Chinese laborers's wages have gone up quite a bit in recent years. China also has lower poverty indicators than the United States--notably, less per-capita hunger (50,000,000 Americans go without enough food each day) but apparently higher homelessness (it's hard to find statistics on this; it's rumored to be 1.6 million in America and 12 million in China, or.49% in America and.88% in China).
China's economy relies on a favorable export market for their manufacture base. This means Chinese families rely on the global market to live. Taking away their jobs because their jobs suck and hobbling their economy in that way to ensure the government can't provide welfare doesn't strike me as the best humanitarian argument one can make, especially while China is openly improving its social and environmental programs.
But this comes at a price increase. Americans pay a multiple for the cotton from India compared to when it were produced locally, because of middlemen, traders and transportation. So here trade isn't beneficial because America can produce the cotton itself
But Americans can produce cotton for $500, whereas it's $125 from India.
By the way, it costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot shipping container from China to the United States. That container carries 20,000 pairs of trousers or 20,000 jackets. That's 6.5 cents per.
Tell me again about how much it costs to bring cheap cotton from India instead of using expensive cotton from America.
Obviously our economy tanks if we go 30% unemployed overnight
Because I covered that.
It's harder, but more proper and prosperous to continuously re-integrate the displaced, even if it means forsaking certain trade policies.
So, as we've outsourced more jobs, as we've progressed in technology, and as we've continued to lay off Americans in these processes, we've added more population; and we've added more jobs than labor force. Even if you account for our "labor force" by counting the peak labor force participation rate out of the current population over age 16, we end up with more total employed, fewer total unemployed, and fewer underemployed over the past half-decade, decade, and two decades.
So, without "bringing any jobs back from China," we'e actually re-integrated the displaced--or at least, we've re-integrated that portion of America.
Let me spell out the argument for the benefit of everyone: Parts of America that used to be poor and destroyed have become wealthy; and, meanwhile, other parts of America that used to be wealthy have become obsolete and poor. Through all of this, a greater total proportion of Americans enjoy a higher position in society, and the standard-of-living across the American population has increased greatly.
Trade has made Americans richer. Middle-class Americans. Lower-class Americans. America has not slowly created a growing class of unemployed, of poor, of abused, of beaten, of destroyed; Americans as a whole have enjoyed less poverty and more wealth thanks to trade and technical progress.
You're being butthurt because Cupertino has become a wealthy, prosperous city, while Detroit has become an unmitigated shithole. You argue that Cupertino should have been left an unmitigated shithole while Detroit was protected from its fall, even though the current situation is much better for enormously more Americans.
What you describe isn't more-prosperous; it's a rebellion against change. You want the world to stay the same as it's been in the past--rather, in the point in history you're comfortable with as some sort of reference. You don't care how many people suffer so long as you're personally comfortable with it: if literally hundreds of millions of Americans suffer so that tens of thousands can be more-prosperous as they've always been, then fine, fuck everyone but those tens of thousands.
It's the same mentality as the RIAA desperately trying to cling to their old business models, striking down digital distribution so that the CD remains the common currency of their industry. The new is bad and the old is good.
the rich just hoard all the money and pull up the ladder behind them.
I mean, I can buy roughly twice as much stuff with the median income today than I could with the median income in 1995. How many quad-core processors, gigabytes of RAM, satellite navigation systems, and high-end smart phones could you buy in 2002? What did 10GB of 4G data plan and streaming music and video cost you? How much did Comcast charge for 200Mb/s internet?
It's true food has only gotten marginally cheaper, clothing has only dropped by some small fraction, and the housing market has been a mess. Utilities are cheaper in the same way housing is expensive: Speculation and new technology have disrupted the energy market, and the cheap prices we're seeing are not representative of long-term trends. In all, the cost of living has decreased, and the reach we have to purchase luxury goods at middle-class incomes has increased.
The fantasy of turning everyone in the US into intellectuals and forcing everyone to go to college has to stop at some point.
The truth is people will wind up like IT workers. IT workers are glorified burger flippers. You have your network engineers who can actually find their ass with both hands and an RJ-45 jack, and you have IT who answers the phone at the remote site and has to be talked through plugging in cables--oh, and we can now remotely make the switch port lights blink so they can actually identify "port 22" even if their dumb asses mount the fucking thing upside-down like they tend to do.
That's right: IT workers are a bunch of morons who think they're in the same class as DBAs, network engineers, programmers, and systems architects. We'd replace them with robots, but actually getting robots to mount switches and servers in generic data centers is a really hard engineering job, and it's cheaper to pay retards some $50k and pat them on the head when they manage to not lose the screwdriver down their pants. Maybe we can train spider monkeys to do it for cheaper, but they shit all over the data center.
So yeah, the retail workers, grocery baggers, and burger flippers of America? They're what an IT economy will bring us. Those factory workers you suggest are too stupid to make it through college? That's your IT staff. They even think they're important--like carrying a plastic box from one machine to the next is somehow hard, and not just something it'd cost millions of dollars to get a machine to do and peanuts to get a human to do.
People think I'm a genius because I know things they don't. They don't seem to realize I've figured this shit out from a quick glance through a two-page listing of commands. I build systems from the ground up, I architect security solutions, I point out how to make things scalable, I figure out how to maintain enormous and critical systems that keep gigantic corporations running--and it's trivial. I'm surrounded by other IT workers who come to me to figure out how they should approach trivial things, and who think they're so much smarter than some guy in accounting whose job would make them shit their pants if they had a look over what's involved simply because he doesn't know what a "network router" is.
