I wonder if it might start with false associations. Idiot boss calls during a funeral demanding numbers for the TPS report, feel a bit nauseous Idiot school principal calls complaining that 6 year old is acting like a child, feel a bit nauseous. Subconscious decides the cell phone is the problem.
Do you remember a few years ago when stomach ulcers were "known" to be caused by excessive anxiety?
"Non-24" is stupid marketing around a problem that is entirely non-controversial. You'd have to be a complete moron to not suspect that blind people might not synchronize well to a light cue. By far, the more remarkable observation is that some totally blind people do synchronize to light cues.
SAD is non-controversial. The disorder is documented as is the treatment. The treatment isn't a drug, BTW, it's a bright light. Alternatively, you can make an effort to get more sunlight in the day (unless you're above the arctic circle, of course).
RLS and PBA are also non-controversial.
ADD is real but most of the kids diagnosed don't actually have it.
You've been confused by the disease mongering over-simplified commercials. They are real conditions that people actually have. The quick fix they offer may or may not be helpful and may or may not kill you with side effects.
This isn't SNAP, it's the basic income. Food, clothes, rent, fuel, school supplies, etc etc. It's pretty much every store.
Grocery stores handle it now by only selling SNAP eligible goods when the SNAP EBT is used. If you want anything else, it is rung up in a second transaction and you use a separate card. But your suggestion means they have to somehow signal to the system that I bought $28 in eligible food items, $15 in eligible school supplies, and $5 in ineligible items. But because there was only $27 worth of food items left on the card, it has to notify me that the actual total out of my other account will be $6. The back end would have to know what category each item is and charge it against a separate but linked account appropriate to that category, but as one complex transaction, so it will have to add a whole separate stage where it kicks back when one of the accounts is short and the general account is to be charged the difference.
And it's not just up to the merchants. The networks and clearing houses they connect to would all have to change as well, every single one of them. The changes would go all the way down to COBOL on dusty old decks written in the '70s. They're all designed on the principle that money is money and the charge is the charge.
I'm pushing because you're trying so hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (hypothetically speaking).. And actually, you're the one pushing back, I'm fully on board with the basic income, you''re the one who isn't willing to go that far and wants to turn it into welfare 2.0 even if it costs an extra trillion. And if you don't think the tea party would use all those costs and all the hassles and all the confusion from perfectly responsible people confused and frustrated with all the extra complexity added to a simple transaction and use it as a bludgeon to get it dismantled, you are truly naive. (It would be hard enough to get anything like this done in the U.S. anyway).
I am willing to believe that the vast majority of adults in this country will spend the money in a reasonably responsible manner out of simple self preservation and love for their children. It would be an insult to those millions to treat them like children and it will do nothing to advance the goals of the program. I'm not sure why you expect otherwise.
But of course, they won't be considering the other prerequisites like reducing manager count, burning the timesheet forms (with the 30 second intervals), or offices with doors that close.
You do realize you've just mandated that every store that sells anything the EBT card might buy will have to re-write their POS software, right? Not to mention the entire back end of several transaction systems. And zeroed out any sort of transaction privacy. Normally, charges are not itemized when a charge is being authorized. There's not even a mechanism for it. All there is is an amount, account number being charged, timestamp, account to be credited and a BRIEF description of the transaction that appears ion the itemized bill.
Then there's the question of presenting totals and balances. It's pretty easy when there's just one total to present for the customer to approve. It gets complicated when you have multiple totals in multiple categories AND those totals are affected by the current balances on the card. I'm guessing those little 2 or 3 line displays at the POS will no longer be adequate to the task.
It gets complicated fast when you want to micro-manage the financial lives of 300 million people. It also gets expensive.
And yet, if he doesn't want to leave money on the table (who does), he'll have to figure out how much of what he can buy on that card before whipping out his other card.
Would it be a problem if he gives his assistant his card and asks her to get him a coffee?
What does 1907 have to do with the flush toilet, the telegraph, airlines, and the railroad network?
The government was all over regulating all of those but the flush toilet. You don't think the railroads and Western Union negotiated right of way with each individual land owner, do you? A special government agency was formed specifically to deal with aviation. Does that really sound like laissez-fair to you?
Of course, the flush toilet pre-dated the U.S. by a fair amount anyway, so I'm not sure what that had to do with anything.
