If you take money away from people who invest it into chip factories and give it to people who buy Star Wars action figures, indeed, the producers of Star Wars action figures will have a bigger return on their investment. However, the chip factory won't get built.
First, let's make this more direct. They're not buying Star Wars action figures, but chips - in their cell phone, mp3 player, tablet, etc...
If the people who have the money are considering buying a chip factory, but the current demand for chips is satisfied by existing fabs, they aren't building another one, despite having the money to do so. Now, if demand for chips exceeds current capacity*, even if they're short on money, they'll borrow it.
It turns out that infrastructure isn't built on the basis of fund availability - it's built on the basis of demand. If the demand is there, the money will be found. Right now we have a glut of capital out there - but it's not finding projects with enough demand/return to justify the risk of investment. As such, spurring demand will actually work better to get the economy churning again.
May I suggest you do? While the macroeconomic theories you like are popular with big spending politicians, they are dubious at best and probably wrong. Even if they were right, they were never intended as permanent macroeconomic policy, but as fixes to temporary market failures.
Do you want my transcript showing that I already have? And you're assuming again. The politicians hate my macroeconomic theories. Mostly because it'd mean that they'd have to stop spending money they don't have.
but it is people who think like you who are responsible for these failures and injustices.
Really? Are you sure you're not projecting? When I read about the housing projects, for example, my views on them being dumbasses about it start very, very quickly. When I read about what HUD did back in the day, I face-palm.
No, you don't get accuse me of supporting said failures and injustices when my financial policies would have never supported those programs in the first place.
How about I do what you're doing? You need to look in the mirror, my friend, and decide to make a change. Humanity is a social animal, pure 'I have mine' results in injustice and less for all. You need to stop cutting your own nose off to spite your face. Sometimes a compassionate hand up is far cheaper in the long run than a boot to the ribs of those who have fallen down.
Furthermore, why is it even needed? What actual problem does that address? What evidence is there that people are better off with a basic income guarantee than without one?
Re-read my first posts? Why is it needed: We can no longer support the bureaucratic nightmare that is the conventional welfare system, which currently provides a lot of dis-incentives to work. I believe that fixing that would be too complicated, thus major reform is needed. What evidence: Canada did a similar study, EITC seems to do fairly well, etc... Still, I support starting small and working our way up.
Consider that with a BIG you don't need to do paperwork for welfare, unemployment, social security, etc... It's all automatic. There will still be some paperwork, but it'll be minimal.
It also solves the 'problems' with politicians and others dicking with what people can do with the money - NOBODY is going to want restrictions on THEIR BIG. and like I said, besides my belief in the importance of liberty(to fail as well as succeed), studies are that the closer aid is to cash, the more efficiently it benefits the recipients, on average. Canned food drives actually suck at feeding the poor- the donated foods aren't balanced, the aid society can buy crates of canned food that is actually needed/will be used for the price far cheaper than people buying individual cans in the supermarket, etc...
*And I'm simplifying here, it's more like they'd still be able to sell their chips at a profit at the lower price point that chips settle into after production increases.
It's fairly hard to deliver malware through images like jpeg, png, and gif compared to the ease at which you can do so via java and flash. Without punch the monkey stuff, they'd be stuck trying more more estoric hacks for their malware.
If you do not grant it to everyone than the entire machinery of checking and verification remains intact, removing one of the main arguments (the cost saving aspect).
Indeed. Though this site proposes only granting it to adults, though it does acknowledge that there are numerous options for children, including giving them a partial amount.
This is all basic math and publically accessible sources. How the fuck can you claim that "eliminating existing programs" will already give you 75% of the needed budget?
To be honest, I didn't phrase that all that well. The 75% figure is looking at where you get the money for people who will receive more money from the government than what they're taxed - IE people making less than ~$40k/year. I never proposed that a BIG be implemented without drastically overhauling our tax system.
Figure to meet: $2.1T, or at least 'close', given that I didn't say 75%, I said 'about 3/4'. source. Pensions: 1,247 B welfare: 454B Health Care, Welfare: 567 B Total: 2.3T. The rest is to be met through 'tax adjustments', like eliminating the lowest tax brackets, exemptions, and such.
You can have your basic income if you give up on military spending, healthcare spending, education spending, highways, the space program, etc. Or you can fund it through a massive money-printing program.
Or we could, you know, increase taxes such that the average person ends up pretty much as well off as they were before, with the increased taxes being neutralized(or neutralizing, depending on your view) their BIG payments. Difference being, if they get laid off they don't need to apply for anything like unemployment- the BIG is already there.
But wait, you have "forgotten about inflation", so that's not a concern. Inflation is not real. Giving everybody free cash has no consequences in the real world.
