artists create art for arts sake.
I pretty sure he's saying that he's been working at a back-breaking job for $32k, so his lifestyle is based on making $32k. Offer him $30k without any work requirement, and he's probably willing to forgo the $2k difference. He's used to living on that amount of money, and now will have plenty of free time. He's saying he is probably unwilling to continue to work a backbreaking job, even if it essentially doubled his income. Why bother if his lifestyle is unaffected by not working?
Assuming his job needed to be done--it probably did because someone was paying him $32k for doing it--his former employer is going to have to significantly increase the wages for that job just to entice someone to do it. Face it, people qualified for a $32K back-breaking job usually do not want that job. And those costs will get passed on to customers.
Someone above complained "We should instead be upset at "the richest 100 families", who IMO have been causing so many problems."
As if somehow taking care of them would solve the problems. So I tried to show how we can solve that problem, but it doesn't really do much except punitively eliminate the wealth of the top 400 richest people in the country.
Then I was further trying to show the depths to which very high taxation would actually have to reach to cover the stipend for everyone, because it seemed to me that some proponents think we can just tax a few rich people--get the 1% to "pay their fair share" and viola, magic money for everyone to be happy ever after.
The amount of money needed means punitive and confiscatory levels of taxation for everyone in the upper half, forever. You essentially create a maximum income of about $200,000. There's no disincentive in that is there?
It's not hard to calculate the total net worth of the top 100, 500, or whatever richest people. At least assuming that the numbers Forbes, et al. use are anything close to being in the ball park.
The total net worth of the Forbes 400 (US) is about $2T. The average net worth of a 2015 Forbes 400 member was $3.86 billion, obviously some like Gates at $76B, and Buffet at $62B are higher. Let's go ahead and imagine confiscating it all tomorrow and redistributing it fairly to the rest of the population.
Assuming only adults get a "fair share", each of the more than 242M US adults will get a bit more than $8000. That'll really make a difference!
Once.
Another math problem.
I'll assume that the "basic income" equates to a poverty level of spending. Census numbers tell us that there are about 133M households in the US, with an average of 2.6 members per household. Poverty-line income for a 2-member household is $16020 and for a 3-member household is $20160. I'll interpolate to get $18504 for each 2.6-member household. That's a mere $2.46T to be collected and doled out.
Taking all the net worth from the top 400 basically covers the first year of the program and gets rid of the "super-rich" problem at the same time. Takes care of the billionaire problem.
$2.46T is not such a large number that it could not be done, in fact it turns out to be almost exactly what we're currently spending on mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income assistance, veterans programs). Cut all those and it's basically a wash. But I doubt anyone wants to make people pay for their own healthcare out their basic income, so those won't be cut. Gonna tell the old folks they can't have their Social Security but can have this basic income instead?
Based on recent income reports at the IRS, if we add a new 100% tax on all income over $200,000 we can collect just about that amount--assuming none of those 6 million households minds the 100% rate and goes on about their business of funding the basic needs of the rest of the country, and living on a mere $200,000 of after tax (albeit federal income tax only) income. Oh, I've ignored the the $18K they'll receive from the basic income pot, so $218K.
Try leaving a stack of $1 bills with a sign: "Free money. Please take only $1 per person." Leave it anywhere. If you think the sign will be honored be everyone, you're a far less cynical person than I.
I'm not a particularly religious person, but coveting your neighbor's *everything* has seemingly been a problem for thousands of years.
Some good people will be content with the stipend they receive. Some others will never be satisfied that someone else might have more than they have, regardless of how much the other person may have worked for what they have.
You seems to think the former will vastly outnumber the later; I think the opposite.
They then demand that the 10% steak eaters fork over ever more, so that they too can have steak.
And then the 90% realizes that the 10% has nicer cars, or bigger houses, or prettier spouses, and begins demanding that they should be provided with those things too.
At some point, the "basic income" line "provides" a level of lifestyle such that there's little benefit to working to stay in the 10%. Fuck it, just take the free shit. Now you've got way too few providers and the system collapses.
Sort of like Cinderella and her step-mother and step-sisters.
Despite doing all the work and providing everything for the others, they will resent and demand their "fair share" of anything the 1 might manage to earn above the levels he is forced to "give" the 9.
But almost certainly at levels of income that will not be satisfactory to them.
