"Whether you take the money and train your replacement or not doesn't matter."
Whether you alone take the money likely doesn't matter but whether people in aggregate take the money or not matters. Disrupting operations costs money, a severe disruption can even be a big PR and stock price hit and that costs the board/executives money.
Have a year with 4-6 major headlines about companies that couldn't do business due to outsourcing and took stock price hits then watch how fast strategies change.
"Laying off American's actually working in those jobs to replace them with H1Bs from HCL should prove something no?"
Obviously, there was never a shortage of talent in the US, there is just a desire to flood the market because of salary growth. They create the illusion there isn't qualified talent by listing requirements that might as well be a fingerprint so they can justify declining anyone who applies but they don't have to justify hiring an unqualified h1b, only the americans they reject.
Once you are already in that spot it's too late. But you could just drive a car that you can afford or at least keep the car after you pay it off. You could not use those credit cards. Hell if you lose your job you can just start ignoring unsecured debt like credit cards. Good credit is helpful when you really need it but it isn't a neccessity. Utilities you can float quite a while with juggling and they aren't likely to foreclose on your mortgage soon.
It sucks though, because if companies didn't have staff by the balls this way they would pull this crap far less. Everyone who takes that deal paves the way for more people to find themselves in the same spot.
"If you lose your job you move if you have to. There is no requirement that you continue to live in a place you can no longer afford."
I've been there and done that. But the reality is that a single income family making $60k probably doesn't have a month of salary buffer. And even if they do, it is a very difficult call to burn it on moving expenses when you might have more time to find something if you stay where you are and do a bit of juggling.
Personally, instead of trying to minimize government I'd rather minimize the scale of government. Just like the free market concept stops working when there are two few choices and consumers have too little mobility so does government. A much weaker federal structure and stronger states would help this but breaking it further into weaker states and stronger voting district size chunks would be much better. Don't like the policies where you live, move to another district.
The current system where there is a strong and overreaching federal power and 50 mini clones of the same structure provide very little choice to the populace and very little incentive for states to actively compete to provide citizens with a better quality of life.
"I agree that there should be a baseline existence that we don't let fellow citizens fall beneath, but where we draw that line is the difference between creating an idle, trouble prone permanent dependent underclass that bankrupts the country"
But you are completely good with creating an idle trouble prone permanent dependent upperclass that bankrupts the country as we do now right?
I've lived all over the country. That is an effective way to travel in maybe 3 places. Especially for the poor who have to manage shifts be reachable and available on demand at three jobs.
"Or expect the poor person to attend more "$2 Tuesday" matinees."
Right because their friends are likely to be at those matinees during work hours on Tuesday, or are you suggesting they should only interact with others like themselves and with the same schedules? How is this superior to a smart phone with ulimited content via netflix? Getting and keeping any job is going to require them to have a cellphone and social media profile these days anyway.
Whatever the poor have it needs to be reasonably in common with what everyone else is doing.
"To give money, you have to take it in the first place."
Of course you do and I've defined where we take it. "it should come out of the fed tap"
"And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something"
That isn't neccesarily true. In this case it means money MIGHT be slightly more expensive but only if net inflation actually increases which isn't a given. People having more money means less need of credit so demand for credit from banks might be reduced and there might not be net inflation at all. Even if money is more expensive that translates into greater risk not reduced opportunity.
That is all very general though. The current situation is that the fed rate is currently nearly zero and the fed is likely to hike it simply because it has sat there for so long it feels like we should with the economy seeming to be okay. If anything we running dangerously close to risk of deflation which would be even more catostraphic than out of control inflation.
"You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment."
We already do that now, the money is already being given away and it primarily goes to passive investors who sit at the top 1% by wealth mostly in the US. In the current system they serve a purpose putting pressure that results in increased productivity among the rest. This is simply starting to shift that concept to the global scale where the US population becomes the new 1% that exists to drive the productivity of the new labor forces in India and China. By the time those nations are approaching the point we are and there is nowhere else to shift to it is likely there won't be very many "employment" and "productivity" positions for humans to occupy.