We're not special. We're not the world's top minds--well, maybe James Mickens and that guy who wrote PaX are. We're grunt workers who get by on minimal thought and effort, and the smart ones among us write tools that require even less effort so that even stupider people can do our jobs.
you're saying that a portion of people who currently could pay $300 a month in rent but don't because it's not stable and they might lose their homes, would be willing to pay that with a UBI because it is stable
No, those people are totally willing to pay. The problem is next month they might be able to pay $117, or they might be fired and jobless.
On the landlord's end, that means costs sunk into those evictions and empty units. The landlord pays a bunch of extra money and misses a bunch of income. To make his income equal to or greater than his costs, those $300/month apartments must rent for $350--and ain't nobody even got $350.
For the lower-end demographics, it actually does work that way. The per-sqft price is higher because more of that income tier cause additional costs to the landlord, and more of those units end empty. Enough people in $700, $1/sqft apartments are stable that the income gained from them offsets the loss from the ones who get evicted. Meanwhile people in $1,800, $0.70/sqft apartments generally make their payments on time, all the time, so the cost of evictions and empty units is practically non-existent, and landlords make the same profit margin even renting at a lower per-square-foot cost--something that's considerable when you realize that you could have more small, $1/sqft apartments.
Incidentally, the amount I allocated to rent in 2013 was $1.30/sqft. I talk a lot about reducing risk by stabilizing incomes while simultaneously accounting for a 30% increase in risk. $1/sqft is ghetto-class rental price, seriously. I lived across the street from abandoned buildings and someone got shot in front of my apartment at 3pm. I later bought a house in that neighborhood for $50,000. I still assume it's going to cost landlords 30% more, even after I eliminate the most basic risk: people being too god damned poor to afford rent in the first place.
knowing that there are now people with a stable income, builders would build properties at that lower price point (where they currently don't).
Yes, with the above: these people weren't unwilling, but unable to pay. Landlords are the intermediary, and they hire the builders; landlords will be unwilling to pay in both cases, even if they're able, because the outcome won't produce a profit. The risk of rent drives the profit into the negative.
Because this is new construction in a new segment of the market it would not therefore necessarily have an impact on price levels in other markets.
It's not that. It's that the primary market is separate: these are low-class, low-income people buying a small type of microunit apartment. It's not a 750sqft 1-bedroom or even a 550sqft studio; those units cost significantly more. Meanwhile the guy who rents the 550sqft studio could just rent two 224sqft apartments side-by-side, so if you raise his rent to $600/month... yeah, not going to work. You do know I can just rent the entire floor, right?
when you have new production in a market that doesn't compete with other markets, then you simply have economic growth with minimal impact on price levels.
Reasonable, and I'd still look for possible economic interactions. There's upwards pressure and downwards pressure here--which is actually quite complex.
The poorer you are, the bigger impact the new money has on you. If you make $20,000/year and you get $7,000 more (untaxed!) income, that's a giant leap in your spendable income. If you make $60,000/year and you get $7,000 more... that's a third as much; and, in the model I used, you get more like $5,000 more if you make $60,000/year, so it's like 42% vs 10%--the impact on the poor-class guy is 4 times as big (I did some quick tax math, sorry).
At the same time, the guy at the very bottom only has a stable $300/month set aside for rent; the rest has
Why do some people always think that anyone who points out problems with handing out free money is saying everything must not work? Are you confused by thinking that your plan is "everything", or just that the fact that history has shown that handing out free money does not work means that it must not work?
I'm confused by the fact that UBI isn't the only thing of which people behave this way. They don't even offer good complaints; they just find some reason it won't work, then complain it won't work because of what it is. For a lot of policy issues, if you establish it works, they just wave their hand and say rich people or politicians will never allow it.
I've identified loads of risks and worked out how to control for them. I don't complain that things won't work; I look for what will cause problems and find a way to mitigate them.
Yet, projections of the cost of UBI rely on it being so. Things like saving a trillion dollars by getting rid of welfare, calculating the cost by simply multiplying the number of people by the amount of money, etc, are all zero-sum assumptions
Actually, the welfare system carries a cost simply for being what it is (administrative overhead). It also carries costs in terms of risks like fraud, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency.
Whenever welfare fails to support someone, our economy in total pays the consequence. The most extreme is that our population essentially fits to what our economy can handle with a certain distribution of standards-of-living--or, simply said, there's so much unemployment, so many poor people, so much middle-class, and so forth, and we tend to stabilize toward that. When welfare fails and somebody dies, we eventually replace them--which means raising a child who is utterly-useless until they're around 18-24, consuming tons of resources to get there. Often, failures in providing adequate welfare lead to mental and physical health deterioration, disabling people who then become beggars or other burdens on society; whereas their economic situation would otherwise be temporary and supportable with less labor (and thus less cost).
We've also had ridiculous shit where SNAP would, for a time, only allow certain purchases such as "18oz jar of peanut butter." Larger jars are cheaper per-ounce and more economical, thus more efficient; and, in the most egregious case, we've had states deny purchase of peanut butter when 18oz jars were phased out in favor of 16oz jars, because "16oz jar of peanut butter" was not an acceptable purchase on SNAP. Inefficient.
SNAP and HUD are not communism; they do pay the same kind of central planning cost as the USSR's inefficient central planning ideals, in a lesser form. The plan I propose pays the inefficiency costs of open capitalism, while also more-effectively leveraging its benefits. Still not perfect.
As for a trillion dollars cheaper...
In 2013, our welfare system cost $1.7 trillion, or 17.2% of AGI. In 1950, all Government benefits including Social Security Retirement benefits cost 1.28% of AGI. That's a pretty hefty cost paid by everyone to cover not everyone.
The retail market costs of goods and services to support housing, utilities, food, personal care, and clothing are pretty low. Looking at local prices in grocery stores spanning from California to Baltimore, at apartment rents and square footage, and other sources of retail prices, I actually computed something akin to $294 being able to barely cover everything--but didn't I just say central planning doesn't fucking work?