I don't think anyone should starve, so I would be happy to provide funds for as much beans, rice, and vitamins as would be necessary to prevent starvation. But I'm not happy about being asked to provide lobster, filet mignon, or even fast food.
"Basic needs" at this point though seems to be something like "a nice 2br apartment with all amenities and easy access to all the nice services, in a good school district, 400 channels on 50" 4k TV, 100Mbit internet, smart phone, game console" and "free pot". IOW, they expect my lifestyle without working for it (although I don't smoke pot), and demand instead that I reduce my lifestyle to fund theirs.
I strongly suspect that my level of "basic needs" I'm willing to "give" to someone who smokes pot and plays video games all day is much lower than they will demand.
How can a *bi-partisan* bill get passed? Seems impossible given recent descriptions of Congress.
OTOH, it seems that bi-partisan bills are often pork barrels and little else.
Rather than a real compromise that tries to incorporate and balance the best ideas of both sides, these sorts of bills seem to just have equal parts of bad ideas with enough funding that almost all players "get something".
Taxpayers get something too, but it's the pointy end of the stick.
PATRIOT Act was passed int the Senate 98-1 and 357-66 in the House. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act, and the yeas included Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Robert Byrd, Joe Leiberman, Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer. House Democrats voted for it 145-66.
89 U.S. senators who voted in favor of reauthorization in 2006, and the list includes almost all of the above again. 66 House Democrats were still on board to reauthorize in 2006, which passed with a final House vote of 280-138.
Both were/are horrible laws, but to compare the passage of ACA (which received *zero* Republican Senate votes, and *zero* Republican House votes [219-212]) with PATRIOT (nearly unanimous Senate vote, overwhelming bipartisan House vote) is just wrong.
Clinton's "relationship" with "that woman" was a clear case of sexual harassment--even if she was 100% on board with it. According to many Democrat feminists, it was rape plain and simple.
According to Democrats, a man in the workplace who is in a position of authority over a woman (such as Pres. Clinton had over Ms. Lewinsky) cannot have sex with such a woman without it being a blatant abuse of that authority. There is an inherent threat of retaliation if the "affair" goes south. Indeed, since there is an inherent threat of retaliation if the woman refuses it would be tantamount to forcing her to have sex, ergo, rape.
Further, he can lie to his wife about an affair, but what Clinton did was perjury. As a sitting President, he lied under oath to a federal grand jury about something as stupid as his "affair".
Nothing excuses Nixon's actions. But to downplay Clinton's actions as telling a little fib about getting blown in the Oval Office is disingenuous.
it seems that most of these people are far more interested in hypocritical glory and powers over people that communist dictators would relish. For many years the environmentalist movement has been a watermelon--green on the outside, red on the inside. The Marxist language used is a clear tell:
"Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection", says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. "The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated."
"First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
"Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.
And the condescension runs deep, too:
"That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
(I've no doubt that his answer will be "Not so much, so well control it for them.")
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't have the skills necessary to get a high-paying job, a basic income won't do a thing to change that.
If you do have the ability to command a high-paying job, there's not a thing stopping you from getting one today. A basic income won't change that.
The guy above made it sound so easy "Want $x a month for luxuries, and have 160 hours of free time a month? Find a job that nets $x/160 per hour." And that's true today: want a job that pays x? go out and find one. Basic income or not, if you have highly-valued skills, you will almost always be highly compensated. Basic income or not, if you have common skills, you will almost never make more than common wages.
relative to the effort needed to earn it?
I could work a second job to make even more money than I make now. Why don't I? Because it's not worth it to me to trade more of my free time for more money.
NANCY PELOSI: Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar—you name it, any condition—is job locking.
This is the world you're supposing will exist.
When I saw what she had said I thought to myself: "I've always wanted to be a professional basketball player, but was held back by a lack of health insurance. Obamacare is going to let me live my dream of being a professional basketball player." I told my friends and family that, and they laughed. I said if Nancy says people can feel safe pursuing their dreams of being an artist or a poet, why can't I play professional basketball?
Now it seems that the real thing stopping me from being a professional basketball player is a lack of a basic income forcing me to be a wage slave.
Really? It's not my complete and utter lack of height and skill? It's not that no one in their right mind would ever want to pay to see me play basketball?
I took some solace when I realized that it costs almost nothing to put up a hoop in my driveway and play anyway even if I'm a shitty basketball player who could never survive on my basketball-related wages. Just like it costs almost nothing to write poems or paint pictures even if you're a shitty poet or painter turning out shitty poems and shitty art that no one would ever pay money for. Artists create art for arts sake.