As an automations engineer I assure you, the crazy sci-fi books that talk about an ideal future where humans don't need to work anymore because machines do everything. We are there, except it doesn't happen all at once, at a more and more rapid rate we are replacing humans and there are not more educated positions for them to move up to. In fact we are automating some of the highest paid and most educated positions. In some places labor is still cheaper or we haven't yet gotten to automating for those things the US could never compete with the massive labor pools in India and China. The US built the companies that are expanding to take advantage of that, the US developed the technology that is improving those places and bringing them up to even better standards than we have here. Why should the US not invest to make sure it's middle class owns and continues to own the companies increasing their profits and otherwise shifting interests away from the US?
Social security and medicare are not welfare. The primary reason there is debt associated with these things is because the federal government raids the programs to pay for other things like defense.
" It's even hidden in the cost of the road system - the big trucks do the most damage to the roads, but we tolerate that - and don't force the truck companies to pay corresponding charges - because it reduces the cost of getting food to the poor."
I love how you pretend it is all about the poor. It has nothing to do with all the rest of the goods and services. It isn't as if pretty much every item in your home was transported on a truck at some point and every service you've utilized hasn't required goods transported on trucks. If businesses had to pay directly for all the road wear they cause (including that of the workers they require to operate commuting) I don't think it would be the poor you'd hear scream first.
Netflix? No. Something like Netflix? Yes. The something actually has to be as many different somethings as possible that a group of people can gather around, discuss, have in common (including among those who are not poor), and otherwise socialize with and relax in their free time.
50 years ago that would have been different than today. 100 years ago something else altogether. Today netflix is an extremely low cost option for that, it provides a great deal of variety for a very low rate. It's certainly cheaper than going out and trying to do anything in the world. So few people go out into the world and the companies that provide options there are used to revenue from when people did meaning that prices are through the roof.
If you want to keep the populace content you need to give them bread AND circuses. I know it feels like a lot to give to the slaves who mine the salt, after you, who initial to sign off on the shipment of tons of salt to pay the armies are obviously far more valuable and deserving of entertainment than a slave who mines a couple pounds a day but if you don't give them something to keep them distracted you will find you need that army pretty quickly.
" Fuck that, we're damn near 20 trillion in debt with no real effort to do anything to even slow it down."
Do you know why? It has very little to do with social programs for the poor. The vast majority of our debt is domestic. The reason we have it is that money begins with the federal reserve, which is a private bank. Oh the treasury prints paper money, we used to be able to track what the fed did by their purchase of paper currency but the fed can generate bits on it's own all day and that paper money it purchases not at face value but at printing cost so a hundred dollar bill is purchased for a few cents. The fed loans that money to smaller banks who are required to have holdings of small fraction of what they can borrow and the interest is next to nothing. The rate is lower than inflation so the banks could just keep the money and make a profit. Our government then issues treasury bonds which pay a higher rate than the fed rate, banks then purchase those bonds which creates our national debt, to our own banks, with money that comes from devaluing the money already in your wallet. So all the interest on that national debt? Welfare paid directly to the wealthiest. It doesn't come from tax funds but ALL the interest paid on bank loans is welfare to the rich in the same system because we charitably gave them the money we borrowed back! Even better for them, that money goes into bank holdings so banks actually have effectively unlimited borrowing capacity and the fractional reserve thing is just a dog and pony show.
Now we do need a small interest rate at the top, it doesn't need to go to shareholders in a private bank but we need that rate to function as a valve which can slow new money generation and keep inflation in control (there should always be inflation with fiat currency which is what we have) but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be borrowing directly at that rate for national debt, infrasctructure, student loans, mortgages, sba loans, a basic income or insert anything else of obvious positive impact to our economy. Those things are obvious good investments and we don't need a private bank to determine that. Whatever impact that has on the rate at the top and the free flow of credit through the banking system so be it.
They lived in the world of 100 years ago where everyone else was not using Facebook and a smart phone and therefore those were not mandatory for interacting with society.
Not having a cell phone is a good way to get fired from a low end job and not having a facebook profile is a good way to get rejected during the background check for a good job.