So you would make beggars of us all? Treat us all as incompetent and not even offer a way to prove otherwise? Wouldn't want Warren Buffet to mis-spend his basic income, now would we?
Here you go making things up again. I never said it was punitive in any way.
You proposed to use it as a stick to drive people to get a job. That would be what if not punitive? This as opposed to my proposal of something good that you get if you go to work, that is, more money to spend.
That's nice in theory. In reality, not all people will spend their entitlement on the things that society is funding. According to you, these people have mental health issues that "must be addressed", so you need to add the overhead of measuring how everyone uses their allotment and policing those who do not use it as designed. That's quite a bit more overhead than my plan would have.
Nope, none of that. They got an adequate amount of money, job done. What they do or do not do with it is now their problem.
At that point, they can either recognize that they have a problem and request appropriate mental health care (or even just financial counseling), or they can learn from their error and do better next month. If they end up on the streets, we would know they have the means not to be there (because every citizen would have those means) so it must be something else. If their kids are deprived, inability to do better would no longer be an excuse because we would know they have the ability to provide at least adequately.
It may even be that the person has some sort of long-term disability that requires a form of guardianship to make sure their money is properly allocated (and for that matter that the allocated money is actually spent). The difference is that I prefer to treat people as mentally competent until they prove otherwise.
Sure, cops all too often forget their place and assume they have some sort of supreme power even when their own department says otherwise. I'm guessing that might be counter-balanced by automated cars having a variety of cameras and other sensors that might be recording the scene.
I was more leaning toward providing them with an additional unrestricted cash fund, simply because the incentive to work created by keeping entitlements on the low side and restricted would not make a difference for those people.
In some places you claim the restrictions are simply meant to make sure others spend the money as society believes they should, but here you suggest that the restrictions are supposed to have a punitive element to them to spur a desired behavior. Which is it, punitive or not?
In my system, the stimulus for going to work is an employer offering a fair market payment for work and the natural human desire to better our own situation. Overhead and potential for political manipulation are kept low by keeping the rules extremely simple. Every citizen gets a card and every card gets the allotted monthly credit, adequate for a decent if minimalist life. Done.
In a real sense, it brings back a balance of power that hasn't existed since the commons were enclosed.
In the U.S. many police departments suggest that women (and sometimes men) should go to a well lighted area rather than pull over immediately.
Sometimes it is also suggested that you call the P.D. to make sure it's really a cop before you pull over.
It seems very risky to have a car automatically pull over in the middle of nowhere when signaled, particularly when police have put such a warning out. At the least, the car should allow the passenger to override.
No. I never said that. You are the one that keeps making that shit up... not me.
If you don't believe that, why don't you believe they'll spend an appropriate amount of money to support their kids?
and some are addicted to spending.
And that is a mental health issue. One that will never go away if you treat them like children.
But surely you must be aware that for a universal basic income, such people will be a tiny minority.
And you glossed over the telling fact that you yourself suggested that the disabled should be an exception as if you see some virtue there you do not see in the working poor.
I think they can't budget properly because they have little choice but to deal with the welfare system where working more hours or getting a raise can leave you with less money and actually saving money in a bank like a normal person can leave you destitute. That is true mostly because of people piling on rules they claimed were meant to make sure the welfare money was being spent properly.
You still haven't explained the necessity. Is it because poor people lack a soul and don't love their children, even if they work hard? You revealed a lot to me when you suggested that people who are actually incapable of work should be an exception, perhaps even things you yourself aren't aware of.
I can't tell you what to do, but I would offer that you may benefit greatly from meditating on just exactly why you truly want to tie people up in so many rules and regulations no matter how expensive that is. You seem to genuinely have a blind spot in your own thought process. I can only imagine that it's to your benefit that you fix that.
For the rest, I would submit that if a person is receiving sufficient and regular money to have food, clothing, and shelter and somehow ends up homeless, starving, or naked, he has a mental health issue that must be addressed and that no amount of rules and red tape will paper over it adequately.
They will already have plenty of incentive to work, more money. Who doesn't want more money? Isn't that supposed to be the incentive that makes the market go? And with the restructuring of the job market, a lot of people who don't have jobs now will likely end up employed. That may take a little while to work out. A number of jobs are probably paying below fair market value now based on worker desperation. That will take a little while to find it's level once such positions become unfillable and employers adjust to the new reality.