Man, you just have your rage on, don't you. I mean, you edited out the 'almost' in here, so have you worked out your aggression on the straw man yet? This wasn't a claim that inflation isn't real, it was a statement about it having been really low for a good while.
Drug addicts do not get any cheaper when you give them money either. They will just use it to buy more drugs instead of shelter, food, etc., and then _still_ require society to pay for their non-drug needs.
You really have no clue about my desired policies, do you? And the surprising thing is - just giving them money, counter-intuitively, actually DOES WORK. Eventually. For some. At least as well as the other policies work.:(
On the other hand, massively reforming our 'war on drugs' will help here a lot more.
As for the Canada program: it was not funded by the town itself, but required external funding, and the program has since been stopped. If it were truly such a massive success, don't you think it would instead have spread throughout the country?
You clearly didn't read into it more. It was stopped and funding yanked without ever having analyzed the data. It wasn't until like 20 years later that there was enough interest and funding that they went through the collected documentation and put together the information to determine the results.
It's only now working it's way up the policy ladders - there's a huge amount of inertia for something like this, it is radical after all.
You see, the problem isn't that I haven't put '5 minutes' into this, I've put far longer in, so I actually know the details behind the examples you blindly toss out.
You know, sometimes I'll say that I screwed up my wording, that I was unclear. In this case, I suggest that you work on YOUR wording, because I did NOT get that from your postings.
The correct "velocity of money", in the sense of creating the most employment and wealth, is the velocity a free market chooses in the absence of government intervention.
Okay, so you finally managed to say something I disagree with. The fact of the matter is that I believe that a certain amount of government intervention is necessary. Stuff like truth in advertising, honest measurements, non-adulteration(or at least honest dilution if that's desired), contract mediation, and internalization of external costs. There may be a few others in there. I support some interventions before they reach the listed points due to prevention sometimes being far cheaper than the after-effects.
I support reducing government intervention, yes, but I support doing so after examinging the particular intervention in place to assess whether it's benefits exceed it's costs, how much it serves/harms freedom, whether there's other programs that can do it's job better, etc...
, it doesn't follow that intervening to change the velocity of money causes the economic indicator to change.
True, but I'm not aware that I claimed that it was anything more than an indicator/tendency.
When you give money to poor people, they will mostly spend it on consumption, and consumption generates no wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is investment, i.e. spending money on something that has an expected positive return.
Actually, it does 'generate' wealth, because it takes investments in infrastructure to generate the goods they consume, and the investments you're talking about don't have that positive return unless there's demand for the goods they produce. So there's no investments to make money off of without consumption. Spur consumption and you spur investment. May I suggest you read up on macro-economics?
And if you look at the last half century of the war on poverty, it "turns out" that giving money to poor people is ineffective for wealth generation.
Actually, part of the problem is that we didn't just give them money. What did we do? We gave them housing - away from 'good people'. We gave them food - or stamps restricted to the same. We set up programs that effectively penalized intact families and getting a basic job, because both would cost you substantial amounts of aid. My take from the last 50 years of 'war on poverty' is that we had traitors in our midst - carefully sabotoging our every move in the name of racism, classism, even relegion.
Why do you think I support a basic income guarantee? It's to simpify administrative expenses. It's to reward intact families again, or at least not to penalize them. It's to ensure, whenever possible, that somebody working is always better off than not working.
1. Economic agenda? I wasn't aware I'd posted enough of my agenda for you to assess it. What do you think my agenda is? 2. Repeating vs reflecting. Perhaps because you hadn't said anything that I haven't already considered. Why do you think I kept saying you were agreeing with me? Because you weren't saying anything counter to my beliefs.
Honestly, consider fro a moment that your view on my actual 'agenda' might not actually be my agenda, but a funhouse mirror of it. So you're blasting away at it, while I'm standing next to you.
Re-read what I wrote without trying to take the worst, most extreme meaning possible. Read it as the words of a reasonable, moderate, but flawed individual who doesn't always pick the 100% perfect phrasing. You'll probably come up with something a lot closer to my real beliefs.
If you still think I'm going off the deep end, may I suggest a polite question for clarification first. Maybe I did screw something up. Maybe you're making a mountain out of a molehill(IE turning what I consider merely a useful metaphor into an entire philosophical economic policy).
Sure, I said that the faster money is moving, the more economic activity it generate. I then immediately put a disclaimer in that it's possible to 'fake out' the metric. So I counter, again, that you're agreeing with me in a disagreeable fashion.
As for my second statement - again, 'on average'. Exceptions exist, as both you and I have pointed out. I just didn't list examples of said exceptions, in the interests of not writing a book, IE a huge post.