"Given a chance, the free market would fix air pollution."
Given that those environmental agencies came to exist because the free market was doing the opposite when unregulated I doubt that very much.
"Unfortunately, it is hamstrung by "environmental agencies" that permit corporations to pollute without consequences."
Unfortunately the issue is complicated by the fact that both this AND what I said above are true. The free market has taken control of environmental agencies, the result being intentionaly flawed standards that amount to snake oil and companies doing the bare minimum to manipulate products to comply with those standards. The result being a bunch of snake oil products that aren't really any better, cost only slightly more to make, but which companies then charge a hefty premium for. Because they complied with standards they can then point to that and be proof against liability for their actions.
Well there is a lot of truth there. Something like paints might make a poor example of it but most environmentally friendly efforts are snake oil. Everyone also looks out for their own interests. A paint manufacturer might charge more for that environmentally safe and healthy paint and/or choose the options that result in paint with a less durable finish and/or poorer coverage with the net result being that people pay more for paint. Even if the paint manufacturer isn't intentionally using environmentally friendly paint as a way to milk a higher profit the manufacturers of the more environmentally friendly paint might be doing just that, they might even be the snake oil vendor, just like a drug manufacturer, tweak a molecule so you have a new thing you can patent and that hasn't been proven to be unsafe yet and then sell that claiming it is more environmentally friendly than X which has already been shown to be unsafe.
What is the difference between the company footing the costs to make safer paints and the consumer? First, companies are greedy profit machines and will milk the consumers not for the cost but for as much perceived value increase the market will accept, and second it disproportionately attacks those with less wealth rather than evenly spreading the cost to match wealth. Spreading according to wealth doesn't just minimize the real impact to quality of life, it also better correlates to who ultimately ends up getting the most value from all the painting being done.
Democracy has the same purpose every government structure has, keeping the majority from revolting while the elite remain elite and live off their labors.
And crazy everything natural/organic/non-gmo/animal rights people pollute the waters and prevent rationale discussion that is actually based on science. Unfortunately, certain subjects draw extremists like flies, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, anything negative the government might be doing, global banking, private prisons, etc.
Just look at what the NSA was doing, geeks knew about the FBI programs in the 90's, they knew where the tech was and could "follow the money" so to speak. Assuming the NSA works like any person or organization and does whatever it can do and get away with to further its interests and/or those of its leaders we might not have known exactly what they were up to but that they were up to something which violated the rights of citizens and was counter to our interests was pretty much a given. Try to point it out and you immediately got lumped in with every nutjob who claims there are pyramids on Mars.
It is something useful to say, those who have wealth generally like to pretend it's because they are superior with their increased wealth as the evidence. Because that sounds too obviously arrogant they frame it as the poor being irresponsible with their lack of relative wealth being the evidence. Pointing out everyone is equally irresponsible despite how much wealth they happen to have and that disparity of wealth as a consequence of personal superiority is an oddity rather than typical argues for a level field of judgement.
Agreed and that basic income in the US should not come from taxpayer funds, it should come from the federal reserve tap. Our entire economic system is based on inflation, people are so afraid of out of control inflation that most don't realize that inflation is the bedrock on which our system is built. With inflationary currency systems new money has to be injected to devalue existing currency and thereby force growth. Currently in the US we give all that money via the federal reserve to the wealthiest among us at banks, they loan some of that back to cover tax funded programs by buying treasury bonds which pay them higher rates. Paying that new currency out as basic income first and increasing the fed rate for bank borrowing to control inflation makes more sense than giving the money to banks and borrowing it back from them at a higher rate.
Yes, you risk slowing credit but giving a basic income across all classes means there is less need to borrow and currently the rates are so low as to be effectively nothing. The fed is looking to slowly start increasing because they've been so low for so long but not in response to any actual sign of inflation. If anything we are at risk of deflating.
To counter my own argument (which I think addresses what the GP meant most accurately) while there aren't huge benefits today there are some big benefits if you are looking down the road to optical computing. Obviously optical interconnects are faster and more efficient than converting back and forth to electrical interconnects.