I pretty sure he's saying that he's been working at a back-breaking job for $32k, so his lifestyle is based on making $32k. Offer him $30k without any work requirement, and he's probably willing to forgo the $2k difference. He's used to living on that amount of money, and now will have plenty of free time. He's saying he is probably unwilling to continue to work a backbreaking job, even if it essentially doubled his income. Why bother if his lifestyle is unaffected by not working?
Assuming his job needed to be done--it probably did because someone was paying him $32k for doing it--his former employer is going to have to significantly increase the wages for that job just to entice someone to do it. Face it, people qualified for a $32K back-breaking job usually do not want that job. And those costs will get passed on to customers.
To buy supplies to create the first products for sale, Wozniak sold his HP 65 Calculator for $500 and Jobs sold his VW bus for $750.
They couldn't afford a single idea that failed either. But they took the risk anyway.
A quick search for rags-to-riches stories (e.g. Oprah) will turn up a common factor: they all took huge risks when there was no margin for error.
A basic income providing a poverty-line lifestyle is almost certainly not going to change your risk tolerance. But if you say so...
Someone above complained "We should instead be upset at "the richest 100 families", who IMO have been causing so many problems."
As if somehow taking care of them would solve the problems. So I tried to show how we can solve that problem, but it doesn't really do much except punitively eliminate the wealth of the top 400 richest people in the country.
Then I was further trying to show the depths to which very high taxation would actually have to reach to cover the stipend for everyone, because it seemed to me that some proponents think we can just tax a few rich people--get the 1% to "pay their fair share" and viola, magic money for everyone to be happy ever after.
The amount of money needed means punitive and confiscatory levels of taxation for everyone in the upper half, forever. You essentially create a maximum income of about $200,000. There's no disincentive in that is there?
"Want $x a month for luxuries, and have 160 hours of free time a month? Find a job that nets $x/160 per hour."
What's stopping you from doing that now?
Well, hell let's make the basic income $1M, think of the taxes we can collect on those incomes!
Not in the upside down "strict liability" world we live in.
It's not hard to calculate the total net worth of the top 100, 500, or whatever richest people. At least assuming that the numbers Forbes, et al. use are anything close to being in the ball park.
The total net worth of the Forbes 400 (US) is about $2T. The average net worth of a 2015 Forbes 400 member was $3.86 billion, obviously some like Gates at $76B, and Buffet at $62B are higher. Let's go ahead and imagine confiscating it all tomorrow and redistributing it fairly to the rest of the population.
Assuming only adults get a "fair share", each of the more than 242M US adults will get a bit more than $8000. That'll really make a difference!
Once.
Another math problem.
I'll assume that the "basic income" equates to a poverty level of spending. Census numbers tell us that there are about 133M households in the US, with an average of 2.6 members per household. Poverty-line income for a 2-member household is $16020 and for a 3-member household is $20160. I'll interpolate to get $18504 for each 2.6-member household. That's a mere $2.46T to be collected and doled out.
Taking all the net worth from the top 400 basically covers the first year of the program and gets rid of the "super-rich" problem at the same time. Takes care of the billionaire problem.
$2.46T is not such a large number that it could not be done, in fact it turns out to be almost exactly what we're currently spending on mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income assistance, veterans programs). Cut all those and it's basically a wash. But I doubt anyone wants to make people pay for their own healthcare out their basic income, so those won't be cut. Gonna tell the old folks they can't have their Social Security but can have this basic income instead?
Based on recent income reports at the IRS, if we add a new 100% tax on all income over $200,000 we can collect just about that amount--assuming none of those 6 million households minds the 100% rate and goes on about their business of funding the basic needs of the rest of the country, and living on a mere $200,000 of after tax (albeit federal income tax only) income. Oh, I've ignored the the $18K they'll receive from the basic income pot, so $218K.
That takes care of the millionaire problem too.
Try leaving a stack of $1 bills with a sign: "Free money. Please take only $1 per person." Leave it anywhere. If you think the sign will be honored be everyone, you're a far less cynical person than I.
I'm not a particularly religious person, but coveting your neighbor's *everything* has seemingly been a problem for thousands of years.
Some good people will be content with the stipend they receive. Some others will never be satisfied that someone else might have more than they have, regardless of how much the other person may have worked for what they have.