As for stimulating the economy, making money move faster, how it can move 'too fast', I agree. The only problem I have is your claiming that I don't know this stuff when I'm putting exceptions into the very posts you attack, even using pretty much the same argument as my listed exception!
What the government can, and should, do is use estimates of this 'velocity', which is a fairly abstract concept, to help determine the most effective forms of intervention. That's a lot of the problem - they keep using methods that are known not to work well. Turns out, giving poor people money tends to give pretty good results. Better than rich type, at least.
That's far from the only cost in our system. For example, insurance paperwork/transaction costs are something like 30% of the bill for your healthcare.
This is what my design professor called a high tech solution to a low tech problem. I use a dipstick.
Dipstick tells you oil level, and if you're good, a smidge about oil condition. Unless you're driving an oil-burner, level doesn't say much.
Also, oil turns black pretty quickly, and it's actually guesswork on how well it's holding up depending on numerous values - changing it early saves the engine, but costs you more oil changes. Changing it late costs the engine, but saves you on oil changes. Ideally, you change the oil once the sustainers and such in it are exhausted and it can't carry out the contaminants quickly enough.
In order to really do this, you need to test. I actually ordered an oil test kit recently, and I already use an oversized oil filter - cleans just as good as the standard, but has ~50% more filter.
That's a load of BS as far as I'm concerned unless it's a rotary engine. Even then I think they can do much better than a quart per 600 miles - more like a quart per 3-5k, enough that if you don't top off in the middle you're just a bit low when the normal time for an oil change comes up.
Because you just can't have enough horsepower. Faster faster faster!
Dieselheads are as often worried about mpg as they are about power. 1 mpg difference can mean a lot of money when you're towing a trailer 1k miles. And the emissions were often costing 2-3. Means a lot when you were starting at 8.
At least until you're running them in a mode to get rid of the particulates and NOx - at least the first generations of these have such worse gas mileage that hybrid buses are getting fewer miles per gallon than the 30 year old buses they were supposed to replace. The hybrids were getting much better mileage until they had the engine replaced with one that was 1 generation of emission control requirements newer.
Economic activity, that is the exchange of goods and services, increases wealth due to comparative advantage. But that happens only if the exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial. Without comparative advantage, economic activity doesn't make anybody wealthier. If we keep buying and selling the same house and land between us ten times for 100000 dollars, we didn't generate a million dollars in new wealth; rather, there is still only a house and land worth 100000 dollars.
In short, you didn't read the second paragraph of my original post, did you? where I mentioned "Well, so long as it isn't on a non-productive 'treadmill'. Two banks trading money back and forth is a treadmill." I then mentioned examples of productive exchanges like haircuts, lunches, and movies.
Basically, you're restating something I said, that I agree with, in a disagreeable fashion. Well, until you get to digging ditches, but even there I agree with you, I'd include it under 'treadmill', because like you said, it's not productive. I just didn't put such an example in because these posts are long enough, I'm not writing a book.
Just make sure that nobody can get too far from the mean income, up or down -- that the further away from it you get, the harder you are pulled back toward it, but in the wide ranges nearer to it you're free to succeed or fail on your own -- and then let the market sort out things like paying wages and providing services as efficiently as possible, knowing that even the most desperately needy person is getting at least enough to cover their basic needs, and that the cost of that is being paid only by those most easily able to shoulder it, leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
An interesting idea, certainly. And 'one simple elegant bandaid' is such an interesting way to put it. It's still a bandaid - supposed to be a temporary fix, but at least it's not the mess of medical gauze & tape you see in cartoons, applied by people who aren't medics.
leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
Bingo. And really, the only reason we're messing with the 'rich' is to pay for the poor.
The problem with giving this type of freedom is that it is freedom to fail.
It's also the freedom to seek happiness. Yes, that means that you might fall along the way. But in many cases it's also the only way to learn how to succeed.
The reason many programs have limits on how you can spend the money (i.e. WIC only allowing food purchases) is because when you just give cash to people who are already bad with money, they tend to waste it.
Perhaps. Or maybe they just value things differently than you do? The only way they'll learn how to be 'good' with money is to actually use it. At least with a BIG they'll get another deposit next month.
Our current welfare programs are mostly aimed at helping children, but if everything is just a cash handout under BIG then many of these children (and adults) will end up going hungry because the money is spent on frivolities rather than necessities.
If the kids are still hungry, we have issues beyond what just giving them money that's 'dedicated' to food. Hell, converting restricted resources(like WIC warrants) to fungible(exchangable) ones already happens, and it's so bad in some areas that schools have to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the kids or they don't eat. I have issues with that. It's a complicated, complicated issue when you have to keep resources from parents that much in order to ensure that their children get enough to eat.