The reason to go with optical computing is the massive gain in bandwidth and much lower attenuation. One electrical computing core is just that, one computing core, an optical computing core could potentially simulanteously carry many independent processing paths carried on different wavelengths just as we can carry multiple signals on different wavelengths on an optical data cable now. That is actually huge, at first glance you'd think "cool, 4 colors would mean 4 cores for the price of one" but theoretically it's much more than that if the processing core had X logic paths it would grow to X^W where W is the number of independent wavelengths. Timing would be fun.
When you give people money taxpayers always get something back, those people spend that money which drives the economy providing jobs and reducing prices.
I'm not sure what a basic income has to do with welfare or even taxes since doing it properly it should come out of the fed tap as an alternative to fueling needed inflation by giving funds to banks. The entire global economic system depends on giving out free money, I fail to see the benefits of giving it to those who have the most right out of the gate vs giving to everyone across the board.
Thanks to globalization and automation there is a shift of labor overseas and a reduction of new jobs to replace less skilled jobs with, a basic income in the western nations that developed the technology that developing nations are utilizing makes sense and enables those nations to bring more of their population into an investment class that actually benefits from their large corporations globalizing and making increased profits. The current system leaves no room for the lower class to invest and all but the upper middle and above can only invest retirement funds. With no wages there is no system of investment for the middle class, leaving no negative impact to the wealthy as jobs disappear domestically and they relocate to newly developed nations with improving and more modern infrastructure. We need a basic income that allows 25-50% of domestic wages to be invested so that the western world becomes the top 1% in the globalized world of tomorrow and not the dessicated corpose left behind by the wealthy who have moved on.
And what they need does include entertainment, social connection and interaction, and VARIETY of foods. This may not be required to produce the physical meat of the body but it is a requirement for proper mental function.
Slashdot Mirror
This.
There isn't anywhere where the cost of living is $11,880, not even in the most rural and poor parts of the country.
"Whether you take the money and train your replacement or not doesn't matter."
Whether you alone take the money likely doesn't matter but whether people in aggregate take the money or not matters. Disrupting operations costs money, a severe disruption can even be a big PR and stock price hit and that costs the board/executives money.
Have a year with 4-6 major headlines about companies that couldn't do business due to outsourcing and took stock price hits then watch how fast strategies change.
"Laying off American's actually working in those jobs to replace them with H1Bs from HCL should prove something no?"
Obviously, there was never a shortage of talent in the US, there is just a desire to flood the market because of salary growth. They create the illusion there isn't qualified talent by listing requirements that might as well be a fingerprint so they can justify declining anyone who applies but they don't have to justify hiring an unqualified h1b, only the americans they reject.
Once you are already in that spot it's too late. But you could just drive a car that you can afford or at least keep the car after you pay it off. You could not use those credit cards. Hell if you lose your job you can just start ignoring unsecured debt like credit cards. Good credit is helpful when you really need it but it isn't a neccessity. Utilities you can float quite a while with juggling and they aren't likely to foreclose on your mortgage soon.
It sucks though, because if companies didn't have staff by the balls this way they would pull this crap far less. Everyone who takes that deal paves the way for more people to find themselves in the same spot.
This is why we need a basic income.
"If you lose your job you move if you have to. There is no requirement that you continue to live in a place you can no longer afford."
I've been there and done that. But the reality is that a single income family making $60k probably doesn't have a month of salary buffer. And even if they do, it is a very difficult call to burn it on moving expenses when you might have more time to find something if you stay where you are and do a bit of juggling.
That is why the smart companies hire the replacements in parallel and in a gradual phase in.
Personally, instead of trying to minimize government I'd rather minimize the scale of government. Just like the free market concept stops working when there are two few choices and consumers have too little mobility so does government. A much weaker federal structure and stronger states would help this but breaking it further into weaker states and stronger voting district size chunks would be much better. Don't like the policies where you live, move to another district.
The current system where there is a strong and overreaching federal power and 50 mini clones of the same structure provide very little choice to the populace and very little incentive for states to actively compete to provide citizens with a better quality of life.