You seems to think the former will vastly outnumber the later; I think the opposite.
people in the US is about $2T. Yep, that's a lot of money, about half of what the government spends per year.
If you confiscate all of that money from the super-rich, you get that one-time pot of $2T.
Redistribute that to the other 300M+ Americans, and each citizen receives about $6000.
What's the next trick?
Just wait long enough.
They then demand that the 10% steak eaters fork over ever more, so that they too can have steak.
And then the 90% realizes that the 10% has nicer cars, or bigger houses, or prettier spouses, and begins demanding that they should be provided with those things too.
At some point, the "basic income" line "provides" a level of lifestyle such that there's little benefit to working to stay in the 10%. Fuck it, just take the free shit. Now you've got way too few providers and the system collapses.
Sort of like Cinderella and her step-mother and step-sisters.
Despite doing all the work and providing everything for the others, they will resent and demand their "fair share" of anything the 1 might manage to earn above the levels he is forced to "give" the 9.
But almost certainly at levels of income that will not be satisfactory to them.
I don't think anyone should starve, so I would be happy to provide funds for as much beans, rice, and vitamins as would be necessary to prevent starvation. But I'm not happy about being asked to provide lobster, filet mignon, or even fast food.
"Basic needs" at this point though seems to be something like "a nice 2br apartment with all amenities and easy access to all the nice services, in a good school district, 400 channels on 50" 4k TV, 100Mbit internet, smart phone, game console" and "free pot". IOW, they expect my lifestyle without working for it (although I don't smoke pot), and demand instead that I reduce my lifestyle to fund theirs.
I strongly suspect that my level of "basic needs" I'm willing to "give" to someone who smokes pot and plays video games all day is much lower than they will demand.
How can a *bi-partisan* bill get passed? Seems impossible given recent descriptions of Congress.
OTOH, it seems that bi-partisan bills are often pork barrels and little else.
Rather than a real compromise that tries to incorporate and balance the best ideas of both sides, these sorts of bills seem to just have equal parts of bad ideas with enough funding that almost all players "get something".
Taxpayers get something too, but it's the pointy end of the stick.
"Pushed through"????!!!!!
PATRIOT Act was passed int the Senate 98-1 and 357-66 in the House. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin was the only senator who voted against the Patriot Act, and the yeas included Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Robert Byrd, Joe Leiberman, Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, and Chuck Schumer. House Democrats voted for it 145-66.
89 U.S. senators who voted in favor of reauthorization in 2006, and the list includes almost all of the above again. 66 House Democrats were still on board to reauthorize in 2006, which passed with a final House vote of 280-138.
Both were/are horrible laws, but to compare the passage of ACA (which received *zero* Republican Senate votes, and *zero* Republican House votes [219-212]) with PATRIOT (nearly unanimous Senate vote, overwhelming bipartisan House vote) is just wrong.
Clinton's "relationship" with "that woman" was a clear case of sexual harassment--even if she was 100% on board with it. According to many Democrat feminists, it was rape plain and simple.
According to Democrats, a man in the workplace who is in a position of authority over a woman (such as Pres. Clinton had over Ms. Lewinsky) cannot have sex with such a woman without it being a blatant abuse of that authority. There is an inherent threat of retaliation if the "affair" goes south. Indeed, since there is an inherent threat of retaliation if the woman refuses it would be tantamount to forcing her to have sex, ergo, rape.
Further, he can lie to his wife about an affair, but what Clinton did was perjury. As a sitting President, he lied under oath to a federal grand jury about something as stupid as his "affair".
Nothing excuses Nixon's actions. But to downplay Clinton's actions as telling a little fib about getting blown in the Oval Office is disingenuous.
it seems that most of these people are far more interested in hypocritical glory and powers over people that communist dictators would relish. For many years the environmentalist movement has been a watermelon--green on the outside, red on the inside. The Marxist language used is a clear tell:
"Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection", says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. "The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated."
"First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
"Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.
And the condescension runs deep, too:
"That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
(I've no doubt that his answer will be "Not so much, so well control it for them.")
"We demonstrate that this outcome is not unexpected because the level of consensus correlates with expertise in climate science."
No *real* expert in climate science disagrees...
Just adopt the George Costanza approach with her.
Virtually 100% of all on-the-job deaths are men, aren't you interested to know why?
Surely the government-funded free stuff works as designed?