But then, I'm a nasty libertarian type. The adults being smacked upside the head with a clue-stick is part of that.
Another thing to consider - this flips back the situation from where an absentee parent(normally father) gets you more assistance than having one. Which might just encourage intact households where the food thing might not happen as much.
I think that most traditionalist libertarians (even minarchists) wouldn't really agree with you on this.
I tend to call those types Libertarians/Fundamental libertarians, but yes, it is something of a contentious issue. Even for me it's a balancing act - thus why when I propose a BIG, it's more like $500-$1k, not the $2k some others propose.
Your proposal is interesting, and I had to think about it for a while.
My position comes down to opposing yours, mostly due to it being 'Taxation as social policy'. Which isn't liberty.
That being said, if the effect was more minor, or tied mostly to lower income people, I'd object less. Something like your first $10k of capital gains/interest in a year being tax-free.
Instead, what I'd do is allow long-term investment income to be spread over more years.
By the time you're as rich as Bill Gates, Trump, Perot, and such, you don't have any real choice but investments.
As a leftie, I found it interesting that quite a few libertarians whom I spoke to on the subject seem to be okay with BIG, or at least strongly preferring it to the current system (on the basis of reduced complexity & overhead). Perhaps we really can get enough political momentum for this to come anywhere...
I like to say that I agree with the liberals half the time, conservatives half the time, and disagree with both of them half the time, on things that they agree with each other on. Far too many on slashdot seem to think we're just extreme Republicans/conservatives.
As the second article mentions, there are libertarians who support a BIG, such as Charles Murray. It's important to remember that a 'true' libertarian is not an anarchist, or a corporist, or whatever strawman so many seem to love constructing. On average, we support a strong, but limited, government. The idea is that government should be a bit like an industrial press - perfectly capable of the necessary amount of force to do the job it was designed to do, but unable to exert force outside of that direction.
Once you accept that taking care of our most needy citizens, as covered under 'promote the general welfare' in the prologue of the constitution, is a legitimate public function, the question becomes one of how to do it. Personally: 1. Maximize freedom. Attaching strings to benefits isn't freedom. Consider that there have been calls, when it comes to welfare, to require sterilization of recipients, ban organic food, ban food categorized as 'junk', etc... 2. Maximize efficiency: IE Maximum benefit for Minimum cost. Strings cost money.
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee [wikipedia.org] where the government is the employer of last resort.
Sure there is - flexibility. Somebody working a FedJob will see a transition cost to private work that somebody with a BIG would see simply going to a new job.
Still, there's merit in a hybrid approach - Reduce the BIG payment to 'pretty low', then have the guaranteed jobs suppliment that, where they work to maintain and build infrastructure, especially where said infrastructure can stand NOT being maintained during an economic boom. IE bridges get replaced during recessions, not during spikes, in the economy.
Why is this not a completely winning argument in favor of a safety net for the homeless? I genuinely want to know.
'lots' of safety nets actually exist. Homeless shelters are safety nets. Citations - well, $250k was off, it's closer to $40k, around 2002. But you're still looking at housing them being half the cost. $35-150k to keep them on the street, as opposed to $13-25k to house them.
Is it because those in charge really want people they feel better than to suffer so badly that they're willing to pay MORE in order to ensure that happens?
Inertia and fear, I think.
Inertia - there's this belief that homeless people need to 'show' that they're ready for help, by doing things like drying out while still on the street.
Fear - that if they make it 'too nice' that people will be more willing to be or at least claim homelessness to get into the system and linger in it.
Don't get me wrong, I have my conservative aspects, which means that I'm all for studies and steady, measured, implimentation after things like pilot programs. But once you've developed and verified a working program, it's time for a superior program to be adopted elsewhere.
Darn it - forgot to put in quote tags - this would be the proper start to my post:
The OP claimed to be "libertarian leaning" and not a libertarian, so I'm sure he would agree with you.
Indeed I do! Titles are limited in length, so 'leaning' tends to get left out. One problem I see a lot on slashdot is confusion between libertarians, Libertarians(IE fundies), and Anarchists. While I enjoy an on and off membership in the libertarian party, I am very much a moderate in that respect. As one poster on another forum put it, I'm more of a 'practical minarchist'.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take money away from people who invest it into chip factories and give it to people who buy Star Wars action figures, indeed, the producers of Star Wars action figures will have a bigger return on their investment. However, the chip factory won't get built.
First, let's make this more direct. They're not buying Star Wars action figures, but chips - in their cell phone, mp3 player, tablet, etc...
If the people who have the money are considering buying a chip factory, but the current demand for chips is satisfied by existing fabs, they aren't building another one, despite having the money to do so. Now, if demand for chips exceeds current capacity*, even if they're short on money, they'll borrow it.