"I agree that there should be a baseline existence that we don't let fellow citizens fall beneath, but where we draw that line is the difference between creating an idle, trouble prone permanent dependent underclass that bankrupts the country"
But you are completely good with creating an idle trouble prone permanent dependent upperclass that bankrupts the country as we do now right?
"Or expect the poor person to get a bus pass."
I've lived all over the country. That is an effective way to travel in maybe 3 places. Especially for the poor who have to manage shifts be reachable and available on demand at three jobs.
"Or expect the poor person to attend more "$2 Tuesday" matinees."
Right because their friends are likely to be at those matinees during work hours on Tuesday, or are you suggesting they should only interact with others like themselves and with the same schedules? How is this superior to a smart phone with ulimited content via netflix? Getting and keeping any job is going to require them to have a cellphone and social media profile these days anyway.
Whatever the poor have it needs to be reasonably in common with what everyone else is doing.
"To give money, you have to take it in the first place."
Of course you do and I've defined where we take it. "it should come out of the fed tap"
"And when you take it, the opportunity cost means that that money cant be used to pay someone to produce something"
That isn't neccesarily true. In this case it means money MIGHT be slightly more expensive but only if net inflation actually increases which isn't a given. People having more money means less need of credit so demand for credit from banks might be reduced and there might not be net inflation at all. Even if money is more expensive that translates into greater risk not reduced opportunity.
That is all very general though. The current situation is that the fed rate is currently nearly zero and the fed is likely to hike it simply because it has sat there for so long it feels like we should with the economy seeming to be okay. If anything we running dangerously close to risk of deflation which would be even more catostraphic than out of control inflation.
"You are subsidizing non productivity and unemployment."
We already do that now, the money is already being given away and it primarily goes to passive investors who sit at the top 1% by wealth mostly in the US. In the current system they serve a purpose putting pressure that results in increased productivity among the rest. This is simply starting to shift that concept to the global scale where the US population becomes the new 1% that exists to drive the productivity of the new labor forces in India and China. By the time those nations are approaching the point we are and there is nowhere else to shift to it is likely there won't be very many "employment" and "productivity" positions for humans to occupy.
As an automations engineer I assure you, the crazy sci-fi books that talk about an ideal future where humans don't need to work anymore because machines do everything. We are there, except it doesn't happen all at once, at a more and more rapid rate we are replacing humans and there are not more educated positions for them to move up to. In fact we are automating some of the highest paid and most educated positions. In some places labor is still cheaper or we haven't yet gotten to automating for those things the US could never compete with the massive labor pools in India and China. The US built the companies that are expanding to take advantage of that, the US developed the technology that is improving those places and bringing them up to even better standards than we have here. Why should the US not invest to make sure it's middle class owns and continues to own the companies increasing their profits and otherwise shifting interests away from the US?
Social security and medicare are not welfare. The primary reason there is debt associated with these things is because the federal government raids the programs to pay for other things like defense.
" It's even hidden in the cost of the road system - the big trucks do the most damage to the roads, but we tolerate that - and don't force the truck companies to pay corresponding charges - because it reduces the cost of getting food to the poor."
I love how you pretend it is all about the poor. It has nothing to do with all the rest of the goods and services. It isn't as if pretty much every item in your home was transported on a truck at some point and every service you've utilized hasn't required goods transported on trucks. If businesses had to pay directly for all the road wear they cause (including that of the workers they require to operate commuting) I don't think it would be the poor you'd hear scream first.
Netflix? No. Something like Netflix? Yes. The something actually has to be as many different somethings as possible that a group of people can gather around, discuss, have in common (including among those who are not poor), and otherwise socialize with and relax in their free time.
50 years ago that would have been different than today. 100 years ago something else altogether. Today netflix is an extremely low cost option for that, it provides a great deal of variety for a very low rate. It's certainly cheaper than going out and trying to do anything in the world. So few people go out into the world and the companies that provide options there are used to revenue from when people did meaning that prices are through the roof.