You still haven't answered my question, why do you insist on treating grown ass adults like children by telling them what they may and may not spend their money on? That's the very thing that has created dis-incentives for people on assistance to work.
This is the basic income, not an excuse for government busybodies to decide how you should spend your money or if you should be a vegan or a non-smoker or if alcohol is sinful.
Sophistry aside, if you are telling others how they may or may not spend the money they have coming, you ARE trying to control them. What is your justification?
You haven't even begun to address the problems with a one size fits all plan or the alternative intense intrusion into everybody's business to fit the restrictions to the recipient. Nor have you addressed the cost of all of that unnecessary meddling.
I suspect a lot of people WOULD get a job. But if that job is for sub minimum wage, you will be treating people who DID get a job like children. What is this obsession with controlling others? You seem to be willing to burn a fair bit of money just to do it and offer little in the way of justification.
Keep in mind, for the free market to work, it means that at any given time, there will be people who quit their job for good reason who have not yet found another (if they find one instantly in a free market, they probably undersold themselves). There will also be people in the startup phase of a new business. Do you want to handicap them by not allowing them to allocate funds as needed? Do you find that unworthy of being treated like an adult? There will be people taking a medical leave. How about people who go back to school? Are they also unworthy of being treated like adults? How many special cases do you want to declare here?
How would you feel about someone who lives off of their basic income while volunteering in their community? Have they met your standard? Worthy adult or child to be commanded? Does that change if they have a mental disability that makes them more suitable for volunteer work?
Just because we carry a big overhead now doesn't mean we should continue to do so. One benefit of going to the basic income is the opportunity to do away with overhead along with the various tricks and traps associated with qualification. We're not children.
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Why would it no longer be a disease just because it is easily avoided and is best cured by something other than drugs?
I wonder if it might start with false associations. Idiot boss calls during a funeral demanding numbers for the TPS report, feel a bit nauseous Idiot school principal calls complaining that 6 year old is acting like a child, feel a bit nauseous. Subconscious decides the cell phone is the problem.
Do you remember a few years ago when stomach ulcers were "known" to be caused by excessive anxiety?
"Non-24" is stupid marketing around a problem that is entirely non-controversial. You'd have to be a complete moron to not suspect that blind people might not synchronize well to a light cue. By far, the more remarkable observation is that some totally blind people do synchronize to light cues.
SAD is non-controversial. The disorder is documented as is the treatment. The treatment isn't a drug, BTW, it's a bright light. Alternatively, you can make an effort to get more sunlight in the day (unless you're above the arctic circle, of course).
RLS and PBA are also non-controversial.
ADD is real but most of the kids diagnosed don't actually have it.
You've been confused by the disease mongering over-simplified commercials. They are real conditions that people actually have. The quick fix they offer may or may not be helpful and may or may not kill you with side effects.
This isn't SNAP, it's the basic income. Food, clothes, rent, fuel, school supplies, etc etc. It's pretty much every store.
Grocery stores handle it now by only selling SNAP eligible goods when the SNAP EBT is used. If you want anything else, it is rung up in a second transaction and you use a separate card. But your suggestion means they have to somehow signal to the system that I bought $28 in eligible food items, $15 in eligible school supplies, and $5 in ineligible items. But because there was only $27 worth of food items left on the card, it has to notify me that the actual total out of my other account will be $6. The back end would have to know what category each item is and charge it against a separate but linked account appropriate to that category, but as one complex transaction, so it will have to add a whole separate stage where it kicks back when one of the accounts is short and the general account is to be charged the difference.
And it's not just up to the merchants. The networks and clearing houses they connect to would all have to change as well, every single one of them. The changes would go all the way down to COBOL on dusty old decks written in the '70s. They're all designed on the principle that money is money and the charge is the charge.
I'm pushing because you're trying so hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (hypothetically speaking).. And actually, you're the one pushing back, I'm fully on board with the basic income, you''re the one who isn't willing to go that far and wants to turn it into welfare 2.0 even if it costs an extra trillion. And if you don't think the tea party would use all those costs and all the hassles and all the confusion from perfectly responsible people confused and frustrated with all the extra complexity added to a simple transaction and use it as a bludgeon to get it dismantled, you are truly naive. (It would be hard enough to get anything like this done in the U.S. anyway).