My initial numbers were $547/month. In 2015, that's $583/month. That's 17% of all taxable income, divided across all adults. Speaking of zero-sum economics, did you know trade and technical progress lower the cost of goods and raise buying power? 17% of all of the money in 2015, divided by all of the adults in 2015, actually buys more
Your model is broken. Chapter 13 removes the landlords who can't provide affordable housing to this group.
My point is it's physically-impossible now. There are zero landlords who can provide affordable housing to people who are homeless, jobless, and unstable. How do you supply affordable housing to people whose annual income is less than the cost of providing housing, or even to people whose costs fluctuate across that limit?
Imagine if your paychecks could randomly be as little as 30% of your salary, and could suddenly stop coming for a few weeks or months at a time. How would you pay your mortgage?
And the lowest class probably still won't after UBI, due to some combination of financial incompetence, drug use (legal or not), mental illness, and inflation of basic needs
They're a minority of low-income individuals and households. Those problems are always greatly-overstated, partly because it's hard to measure.
It's a persuasion thing. I never learned to lie, so I learned to say things with specific words, inflections, ordering of ideas, and other manner of technically-saying-the-same-thing to imply other things not being said, or to prevent people from asking uncomfortable questions by making sure the thought never crosses their minds.
It's a matter of identifying the emotion people associate with a certain statement. A word may not mean "evil person," but may bring an impression of nefariousness to the person's mind. I've seen more ham-fisted examples where people describe a situation and then point out that the reader identified a particular character as a mid-40s white woman, identified some of the other characters as black, and came up with an unstated history where the black kids were into drugs and rape and shit, even though nobody did anything bad--it's just how they talk, how they smile, and the emotion you interpret between them, where they are at the time, etc.. You can get a lot more subtle than saying "he held up his ghetto-blaster" instead of "he raised his portable radio".
Trade is beneficial. Trade lowers prices and increases wealth. Moving the manufacture of goods which have been offshored back to America would mean that those very factory workers would work longer hours to buy the same goods they're making. Above a certain factory worker wage, there would be fewer factory workers than lost American jobs; below a certain factory worker wage, we'd come up short, and so create American jobs to fill.
So, we're talking about destroying American jobs and making all Americans poorer, or about creating a few American jobs and also making all Americans poorer.
...yeah, we should continue to strategically offshore work that's cheaper to offshore, slowly, at a rate that doesn't shock our economy with sudden spikes in unemployment. Obviously our economy tanks if we go 30% unemployed overnight; whereas if we lose 0.1% per month to trade, we end up rich enough to offset it, creating more American jobs by the time the next year's layoffs come, thus ending up with lower unemployment and a wealthier middle- and lower-class.
UBI gives you a chunk of cash and says have at it. Done. Market must figure out how to turn you into a profit source. I've already figured that part out, and simply haven't written an economic mandate to carry out a certain form of Government-directed, centrally-managed business as part of the policy.
I thought we were talking about the chronically homeless, which is generally due to mental or other health issues
Homelessness causes mental health issues. It's a lot of stress. Bad decisions and mental health problems can lead to homelessness; however, non-institutionalizing dementia doesn't generally lead to that scale of failure at life. Most people, given the means to get by, can.
The current generation will improve, albeit the issues you cite will have a minor impact. To put this to perspective: there are 1.6 million homeless Americans, and 1 million find shelter each night; 0.6 million don't get shelter. There are 50 million Americans facing hunger; and a one-time infusion of $1,000 of cash is thought to prevent homelessness of at-risk households for over a year.
That means the conversion of individuals in non-homeless households to homeless individuals is stymied by a monthly infusion of around $600 of cash (currently) (it's 17% of all taxable income; the actual buying power tracks the GDP-per-capita by mathematical necessity), while households facing hunger are most likely 100% remediated. That leaves 1.6 million homeless Americans, who cycle out roughly at the same rate other Americans become newly-homeless.
What do you think will happen to those 1.6 million homeless Americans when they're told they can walk into a bank, start an account, and start receiving $600/month (plus whatever payment they should have already received but to which the Administration had no address nor account to deposit, thus it's sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund)?
They might suddenly be able to buy a $50 tent and food.
They might eventually be able to buy into a tiny apartment, after one gets built to capitalize on these broke-ass street urchins.
There are a lot of things that might happen that won't happen now; and the next generation is facing a lot of things that won't ever happen again because they'll be prepared for it and have the means to stop it.
I think this point got lost in discussion about landlords' reasons for being a landlord, etc. I still think, though, that the effect of UBI on inflation - especially housing cost inflation - needs more consideration; without increasing the available supply of housing, more money chasing the same supply will inevitably increase prices
Yes well, the whole discussion is long, complex, and can't be stated in half a sentence, so the point gets lost. I'm also off my ADHD meds, slightly-manic, and routing around mental impulses that cause cortisol release and subsequent violent reactions--how'm I doin'?--so you're pissing me off. I need to talk to my psychiatrist ffs.
Anyway you're still thinking about these things in a narrow and unimaginative way. Inflation doesn't work that way, and you're essentially trying to wedge ECON101 bullshit supply-and-demand into reality.
The lynchpin here is that the new renters have a limited supply of money--limited income. If you have 1 million renters chasing 600 apartments, you might think supply and demand suggests rents go up. Every damn one of them dirty ghetto-rats is incapable of paying rent above $300/month. Where's your supply-and-demand now?
The same goes for building new units. There's sudden demand to build way more apartments than we have material and labor for (even though it's mostly rennovating old, empty units). Those units will rent for under $300/month. Do you really think the builders will jack their prices up like crazy? It won't happen; landlords won't pay it
I'm not sure about the wording. "Admission" sounds like guilt, which is a complex concept. Fault isn't guilt.