If you want to keep the populace content you need to give them bread AND circuses. I know it feels like a lot to give to the slaves who mine the salt, after you, who initial to sign off on the shipment of tons of salt to pay the armies are obviously far more valuable and deserving of entertainment than a slave who mines a couple pounds a day but if you don't give them something to keep them distracted you will find you need that army pretty quickly.
" Fuck that, we're damn near 20 trillion in debt with no real effort to do anything to even slow it down."
Do you know why? It has very little to do with social programs for the poor. The vast majority of our debt is domestic. The reason we have it is that money begins with the federal reserve, which is a private bank. Oh the treasury prints paper money, we used to be able to track what the fed did by their purchase of paper currency but the fed can generate bits on it's own all day and that paper money it purchases not at face value but at printing cost so a hundred dollar bill is purchased for a few cents. The fed loans that money to smaller banks who are required to have holdings of small fraction of what they can borrow and the interest is next to nothing. The rate is lower than inflation so the banks could just keep the money and make a profit. Our government then issues treasury bonds which pay a higher rate than the fed rate, banks then purchase those bonds which creates our national debt, to our own banks, with money that comes from devaluing the money already in your wallet. So all the interest on that national debt? Welfare paid directly to the wealthiest. It doesn't come from tax funds but ALL the interest paid on bank loans is welfare to the rich in the same system because we charitably gave them the money we borrowed back! Even better for them, that money goes into bank holdings so banks actually have effectively unlimited borrowing capacity and the fractional reserve thing is just a dog and pony show.
Now we do need a small interest rate at the top, it doesn't need to go to shareholders in a private bank but we need that rate to function as a valve which can slow new money generation and keep inflation in control (there should always be inflation with fiat currency which is what we have) but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be borrowing directly at that rate for national debt, infrasctructure, student loans, mortgages, sba loans, a basic income or insert anything else of obvious positive impact to our economy. Those things are obvious good investments and we don't need a private bank to determine that. Whatever impact that has on the rate at the top and the free flow of credit through the banking system so be it.
They lived in the world of 100 years ago where everyone else was not using Facebook and a smart phone and therefore those were not mandatory for interacting with society.
Not having a cell phone is a good way to get fired from a low end job and not having a facebook profile is a good way to get rejected during the background check for a good job.
"Given a chance, the free market would fix air pollution."
Given that those environmental agencies came to exist because the free market was doing the opposite when unregulated I doubt that very much.
"Unfortunately, it is hamstrung by "environmental agencies" that permit corporations to pollute without consequences."
Unfortunately the issue is complicated by the fact that both this AND what I said above are true. The free market has taken control of environmental agencies, the result being intentionaly flawed standards that amount to snake oil and companies doing the bare minimum to manipulate products to comply with those standards. The result being a bunch of snake oil products that aren't really any better, cost only slightly more to make, but which companies then charge a hefty premium for. Because they complied with standards they can then point to that and be proof against liability for their actions.
Well there is a lot of truth there. Something like paints might make a poor example of it but most environmentally friendly efforts are snake oil. Everyone also looks out for their own interests. A paint manufacturer might charge more for that environmentally safe and healthy paint and/or choose the options that result in paint with a less durable finish and/or poorer coverage with the net result being that people pay more for paint. Even if the paint manufacturer isn't intentionally using environmentally friendly paint as a way to milk a higher profit the manufacturers of the more environmentally friendly paint might be doing just that, they might even be the snake oil vendor, just like a drug manufacturer, tweak a molecule so you have a new thing you can patent and that hasn't been proven to be unsafe yet and then sell that claiming it is more environmentally friendly than X which has already been shown to be unsafe.
What is the difference between the company footing the costs to make safer paints and the consumer? First, companies are greedy profit machines and will milk the consumers not for the cost but for as much perceived value increase the market will accept, and second it disproportionately attacks those with less wealth rather than evenly spreading the cost to match wealth. Spreading according to wealth doesn't just minimize the real impact to quality of life, it also better correlates to who ultimately ends up getting the most value from all the painting being done.