It turns out that infrastructure isn't built on the basis of fund availability - it's built on the basis of demand. If the demand is there, the money will be found. Right now we have a glut of capital out there - but it's not finding projects with enough demand/return to justify the risk of investment. As such, spurring demand will actually work better to get the economy churning again.
May I suggest you do? While the macroeconomic theories you like are popular with big spending politicians, they are dubious at best and probably wrong. Even if they were right, they were never intended as permanent macroeconomic policy, but as fixes to temporary market failures.
Do you want my transcript showing that I already have? And you're assuming again. The politicians hate my macroeconomic theories. Mostly because it'd mean that they'd have to stop spending money they don't have.
but it is people who think like you who are responsible for these failures and injustices.
Really? Are you sure you're not projecting? When I read about the housing projects, for example, my views on them being dumbasses about it start very, very quickly. When I read about what HUD did back in the day, I face-palm.
No, you don't get accuse me of supporting said failures and injustices when my financial policies would have never supported those programs in the first place.
How about I do what you're doing? You need to look in the mirror, my friend, and decide to make a change. Humanity is a social animal, pure 'I have mine' results in injustice and less for all. You need to stop cutting your own nose off to spite your face. Sometimes a compassionate hand up is far cheaper in the long run than a boot to the ribs of those who have fallen down.
Furthermore, why is it even needed? What actual problem does that address? What evidence is there that people are better off with a basic income guarantee than without one?
Re-read my first posts?
Why is it needed: We can no longer support the bureaucratic nightmare that is the conventional welfare system, which currently provides a lot of dis-incentives to work. I believe that fixing that would be too complicated, thus major reform is needed.
What evidence: Canada did a similar study, EITC seems to do fairly well, etc... Still, I support starting small and working our way up.
Consider that with a BIG you don't need to do paperwork for welfare, unemployment, social security, etc... It's all automatic. There will still be some paperwork, but it'll be minimal.
It also solves the 'problems' with politicians and others dicking with what people can do with the money - NOBODY is going to want restrictions on THEIR BIG. and like I said, besides my belief in the importance of liberty(to fail as well as succeed), studies are that the closer aid is to cash, the more efficiently it benefits the recipients, on average. Canned food drives actually suck at feeding the poor- the donated foods aren't balanced, the aid society can buy crates of canned food that is actually needed/will be used for the price far cheaper than people buying individual cans in the supermarket, etc...
*And I'm simplifying here, it's more like they'd still be able to sell their chips at a profit at the lower price point that chips settle into after production increases.
It's fairly hard to deliver malware through images like jpeg, png, and gif compared to the ease at which you can do so via java and flash. Without punch the monkey stuff, they'd be stuck trying more more estoric hacks for their malware.
Pretty much what phantomfive said - banner ads, and their size, isn't that big of a deal. You're probably looking at about 20kb for one of them.
Now, video ads, sound ads, active ads - those get huge.
Hmm.... Still, I figure 1 test to make sure I don't have problems like antifreeze or fuel getting into my oil is a good idea.
Clean up your shit and adblocking goes away.
Adblocking would never have become a thing if they had stuck to image only banner ads and such and never introduced 'punch the monkey' type ads.
If you do not grant it to everyone than the entire machinery of checking and verification remains intact, removing one of the main arguments (the cost saving aspect).
Indeed. Though this site proposes only granting it to adults, though it does acknowledge that there are numerous options for children, including giving them a partial amount.
This is all basic math and publically accessible sources. How the fuck can you claim that "eliminating existing programs" will already give you 75% of the needed budget?
To be honest, I didn't phrase that all that well. The 75% figure is looking at where you get the money for people who will receive more money from the government than what they're taxed - IE people making less than ~$40k/year. I never proposed that a BIG be implemented without drastically overhauling our tax system.
Figure to meet: $2.1T, or at least 'close', given that I didn't say 75%, I said 'about 3/4'.
source.
Pensions: 1,247 B
welfare: 454B
Health Care, Welfare: 567 B
Total: 2.3T.
The rest is to be met through 'tax adjustments', like eliminating the lowest tax brackets, exemptions, and such.
You can have your basic income if you give up on military spending, healthcare spending, education spending, highways, the space program, etc. Or you can fund it through a massive money-printing program.
Or we could, you know, increase taxes such that the average person ends up pretty much as well off as they were before, with the increased taxes being neutralized(or neutralizing, depending on your view) their BIG payments. Difference being, if they get laid off they don't need to apply for anything like unemployment- the BIG is already there.
But wait, you have "forgotten about inflation", so that's not a concern. Inflation is not real. Giving everybody free cash has no consequences in the real world.