Uber doesn't seem to have engaged in a cover-up or avoided the issue, so they don't seem to be "admitting" anything. I can't imagine the issue wasn't noticed by others prior to this, so "disclosed" doesn't seem the right word. Perhaps "acknowledged" or "confirmed" would be more politically-neutral, with the latter being a more-favorable action word ("Uber has confirmed its engineers are working to correct a flaw...") while the former is a less-favorable statement ("Uber has acknowledged a flaw exists. They know. Stop calling them about it.").
I would like to see the next DS be a one-screen behemoth with some form of emulating two screens, to kill the stupid two-screen mandatory widget everyone uses whether it's appropriate or not simply because having one black screen is apparently terrible (except on Wii U, since nobody looks at the tablet thing anyway, so it often goes unused).
I think the problem is people take parenting as a personal thing, and so can't accept that they're wrong. If people would learn to see parenting as an engineering challenge, they'd have more success in creating better-adjusted offspring, and their offspring would be less-annoying and more-successful.
Instead of parenting in a way which is best for society and for their children, people parent in a way which is best for their ego and self-image.
That doesn't magically include a bank account though.
Funny, it turns out you get social security whether you want it or not. The checks back up if you don't have a way to receive them. Further, the Social Security Administration works with state-controlled satellite sites to supply actual benefit, rather than sending money direct from the Federal government; and many states supply such benefits through banks. For example: when I took unemployment, my state created a mandatory checking account at Citi Bank, in which they put my money I was receiving as an unemployment benefit.
(emphasis added)
Yes, you emphasized the remainder risk which is present in all other tenants, notably in tenants of immediately-higher income. Did you know tenants might also die, or set their apartments on fire?
Even fairly-rich tenants might spend all their money on booze. Middle-class college kids do this. The point was that I've reduced problems that poor people have (unstable income) to problems that everyone else has, making them equivalent in nature.
Why even bother with that complexity? Why not just have the state build zero-cost housing and eliminate the intermediate steps of the bank accounts and tracking UBI?
So, rather than a self-optimizing market structure with a bounds put on bad-state behavior, you want analysts to expend massive amounts of labor trying to use incomplete information to figure out where to optimally provide service?
Even our current welfare system--which has much less management than that--doesn't fucking work. Look at HUD: 25% of HUD-qualified households get benefits, and the other 75% are told they have to wait... and they wait until they no longer qualify for HUD.
Further, have you considered that you have eighteen fucking years living with your parents to create your own bank account, register it as the direct-deposit target with the Social Security Administration, and start receiving income the week you turn 18? Do you think babies are born into homelessness? What do you think is so hard about someone walking into a bank to get a checking account as a direct deposit target for money the government has accounted for as being theirs?
A whole hell of your argument predicates on Social Security being enormous and complex and non-existent, and thus requiring a whole new system to be built from the ground-up. Unfortunately for you, the system I describe is already in existence, and is over 99% efficient.
I am making the subtle implication that he most likely took notice of her body the moment it became a sexually-mature adult--although being that that's around 12-14 years, yes, technically he's not a pedophile even if he did indeed want to bang the shit out of his 12-year-old daughter with the curvy hips and the buxom tits, simply by the fact that she had tits and ass at that age.
What will happen in the real world is that your demand for the trades will drive those prices up, as will the realization from many people making minimum wage that they can do just as well on UBI and not work. The 39,000 "new consumers" will actually be 30,000 or less as the rest simply drink or smoke up the UBI payments.
Why do people always insist everything must not work? Are you all just prone to neurosis?
It's the same thing with people claiming that public school would deteriorate and destroy children's brains, because they can't handle that kind of information overload. It's the same thing with people claiming businesses just take 100% profit as they advance technology and trade--something that history shows can't and doesn't happen, but which people insist is the only thing that ever has happened.
So, you're telling me people's #1 desire is to live in a CAFO, caged, being fed the lowest-quality rodent feed? Why don't all homeless people simply go to prison? Hell, why don't all people just go to prison? Why don't you go to prison? It's better than working.
It's nice making projections based on a zero-sum economy
The economy is not zero-sum. The stock market is, but that's not the economy.
since there will always be unemployable people for whom UBI simply won't cover the costs of surviving. How do you deal with them?
I actually built my profile UBI on current market costs, risk projections, and predicted economic fluctuations. It was designed to provide enough to cover the cost of living. It's cheaper than modern welfare by roughly $1 trillion less taxpayer burden, and 46% of the monthly income is risk-controls--only 54.1% of the money represents current retail prices for food, shelter, utilities, clothing, and personal care.
I also kept a welfare system for children of low-income families, although it's small--about 1.4% of AGI, or some $150 billion.
Let's say you pay some workers $10/hr. You have 10 of these workers. Each hour, their combined efforts produce 2 toasters.
To buy a toaster, you must pay the workers's wages. As there are ten of them, they make $100/hr; and as they produce toasters, a toaster must necessarily sell for a minimum of $50. The lowest price you will ever see for a toaster is $50.
So we invented a machine that, over its lifetime, represents roughly ten thousand hours of work at $20/hr in its manufacture, maintenance, fueling, and operation; but it has a lifetime of 20,000 hours of operation. That means this machine costs $10/hr to operate.
By employing this machine, we can use 4 human workers at $10/hr to produce 5 toasters per hour by their combined efforts. That's $50/hr of total human labor expended, 5 toasters. To pay everyone involved, that toaster must sell for a minimum of $10. Effectively, 80% of toaster makers are no longer employed in the making of the same number of toasters--although now that toasters aren't so damned expensive, they've become a staple household item and so more people (and poorer people) buy them, and otherwise we buy other things with the difference (creating replacement jobs, so long as we didn't create like 30% unemployment in one swing and crash our economy).