I am willing to believe that the vast majority of adults in this country will spend the money in a reasonably responsible manner out of simple self preservation and love for their children. It would be an insult to those millions to treat them like children and it will do nothing to advance the goals of the program. I'm not sure why you expect otherwise.
But of course, they won't be considering the other prerequisites like reducing manager count, burning the timesheet forms (with the 30 second intervals), or offices with doors that close.
I think paper bags are probably the best delivery container. Set it on fire to make sure they see it, wouldn't want them to accidentally step in it :-)
You do realize you've just mandated that every store that sells anything the EBT card might buy will have to re-write their POS software, right? Not to mention the entire back end of several transaction systems. And zeroed out any sort of transaction privacy. Normally, charges are not itemized when a charge is being authorized. There's not even a mechanism for it. All there is is an amount, account number being charged, timestamp, account to be credited and a BRIEF description of the transaction that appears ion the itemized bill.
Then there's the question of presenting totals and balances. It's pretty easy when there's just one total to present for the customer to approve. It gets complicated when you have multiple totals in multiple categories AND those totals are affected by the current balances on the card. I'm guessing those little 2 or 3 line displays at the POS will no longer be adequate to the task.
It gets complicated fast when you want to micro-manage the financial lives of 300 million people. It also gets expensive.
Get the large box. If it fits, it ships.
I said SHIPS!
And yet, if he doesn't want to leave money on the table (who does), he'll have to figure out how much of what he can buy on that card before whipping out his other card.
Would it be a problem if he gives his assistant his card and asks her to get him a coffee?
What does 1907 have to do with the flush toilet, the telegraph, airlines, and the railroad network?
The government was all over regulating all of those but the flush toilet. You don't think the railroads and Western Union negotiated right of way with each individual land owner, do you? A special government agency was formed specifically to deal with aviation. Does that really sound like laissez-fair to you?
Of course, the flush toilet pre-dated the U.S. by a fair amount anyway, so I'm not sure what that had to do with anything.
So you would make beggars of us all? Treat us all as incompetent and not even offer a way to prove otherwise? Wouldn't want Warren Buffet to mis-spend his basic income, now would we?
Here you go making things up again. I never said it was punitive in any way.
You proposed to use it as a stick to drive people to get a job. That would be what if not punitive? This as opposed to my proposal of something good that you get if you go to work, that is, more money to spend.
That's nice in theory. In reality, not all people will spend their entitlement on the things that society is funding. According to you, these people have mental health issues that "must be addressed", so you need to add the overhead of measuring how everyone uses their allotment and policing those who do not use it as designed. That's quite a bit more overhead than my plan would have.
Nope, none of that. They got an adequate amount of money, job done. What they do or do not do with it is now their problem.
At that point, they can either recognize that they have a problem and request appropriate mental health care (or even just financial counseling), or they can learn from their error and do better next month. If they end up on the streets, we would know they have the means not to be there (because every citizen would have those means) so it must be something else. If their kids are deprived, inability to do better would no longer be an excuse because we would know they have the ability to provide at least adequately.
It may even be that the person has some sort of long-term disability that requires a form of guardianship to make sure their money is properly allocated (and for that matter that the allocated money is actually spent). The difference is that I prefer to treat people as mentally competent until they prove otherwise.
Those things happened with a regulated economy. The government was significantly involved in the railroad network in particular.
Moving to laissez-fair gave us Enron and the forced banking bail-out of 2007.
Sure, cops all too often forget their place and assume they have some sort of supreme power even when their own department says otherwise. I'm guessing that might be counter-balanced by automated cars having a variety of cameras and other sensors that might be recording the scene.
I was more leaning toward providing them with an additional unrestricted cash fund, simply because the incentive to work created by keeping entitlements on the low side and restricted would not make a difference for those people.
In some places you claim the restrictions are simply meant to make sure others spend the money as society believes they should, but here you suggest that the restrictions are supposed to have a punitive element to them to spur a desired behavior. Which is it, punitive or not?
In my system, the stimulus for going to work is an employer offering a fair market payment for work and the natural human desire to better our own situation. Overhead and potential for political manipulation are kept low by keeping the rules extremely simple. Every citizen gets a card and every card gets the allotted monthly credit, adequate for a decent if minimalist life. Done.