Man, you just have your rage on, don't you. I mean, you edited out the 'almost' in here, so have you worked out your aggression on the straw man yet? This wasn't a claim that inflation isn't real, it was a statement about it having been really low for a good while.
Drug addicts do not get any cheaper when you give them money either. They will just use it to buy more drugs instead of shelter, food, etc., and then _still_ require society to pay for their non-drug needs.
You really have no clue about my desired policies, do you? And the surprising thing is - just giving them money, counter-intuitively, actually DOES WORK. Eventually. For some. At least as well as the other policies work. :(
On the other hand, massively reforming our 'war on drugs' will help here a lot more.
As for the Canada program: it was not funded by the town itself, but required external funding, and the program has since been stopped. If it were truly such a massive success, don't you think it would instead have spread throughout the country?
You clearly didn't read into it more. It was stopped and funding yanked without ever having analyzed the data. It wasn't until like 20 years later that there was enough interest and funding that they went through the collected documentation and put together the information to determine the results.
It's only now working it's way up the policy ladders - there's a huge amount of inertia for something like this, it is radical after all.
You see, the problem isn't that I haven't put '5 minutes' into this, I've put far longer in, so I actually know the details behind the examples you blindly toss out.
You know, sometimes I'll say that I screwed up my wording, that I was unclear. In this case, I suggest that you work on YOUR wording, because I did NOT get that from your postings.
The correct "velocity of money", in the sense of creating the most employment and wealth, is the velocity a free market chooses in the absence of government intervention.
Okay, so you finally managed to say something I disagree with. The fact of the matter is that I believe that a certain amount of government intervention is necessary. Stuff like truth in advertising, honest measurements, non-adulteration(or at least honest dilution if that's desired), contract mediation, and internalization of external costs. There may be a few others in there. I support some interventions before they reach the listed points due to prevention sometimes being far cheaper than the after-effects.
I support reducing government intervention, yes, but I support doing so after examinging the particular intervention in place to assess whether it's benefits exceed it's costs, how much it serves/harms freedom, whether there's other programs that can do it's job better, etc...
, it doesn't follow that intervening to change the velocity of money causes the economic indicator to change.
True, but I'm not aware that I claimed that it was anything more than an indicator/tendency.
When you give money to poor people, they will mostly spend it on consumption, and consumption generates no wealth. The only thing that generates wealth is investment, i.e. spending money on something that has an expected positive return.
Actually, it does 'generate' wealth, because it takes investments in infrastructure to generate the goods they consume, and the investments you're talking about don't have that positive return unless there's demand for the goods they produce. So there's no investments to make money off of without consumption. Spur consumption and you spur investment. May I suggest you read up on macro-economics?
And if you look at the last half century of the war on poverty, it "turns out" that giving money to poor people is ineffective for wealth generation.
Actually, part of the problem is that we didn't just give them money. What did we do? We gave them housing - away from 'good people'. We gave them food - or stamps restricted to the same. We set up programs that effectively penalized intact families and getting a basic job, because both would cost you substantial amounts of aid. My take from the last 50 years of 'war on poverty' is that we had traitors in our midst - carefully sabotoging our every move in the name of racism, classism, even relegion.
Why do you think I support a basic income guarantee? It's to simpify administrative expenses. It's to reward intact families again, or at least not to penalize them. It's to ensure, whenever possible, that somebody working is always better off than not working.
1. Economic agenda? I wasn't aware I'd posted enough of my agenda for you to assess it. What do you think my agenda is?
2. Repeating vs reflecting. Perhaps because you hadn't said anything that I haven't already considered. Why do you think I kept saying you were agreeing with me? Because you weren't saying anything counter to my beliefs.
Honestly, consider fro a moment that your view on my actual 'agenda' might not actually be my agenda, but a funhouse mirror of it. So you're blasting away at it, while I'm standing next to you.
Re-read what I wrote without trying to take the worst, most extreme meaning possible. Read it as the words of a reasonable, moderate, but flawed individual who doesn't always pick the 100% perfect phrasing. You'll probably come up with something a lot closer to my real beliefs.
If you still think I'm going off the deep end, may I suggest a polite question for clarification first. Maybe I did screw something up. Maybe you're making a mountain out of a molehill(IE turning what I consider merely a useful metaphor into an entire philosophical economic policy).
My intent is not to test on a routine basis, but more to get a baseline. Call it a 100k mile checkup.
Basically, can I extend my oil changes or not?
Sure, I said that the faster money is moving, the more economic activity it generate. I then immediately put a disclaimer in that it's possible to 'fake out' the metric. So I counter, again, that you're agreeing with me in a disagreeable fashion.