Following so far?
That $10/hr wage isn't all take-home pay.
There's benefits, income taxes, unemployment insurance premiums, and payroll taxes to pay on workers. Obviously, income comes off your wage--if you take home $10 and pay 10% on it, that means you get $9 of that take-home--but the rest comes out of the employer's pocket.
Let's say your worker costs a 0.1% unemployment premium, 18% benefits, and 6.4% payroll tax (OASDI is 6.2%, medicare is 0.2%). That $10/hr employee thus has a $8.03 wage (and takes home $6.73/hr--10% income tax and 6.2% OASDI out of your paycheck), and $1.97 is taxes and such.
So under my Universal Social Security, OASDI and unemployment roll into the 17% income tax (on business income as well) that pays the USS. That employee is now a $9.49/hr employee, and those toasters fell from $47.45 to $9.49 when the new machine came online. Likewise, the employee might end up paying 17% tax now and take home $6.66/hr in his paycheck or $532.80 per 2-weeks (versus $538.40) , while receiving an extra $269.08 deposit from Social Security every 2 weeks.
In other words: Toasters cost 51 cents less, and the toaster-maker's paycheck is $263.48 more.
Do you really want businesses to pay money that doesn't go to the worker as a consequence for hiring a human rather than finding a way to do the same work without the human (machines, outsourcing, etc.)? Because that money is paid per labor-hour employed, anything manufactured with any technique using a particular span of labor-hours to make each unit of product will have to factor that increase in labor cost into the price--the consumer pays the payroll tax.
Think of payroll tax as almost-identical to sales tax, but invisible.
It's part of the incentive system for encouraging them not to do that.
The problem is the current system makes providing housing to people who have no stable income non-viable because the ones who turn out stable-ish won't be able to afford to offset the risk of the others--i.e. you have to charge those people more for rent than their income can pay. A UBI system ensures 100% of everyone has a stable income, thus reducing that risk.
You haven't demonstrated that there is a problem here. And add me to the list of people who aren't particularly impressed by the idea of creating a basic income just so we can have more expensive housing.
It wouldn't create more-expensive housing. Let me demonstrate how this works, today and under a UBI like USS.
Today
Lowest class: Unstable income, possibly $0. Can afford less than $500/month.
Lower class: Stable income, $1,500-$2,250/month. Can afford $500/month-$750/month.
Middle-low class: Stable income, $2,100-$3,000/month. Can afford $700-$1,000/month.
Under a Universal Social Security
Lowest class: Stable income, $600/month. Can afford $300/month.
Lower class: Stable income, $2,100-$2,850/month. Can afford $700/month-$950/month.
Middle-low class: Stable income, $2,700-$3,600. Can afford $900-$1,200/month.
As you can see, the lowest class can't afford the lowest-affordable housing right now. That means their income can't push up housing prices. We're not turning the poor into the middle-class.
At the same time, the lower- and middle-classes get richer. They can spend that money on non-housing, or on larger housing, or on a combination of both. As history has shown, societies actually do get richer, and Americans have increased their buying power tenfold over the past few generations--and housing prices didn't simply shoot through the roof to gobble up 100% of all that new money. Indeed, in 1950, the average new home was 982sqft; while by 2000, it was over 2,100sqft--more than doubling the average home size in 50 years, while Americans moved from spending 28% on housing (including utilities and home supplies) to only 33%, just a proportional 18% increase in spending to buy 114% more.
There is also the potential for people to make a choice about housing. People with few possessions and limited need for space might move into the newly-available smaller apartments, decreasing demand for larger apartments. This can have a downward effect on prices--the upward pressure on the smallest apartments is limited because a significant fraction of that market doesn't have enough money to pay for higher rent, yet represents an enormous profit potential, thus holding prices down.
Did you really think the economics were simple? Don't tell me you believed that supply-and-demand fluff they taught you in ECON 101. You should see the look on people's faces when they realize real scarcity can happen while there's well more than enough supply to meet demand.
Money is intrinsically is tied to human labor, NOT the end product
Correct. Money is tied to human labor. Thus if I make $20/hr and you make $10/hr, I work for 1 hour and can induce you to work for 2 hours.
Consider that a moment. What happens when you raise some wages, and not all wages? Minimum wage increases. Well, I work for 1 hour and can induce someone else to work for 1.5 hours instead of 2. I've lost the ability to induce half an hour of work in exchange for my hour of work. At the same time, the minimum-wage worker's 1 hour makes 1.5 times the money--and he can induce another minimum-wage worker to work for... 1 hour. Now, mind you, with his 1.5 times the money, he can induce me to work for 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes for every 1 hour of his work, so he's richer; but the total number of working-hours to be induced into useful labor by exchange in this system has been reduced, and some other workers have thus become unemployed.
Right now, automation combined with globalism is having a a one-two punch on western civilization. On one hand, it's driving the cost of human labor down - hence a deflationary pressure on the value of money. At the same time, governments in said western nations are printing money (thus devaluing the current supply of money now in circulation) in order to inject velocity in the market place
... Uh.
Global trade is making America richer. Normal Americans are becoming richer. There's an argument about job growth, and it's both complex and simple.
The complex explanation is that jobs can be created or destroyed by trade. In America, if we stopped importing Chinese Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, we'd have a break-even at $18/hr: paying the American factory workers above $18/hr would reduce the total American jobs compared to importing from China, while paying American factory workers below $18/hr would increase the total American jobs.