Democracy has the same purpose every government structure has, keeping the majority from revolting while the elite remain elite and live off their labors.
And crazy everything natural/organic/non-gmo/animal rights people pollute the waters and prevent rationale discussion that is actually based on science. Unfortunately, certain subjects draw extremists like flies, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, anything negative the government might be doing, global banking, private prisons, etc.
Just look at what the NSA was doing, geeks knew about the FBI programs in the 90's, they knew where the tech was and could "follow the money" so to speak. Assuming the NSA works like any person or organization and does whatever it can do and get away with to further its interests and/or those of its leaders we might not have known exactly what they were up to but that they were up to something which violated the rights of citizens and was counter to our interests was pretty much a given. Try to point it out and you immediately got lumped in with every nutjob who claims there are pyramids on Mars.
It is something useful to say, those who have wealth generally like to pretend it's because they are superior with their increased wealth as the evidence. Because that sounds too obviously arrogant they frame it as the poor being irresponsible with their lack of relative wealth being the evidence. Pointing out everyone is equally irresponsible despite how much wealth they happen to have and that disparity of wealth as a consequence of personal superiority is an oddity rather than typical argues for a level field of judgement.
Agreed and that basic income in the US should not come from taxpayer funds, it should come from the federal reserve tap. Our entire economic system is based on inflation, people are so afraid of out of control inflation that most don't realize that inflation is the bedrock on which our system is built. With inflationary currency systems new money has to be injected to devalue existing currency and thereby force growth. Currently in the US we give all that money via the federal reserve to the wealthiest among us at banks, they loan some of that back to cover tax funded programs by buying treasury bonds which pay them higher rates. Paying that new currency out as basic income first and increasing the fed rate for bank borrowing to control inflation makes more sense than giving the money to banks and borrowing it back from them at a higher rate.
Yes, you risk slowing credit but giving a basic income across all classes means there is less need to borrow and currently the rates are so low as to be effectively nothing. The fed is looking to slowly start increasing because they've been so low for so long but not in response to any actual sign of inflation. If anything we are at risk of deflating.
To counter my own argument (which I think addresses what the GP meant most accurately) while there aren't huge benefits today there are some big benefits if you are looking down the road to optical computing. Obviously optical interconnects are faster and more efficient than converting back and forth to electrical interconnects.
The reason to go with optical computing is the massive gain in bandwidth and much lower attenuation. One electrical computing core is just that, one computing core, an optical computing core could potentially simulanteously carry many independent processing paths carried on different wavelengths just as we can carry multiple signals on different wavelengths on an optical data cable now. That is actually huge, at first glance you'd think "cool, 4 colors would mean 4 cores for the price of one" but theoretically it's much more than that if the processing core had X logic paths it would grow to X^W where W is the number of independent wavelengths. Timing would be fun.
When you give people money taxpayers always get something back, those people spend that money which drives the economy providing jobs and reducing prices.
I'm not sure what a basic income has to do with welfare or even taxes since doing it properly it should come out of the fed tap as an alternative to fueling needed inflation by giving funds to banks. The entire global economic system depends on giving out free money, I fail to see the benefits of giving it to those who have the most right out of the gate vs giving to everyone across the board.
Thanks to globalization and automation there is a shift of labor overseas and a reduction of new jobs to replace less skilled jobs with, a basic income in the western nations that developed the technology that developing nations are utilizing makes sense and enables those nations to bring more of their population into an investment class that actually benefits from their large corporations globalizing and making increased profits. The current system leaves no room for the lower class to invest and all but the upper middle and above can only invest retirement funds. With no wages there is no system of investment for the middle class, leaving no negative impact to the wealthy as jobs disappear domestically and they relocate to newly developed nations with improving and more modern infrastructure. We need a basic income that allows 25-50% of domestic wages to be invested so that the western world becomes the top 1% in the globalized world of tomorrow and not the dessicated corpose left behind by the wealthy who have moved on.
"That does mean food and housing"
And what they need does include entertainment, social connection and interaction, and VARIETY of foods. This may not be required to produce the physical meat of the body but it is a requirement for proper mental function.