As for my second statement - again, 'on average'. Exceptions exist, as both you and I have pointed out. I just didn't list examples of said exceptions, in the interests of not writing a book, IE a huge post.
As for stimulating the economy, making money move faster, how it can move 'too fast', I agree. The only problem I have is your claiming that I don't know this stuff when I'm putting exceptions into the very posts you attack, even using pretty much the same argument as my listed exception!
What the government can, and should, do is use estimates of this 'velocity', which is a fairly abstract concept, to help determine the most effective forms of intervention. That's a lot of the problem - they keep using methods that are known not to work well. Turns out, giving poor people money tends to give pretty good results. Better than rich type, at least.
That's far from the only cost in our system. For example, insurance paperwork/transaction costs are something like 30% of the bill for your healthcare.
This is what my design professor called a high tech solution to a low tech problem. I use a dipstick.
Dipstick tells you oil level, and if you're good, a smidge about oil condition. Unless you're driving an oil-burner, level doesn't say much.
Also, oil turns black pretty quickly, and it's actually guesswork on how well it's holding up depending on numerous values - changing it early saves the engine, but costs you more oil changes. Changing it late costs the engine, but saves you on oil changes. Ideally, you change the oil once the sustainers and such in it are exhausted and it can't carry out the contaminants quickly enough.
In order to really do this, you need to test. I actually ordered an oil test kit recently, and I already use an oversized oil filter - cleans just as good as the standard, but has ~50% more filter.
Mine's tied to the odometer - every 5k miles from last reset. I just pay attention to the odo and do it when it hits an even divisor of 5k.
That's a load of BS as far as I'm concerned unless it's a rotary engine. Even then I think they can do much better than a quart per 600 miles - more like a quart per 3-5k, enough that if you don't top off in the middle you're just a bit low when the normal time for an oil change comes up.
Because you just can't have enough horsepower. Faster faster faster!
Dieselheads are as often worried about mpg as they are about power. 1 mpg difference can mean a lot of money when you're towing a trailer 1k miles. And the emissions were often costing 2-3. Means a lot when you were starting at 8.
At least until you're running them in a mode to get rid of the particulates and NOx - at least the first generations of these have such worse gas mileage that hybrid buses are getting fewer miles per gallon than the 30 year old buses they were supposed to replace. The hybrids were getting much better mileage until they had the engine replaced with one that was 1 generation of emission control requirements newer.
Economic activity, that is the exchange of goods and services, increases wealth due to comparative advantage. But that happens only if the exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial. Without comparative advantage, economic activity doesn't make anybody wealthier. If we keep buying and selling the same house and land between us ten times for 100000 dollars, we didn't generate a million dollars in new wealth; rather, there is still only a house and land worth 100000 dollars.
In short, you didn't read the second paragraph of my original post, did you? where I mentioned "Well, so long as it isn't on a non-productive 'treadmill'. Two banks trading money back and forth is a treadmill." I then mentioned examples of productive exchanges like haircuts, lunches, and movies.
Basically, you're restating something I said, that I agree with, in a disagreeable fashion. Well, until you get to digging ditches, but even there I agree with you, I'd include it under 'treadmill', because like you said, it's not productive. I just didn't put such an example in because these posts are long enough, I'm not writing a book.
Just make sure that nobody can get too far from the mean income, up or down -- that the further away from it you get, the harder you are pulled back toward it, but in the wide ranges nearer to it you're free to succeed or fail on your own -- and then let the market sort out things like paying wages and providing services as efficiently as possible, knowing that even the most desperately needy person is getting at least enough to cover their basic needs, and that the cost of that is being paid only by those most easily able to shoulder it, leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
An interesting idea, certainly. And 'one simple elegant bandaid' is such an interesting way to put it. It's still a bandaid - supposed to be a temporary fix, but at least it's not the mess of medical gauze & tape you see in cartoons, applied by people who aren't medics.
leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
Bingo. And really, the only reason we're messing with the 'rich' is to pay for the poor.
Define "wealth"? Do you mean things like durable goods, infrastructure, and art? How about a business? Standard of living?
More economic activity = more people employed = more wealth created, on average.
The problem with giving this type of freedom is that it is freedom to fail.
It's also the freedom to seek happiness. Yes, that means that you might fall along the way. But in many cases it's also the only way to learn how to succeed.
The reason many programs have limits on how you can spend the money (i.e. WIC only allowing food purchases) is because when you just give cash to people who are already bad with money, they tend to waste it.
Perhaps. Or maybe they just value things differently than you do? The only way they'll learn how to be 'good' with money is to actually use it. At least with a BIG they'll get another deposit next month.
Our current welfare programs are mostly aimed at helping children, but if everything is just a cash handout under BIG then many of these children (and adults) will end up going hungry because the money is spent on frivolities rather than necessities.