At the same time, you have a cost issue. Americans pay, on average, $14.97 for these MBCT now. At $21/hr, the price would rise to $50.57; while $8.25/hr minimum wage workers would produce those pants for only just a hair above $25/hr. That means, for the respective line-worker wages, a $21/hr American worker's labor-hours expense to buy pants would change from 0.71 to 2.4 hours; while a minimum-wage worker's would change from 1.8 to 3.0 hours. Pants get 3.38 times more expensive for $21/hr American workers if $21/hr American workers make pants; they get 1.65 times as expensive for $8.25/hr American workers if $8.25/hr American workers make pants.
Bring poverty back to America, right?
The simple explanation is it doesn't actually affect jobs. With an excessively-low unemployment, the labor force tends to grow to fill to 4%-5% unemployment; while a high unemployment tends to slow labor force growth. This is mediated by things like early/late retirement or college students going to grad school to wait for the employment market to improve. In the worst case, poor people simply die when unemployment is high and welfare is ineffective (effective welfare tends to create jobs).
At some point, it will stall out, along with economic growth, and supply of goods/services will be limited.
Technical progress increases our reach and reduces scarcity. For example: genetically modified organisms and more-effective pesticides allow us to get more food off the same land, expending less labor, less pesticide (made by labor), less seed (collected by labor), less fertilizer (made by labor), and less irrigation (labor) for the same amount of food.
Automation is a form of technical progress. If you remove the jobs slowly, then consumer buying power increases and creates new jobs. Do it too quickly, and you get high unemployment and a sick economy.
Wages are paid by revenue. You buy a toaster, you have to pay
the example does not seem to be complete. If landlord A can't make it work with $105 million in revenue because it costs $117 million, what is preventing some more efficient operation from coming in and building it for $95 million and being able to profit at $105 million in revenue?
Landlord A can't make it work because tenants have a high chance of losing their income stream. Landlord A is "Landlord Today", and his tenants will lose physical possession of money required to pay rent when their employment situation changes. That means Landlord A's tenants can lose their welfare, they can lose job hours, or they can flat out get fired; then the checks will stop coming in, their bank accounts will be empty, and they'll get evicted--leaving the landlord with an empty unit, not to mention the three-month process of eviction, and the unpaid month leading into eviction anyway, and the cost to hire movers to throw all of the tenant's shit onto the street.
When Landlord A's tenants get evicted, he has to cover that loss. To do this, he needs to include the diffused cost of eviction and empty units across his other tenants. Unstable tenants thus raise the rent the landlord must charge all tenants.
Landlord B lives in our alternate future. Landlord B's tenants have a guaranteed amount of income. If Landlord B's tenants have no job, no welfare, and no income, those tenants still have a known, unchanging amount of money simply appearing in their bank accounts month after month. If those tenants get fired, that base amount of money keeps coming in. That money can't be taken away; it can only be spent.
Landlord B can make a 100% absolute, perfect guarantee that every single tenant will have an income no less than this.
If Landlord B rents a unit which can be rented at a price within what that income can stably pay month-to-month, then Landlord B has 100%, inviolable guarantee that his tenants will receive income sufficient to pay rent each month. That makes Landlord B's lowest-income tenants similar to Landlord B's lower-income tenants: the lower-income tenants tend to have consistent income, and so only fail to pay rent when financial troubles or irresponsible spending consumes their income before they pay rent.
You've now completely eliminated the risk that the lowest-income tenants will fail to pay rent for reasons beyond their control. Ghetto tenants without stable jobs are now functionally-equivalent to ghetto tenants with stable jobs, except they rent smaller units because they have less money.
If you have a random sampling of women of different backgrounds and interests, you're already controlling for most variables. A lot of similarities become randomized; the remainder can be idenitfied as a part of pregnancy, as they're likely behavioral changes caused as a part of the process, like nesting behavior in pregnant animals which don't build nests when not preparing to reproduce.
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Is that the Chinese slave labor argument?
Chinese laborers's wages have gone up quite a bit in recent years. China also has lower poverty indicators than the United States--notably, less per-capita hunger (50,000,000 Americans go without enough food each day) but apparently higher homelessness (it's hard to find statistics on this; it's rumored to be 1.6 million in America and 12 million in China, or .49% in America and .88% in China).
China's economy relies on a favorable export market for their manufacture base. This means Chinese families rely on the global market to live. Taking away their jobs because their jobs suck and hobbling their economy in that way to ensure the government can't provide welfare doesn't strike me as the best humanitarian argument one can make, especially while China is openly improving its social and environmental programs.
But this comes at a price increase. Americans pay a multiple for the cotton from India compared to when it were produced locally, because of middlemen, traders and transportation. So here trade isn't beneficial because America can produce the cotton itself
But Americans can produce cotton for $500, whereas it's $125 from India.
By the way, it costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot shipping container from China to the United States. That container carries 20,000 pairs of trousers or 20,000 jackets. That's 6.5 cents per.
Tell me again about how much it costs to bring cheap cotton from India instead of using expensive cotton from America.
"I don't like this ideal and there are numbers I don't care to understand" doesn't equate to "you're wrong or lying".
You mean like
Obviously our economy tanks if we go 30% unemployed overnight
Because I covered that.
It's harder, but more proper and prosperous to continuously re-integrate the displaced, even if it means forsaking certain trade policies.
So, as we've outsourced more jobs, as we've progressed in technology, and as we've continued to lay off Americans in these processes, we've added more population; and we've added more jobs than labor force. Even if you account for our "labor force" by counting the peak labor force participation rate out of the current population over age 16, we end up with more total employed, fewer total unemployed, and fewer underemployed over the past half-decade, decade, and two decades.
So, without "bringing any jobs back from China," we'e actually re-integrated the displaced--or at least, we've re-integrated that portion of America.
Let me spell out the argument for the benefit of everyone: Parts of America that used to be poor and destroyed have become wealthy; and, meanwhile, other parts of America that used to be wealthy have become obsolete and poor. Through all of this, a greater total proportion of Americans enjoy a higher position in society, and the standard-of-living across the American population has increased greatly.