In a real sense, it brings back a balance of power that hasn't existed since the commons were enclosed.
Are you willing to also have the doors and windows locked no matter what happens?
In the U.S. many police departments suggest that women (and sometimes men) should go to a well lighted area rather than pull over immediately.
Sometimes it is also suggested that you call the P.D. to make sure it's really a cop before you pull over.
It seems very risky to have a car automatically pull over in the middle of nowhere when signaled, particularly when police have put such a warning out. At the least, the car should allow the passenger to override.
No. I never said that. You are the one that keeps making that shit up... not me.
If you don't believe that, why don't you believe they'll spend an appropriate amount of money to support their kids?
and some are addicted to spending.
And that is a mental health issue. One that will never go away if you treat them like children.
But surely you must be aware that for a universal basic income, such people will be a tiny minority.
And you glossed over the telling fact that you yourself suggested that the disabled should be an exception as if you see some virtue there you do not see in the working poor.
I think they can't budget properly because they have little choice but to deal with the welfare system where working more hours or getting a raise can leave you with less money and actually saving money in a bank like a normal person can leave you destitute. That is true mostly because of people piling on rules they claimed were meant to make sure the welfare money was being spent properly.
You still haven't explained the necessity. Is it because poor people lack a soul and don't love their children, even if they work hard? You revealed a lot to me when you suggested that people who are actually incapable of work should be an exception, perhaps even things you yourself aren't aware of.
I can't tell you what to do, but I would offer that you may benefit greatly from meditating on just exactly why you truly want to tie people up in so many rules and regulations no matter how expensive that is. You seem to genuinely have a blind spot in your own thought process. I can only imagine that it's to your benefit that you fix that.
For the rest, I would submit that if a person is receiving sufficient and regular money to have food, clothing, and shelter and somehow ends up homeless, starving, or naked, he has a mental health issue that must be addressed and that no amount of rules and red tape will paper over it adequately.
How about providing a reasonable accommodation?
They will already have plenty of incentive to work, more money. Who doesn't want more money? Isn't that supposed to be the incentive that makes the market go? And with the restructuring of the job market, a lot of people who don't have jobs now will likely end up employed. That may take a little while to work out. A number of jobs are probably paying below fair market value now based on worker desperation. That will take a little while to find it's level once such positions become unfillable and employers adjust to the new reality.
You still haven't answered my question, why do you insist on treating grown ass adults like children by telling them what they may and may not spend their money on? That's the very thing that has created dis-incentives for people on assistance to work.
This is the basic income, not an excuse for government busybodies to decide how you should spend your money or if you should be a vegan or a non-smoker or if alcohol is sinful.
Sophistry aside, if you are telling others how they may or may not spend the money they have coming, you ARE trying to control them. What is your justification?
You haven't even begun to address the problems with a one size fits all plan or the alternative intense intrusion into everybody's business to fit the restrictions to the recipient. Nor have you addressed the cost of all of that unnecessary meddling.
I suspect a lot of people WOULD get a job. But if that job is for sub minimum wage, you will be treating people who DID get a job like children. What is this obsession with controlling others? You seem to be willing to burn a fair bit of money just to do it and offer little in the way of justification.
Keep in mind, for the free market to work, it means that at any given time, there will be people who quit their job for good reason who have not yet found another (if they find one instantly in a free market, they probably undersold themselves). There will also be people in the startup phase of a new business. Do you want to handicap them by not allowing them to allocate funds as needed? Do you find that unworthy of being treated like an adult? There will be people taking a medical leave. How about people who go back to school? Are they also unworthy of being treated like adults? How many special cases do you want to declare here?
How would you feel about someone who lives off of their basic income while volunteering in their community? Have they met your standard? Worthy adult or child to be commanded? Does that change if they have a mental disability that makes them more suitable for volunteer work?
Personally, I just remove it. Systemd has no future on my systems unless it grows up and learns to play nice with others.
Just because we carry a big overhead now doesn't mean we should continue to do so. One benefit of going to the basic income is the opportunity to do away with overhead along with the various tricks and traps associated with qualification. We're not children.
It seems so. After all, we have prosecutors fighting against releasing prisoners even after they are exonerated.