If the kids are still hungry, we have issues beyond what just giving them money that's 'dedicated' to food. Hell, converting restricted resources(like WIC warrants) to fungible(exchangable) ones already happens, and it's so bad in some areas that schools have to serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the kids or they don't eat. I have issues with that. It's a complicated, complicated issue when you have to keep resources from parents that much in order to ensure that their children get enough to eat.
But then, I'm a nasty libertarian type. The adults being smacked upside the head with a clue-stick is part of that.
Another thing to consider - this flips back the situation from where an absentee parent(normally father) gets you more assistance than having one. Which might just encourage intact households where the food thing might not happen as much.
I think that most traditionalist libertarians (even minarchists) wouldn't really agree with you on this.
I tend to call those types Libertarians/Fundamental libertarians, but yes, it is something of a contentious issue. Even for me it's a balancing act - thus why when I propose a BIG, it's more like $500-$1k, not the $2k some others propose.
Your proposal is interesting, and I had to think about it for a while.
My position comes down to opposing yours, mostly due to it being 'Taxation as social policy'. Which isn't liberty.
That being said, if the effect was more minor, or tied mostly to lower income people, I'd object less. Something like your first $10k of capital gains/interest in a year being tax-free.
Instead, what I'd do is allow long-term investment income to be spread over more years.
By the time you're as rich as Bill Gates, Trump, Perot, and such, you don't have any real choice but investments.
As a leftie, I found it interesting that quite a few libertarians whom I spoke to on the subject seem to be okay with BIG, or at least strongly preferring it to the current system (on the basis of reduced complexity & overhead). Perhaps we really can get enough political momentum for this to come anywhere...
I like to say that I agree with the liberals half the time, conservatives half the time, and disagree with both of them half the time, on things that they agree with each other on. Far too many on slashdot seem to think we're just extreme Republicans/conservatives.
As the second article mentions, there are libertarians who support a BIG, such as Charles Murray. It's important to remember that a 'true' libertarian is not an anarchist, or a corporist, or whatever strawman so many seem to love constructing. On average, we support a strong, but limited, government. The idea is that government should be a bit like an industrial press - perfectly capable of the necessary amount of force to do the job it was designed to do, but unable to exert force outside of that direction.
Once you accept that taking care of our most needy citizens, as covered under 'promote the general welfare' in the prologue of the constitution, is a legitimate public function, the question becomes one of how to do it. Personally:
1. Maximize freedom. Attaching strings to benefits isn't freedom. Consider that there have been calls, when it comes to welfare, to require sterilization of recipients, ban organic food, ban food categorized as 'junk', etc...
2. Maximize efficiency: IE Maximum benefit for Minimum cost. Strings cost money.
There is no good reason to choose basic income (income guarantee) over a job guarantee [wikipedia.org] where the government is the employer of last resort.
Sure there is - flexibility. Somebody working a FedJob will see a transition cost to private work that somebody with a BIG would see simply going to a new job.
Still, there's merit in a hybrid approach - Reduce the BIG payment to 'pretty low', then have the guaranteed jobs suppliment that, where they work to maintain and build infrastructure, especially where said infrastructure can stand NOT being maintained during an economic boom. IE bridges get replaced during recessions, not during spikes, in the economy.
Why is this not a completely winning argument in favor of a safety net for the homeless? I genuinely want to know.
'lots' of safety nets actually exist. Homeless shelters are safety nets.
Citations - well, $250k was off, it's closer to $40k, around 2002. But you're still looking at housing them being half the cost. $35-150k to keep them on the street, as opposed to $13-25k to house them.
Is it because those in charge really want people they feel better than to suffer so badly that they're willing to pay MORE in order to ensure that happens?
Inertia and fear, I think.
Inertia - there's this belief that homeless people need to 'show' that they're ready for help, by doing things like drying out while still on the street.
Fear - that if they make it 'too nice' that people will be more willing to be or at least claim homelessness to get into the system and linger in it.
Don't get me wrong, I have my conservative aspects, which means that I'm all for studies and steady, measured, implimentation after things like pilot programs. But once you've developed and verified a working program, it's time for a superior program to be adopted elsewhere.
Darn it - forgot to put in quote tags - this would be the proper start to my post:
The OP claimed to be "libertarian leaning" and not a libertarian, so I'm sure he would agree with you.
Indeed I do! Titles are limited in length, so 'leaning' tends to get left out. One problem I see a lot on slashdot is confusion between libertarians, Libertarians(IE fundies), and Anarchists. While I enjoy an on and off membership in the libertarian party, I am very much a moderate in that respect. As one poster on another forum put it, I'm more of a 'practical minarchist'.