Trade has made Americans richer. Middle-class Americans. Lower-class Americans. America has not slowly created a growing class of unemployed, of poor, of abused, of beaten, of destroyed; Americans as a whole have enjoyed less poverty and more wealth thanks to trade and technical progress.
You're being butthurt because Cupertino has become a wealthy, prosperous city, while Detroit has become an unmitigated shithole. You argue that Cupertino should have been left an unmitigated shithole while Detroit was protected from its fall, even though the current situation is much better for enormously more Americans.
What you describe isn't more-prosperous; it's a rebellion against change. You want the world to stay the same as it's been in the past--rather, in the point in history you're comfortable with as some sort of reference. You don't care how many people suffer so long as you're personally comfortable with it: if literally hundreds of millions of Americans suffer so that tens of thousands can be more-prosperous as they've always been, then fine, fuck everyone but those tens of thousands.
It's the same mentality as the RIAA desperately trying to cling to their old business models, striking down digital distribution so that the CD remains the common currency of their industry. The new is bad and the old is good.
the rich just hoard all the money and pull up the ladder behind them.
I mean, I can buy roughly twice as much stuff with the median income today than I could with the median income in 1995. How many quad-core processors, gigabytes of RAM, satellite navigation systems, and high-end smart phones could you buy in 2002? What did 10GB of 4G data plan and streaming music and video cost you? How much did Comcast charge for 200Mb/s internet?
It's true food has only gotten marginally cheaper, clothing has only dropped by some small fraction, and the housing market has been a mess. Utilities are cheaper in the same way housing is expensive: Speculation and new technology have disrupted the energy market, and the cheap prices we're seeing are not representative of long-term trends. In all, the cost of living has decreased, and the reach we have to purchase luxury goods at middle-class incomes has increased.
The fantasy of turning everyone in the US into intellectuals and forcing everyone to go to college has to stop at some point.
The truth is people will wind up like IT workers. IT workers are glorified burger flippers. You have your network engineers who can actually find their ass with both hands and an RJ-45 jack, and you have IT who answers the phone at the remote site and has to be talked through plugging in cables--oh, and we can now remotely make the switch port lights blink so they can actually identify "port 22" even if their dumb asses mount the fucking thing upside-down like they tend to do.
That's right: IT workers are a bunch of morons who think they're in the same class as DBAs, network engineers, programmers, and systems architects. We'd replace them with robots, but actually getting robots to mount switches and servers in generic data centers is a really hard engineering job, and it's cheaper to pay retards some $50k and pat them on the head when they manage to not lose the screwdriver down their pants. Maybe we can train spider monkeys to do it for cheaper, but they shit all over the data center.
So yeah, the retail workers, grocery baggers, and burger flippers of America? They're what an IT economy will bring us. Those factory workers you suggest are too stupid to make it through college? That's your IT staff. They even think they're important--like carrying a plastic box from one machine to the next is somehow hard, and not just something it'd cost millions of dollars to get a machine to do and peanuts to get a human to do.
People think I'm a genius because I know things they don't. They don't seem to realize I've figured this shit out from a quick glance through a two-page listing of commands. I build systems from the ground up, I architect security solutions, I point out how to make things scalable, I figure out how to maintain enormous and critical systems that keep gigantic corporations running--and it's trivial. I'm surrounded by other IT workers who come to me to figure out how they should approach trivial things, and who think they're so much smarter than some guy in accounting whose job would make them shit their pants if they had a look over what's involved simply because he doesn't know what a "network router" is.
We're not special. We're not the world's top minds--well, maybe James Mickens and that guy who wrote PaX are. We're grunt workers who get by on minimal thought and effort, and the smart ones among us write tools that require even less effort so that even stupider people can do our jobs.
you're saying that a portion of people who currently could pay $300 a month in rent but don't because it's not stable and they might lose their homes, would be willing to pay that with a UBI because it is stable
No, those people are totally willing to pay. The problem is next month they might be able to pay $117, or they might be fired and jobless.
On the landlord's end, that means costs sunk into those evictions and empty units. The landlord pays a bunch of extra money and misses a bunch of income. To make his income equal to or greater than his costs, those $300/month apartments must rent for $350--and ain't nobody even got $350.
For the lower-end demographics, it actually does work that way. The per-sqft price is higher because more of that income tier cause additional costs to the landlord, and more of those units end empty. Enough people in $700, $1/sqft apartments are stable that the income gained from them offsets the loss from the ones who get evicted. Meanwhile people in $1,800, $0.70/sqft apartments generally make their payments on time, all the time, so the cost of evictions and empty units is practically non-existent, and landlords make the same profit margin even renting at a lower per-square-foot cost--something that's considerable when you realize that you could have more small, $1/sqft apartments.
Incidentally, the amount I allocated to rent in 2013 was $1.30/sqft. I talk a lot about reducing risk by stabilizing incomes while simultaneously accounting for a 30% increase in risk. $1/sqft is ghetto-class rental price, seriously. I lived across the street from abandoned buildings and someone got shot in front of my apartment at 3pm. I later bought a house in that neighborhood for $50,000. I still assume it's going to cost landlords 30% more, even after I eliminate the most basic risk: people being too god damned poor to afford rent in the first place.
knowing that there are now people with a stable income, builders would build properties at that lower price point (where they currently don't).
Yes, with the above: these people weren't unwilling, but unable to pay. Landlords are the intermediary, and they hire the builders; landlords will be unwilling to pay in both cases, even if they're able, because the outcome won't produce a profit. The risk of rent drives the profit into the negative.
Because this is new construction in a new segment of the market it would not therefore necessarily have an impact on price levels in other markets.
It's not that. It's that the primary market is separate: these are low-class, low-income people buying a small type of microunit apartment. It's not a 750sqft 1-bedroom or even a 550sqft studio; those units cost significantly more. Meanwhile the guy who rents the 550sqft studio could just rent two 224sqft apartments side-by-side, so if you raise his rent to $600/month ... yeah, not going to work. You do know I can just rent the entire floor, right?
when you have new production in a market that doesn't compete with other markets, then you simply have economic growth with minimal impact on price levels.
Reasonable, and I'd still look for possible economic interactions. There's upwards pressure and downwards pressure here--which is actually quite complex.
The poorer you are, the bigger impact the new money has on you. If you make $20,000/year and you get $7,000 more (untaxed!) income, that's a giant leap in your spendable income. If you make $60,000/year and you get $7,000 more... that's a third as much; and, in the model I used, you get more like $5,000 more if you make $60,000/year, so it's like 42% vs 10%--the impact on the poor-class guy is 4 times as big (I did some quick tax math, sorry).
At the same time, the guy at the very bottom only has a stable $300/month set aside for rent; the rest has
Why do some people always think that anyone who points out problems with handing out free money is saying everything must not work? Are you confused by thinking that your plan is "everything", or just that the fact that history has shown that handing out free money does not work means that it must not work?
I'm confused by the fact that UBI isn't the only thing of which people behave this way. They don't even offer good complaints; they just find some reason it won't work, then complain it won't work because of what it is. For a lot of policy issues, if you establish it works, they just wave their hand and say rich people or politicians will never allow it.
I've identified loads of risks and worked out how to control for them. I don't complain that things won't work; I look for what will cause problems and find a way to mitigate them.
Yet, projections of the cost of UBI rely on it being so. Things like saving a trillion dollars by getting rid of welfare, calculating the cost by simply multiplying the number of people by the amount of money, etc, are all zero-sum assumptions
Actually, the welfare system carries a cost simply for being what it is (administrative overhead). It also carries costs in terms of risks like fraud, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency.
Whenever welfare fails to support someone, our economy in total pays the consequence. The most extreme is that our population essentially fits to what our economy can handle with a certain distribution of standards-of-living--or, simply said, there's so much unemployment, so many poor people, so much middle-class, and so forth, and we tend to stabilize toward that. When welfare fails and somebody dies, we eventually replace them--which means raising a child who is utterly-useless until they're around 18-24, consuming tons of resources to get there. Often, failures in providing adequate welfare lead to mental and physical health deterioration, disabling people who then become beggars or other burdens on society; whereas their economic situation would otherwise be temporary and supportable with less labor (and thus less cost).
We've also had ridiculous shit where SNAP would, for a time, only allow certain purchases such as "18oz jar of peanut butter." Larger jars are cheaper per-ounce and more economical, thus more efficient; and, in the most egregious case, we've had states deny purchase of peanut butter when 18oz jars were phased out in favor of 16oz jars, because "16oz jar of peanut butter" was not an acceptable purchase on SNAP. Inefficient.
SNAP and HUD are not communism; they do pay the same kind of central planning cost as the USSR's inefficient central planning ideals, in a lesser form. The plan I propose pays the inefficiency costs of open capitalism, while also more-effectively leveraging its benefits. Still not perfect.
As for a trillion dollars cheaper...
In 2013, our welfare system cost $1.7 trillion, or 17.2% of AGI. In 1950, all Government benefits including Social Security Retirement benefits cost 1.28% of AGI. That's a pretty hefty cost paid by everyone to cover not everyone.
The retail market costs of goods and services to support housing, utilities, food, personal care, and clothing are pretty low. Looking at local prices in grocery stores spanning from California to Baltimore, at apartment rents and square footage, and other sources of retail prices, I actually computed something akin to $294 being able to barely cover everything--but didn't I just say central planning doesn't fucking work?
My initial numbers were $547/month. In 2015, that's $583/month. That's 17% of all taxable income, divided across all adults. Speaking of zero-sum economics, did you know trade and technical progress lower the cost of goods and raise buying power? 17% of all of the money in 2015, divided by all of the adults in 2015, actually buys more
Your model is broken. Chapter 13 removes the landlords who can't provide affordable housing to this group.
My point is it's physically-impossible now. There are zero landlords who can provide affordable housing to people who are homeless, jobless, and unstable. How do you supply affordable housing to people whose annual income is less than the cost of providing housing, or even to people whose costs fluctuate across that limit?
Imagine if your paychecks could randomly be as little as 30% of your salary, and could suddenly stop coming for a few weeks or months at a time. How would you pay your mortgage?
And the lowest class probably still won't after UBI, due to some combination of financial incompetence, drug use (legal or not), mental illness, and inflation of basic needs
They're a minority of low-income individuals and households. Those problems are always greatly-overstated, partly because it's hard to measure.
It's a persuasion thing. I never learned to lie, so I learned to say things with specific words, inflections, ordering of ideas, and other manner of technically-saying-the-same-thing to imply other things not being said, or to prevent people from asking uncomfortable questions by making sure the thought never crosses their minds.
It's a matter of identifying the emotion people associate with a certain statement. A word may not mean "evil person," but may bring an impression of nefariousness to the person's mind. I've seen more ham-fisted examples where people describe a situation and then point out that the reader identified a particular character as a mid-40s white woman, identified some of the other characters as black, and came up with an unstated history where the black kids were into drugs and rape and shit, even though nobody did anything bad--it's just how they talk, how they smile, and the emotion you interpret between them, where they are at the time, etc.. You can get a lot more subtle than saying "he held up his ghetto-blaster" instead of "he raised his portable radio".
I bought a WiiU Pro Controller because using the tablet controller was ridiculous for Hyrule Warriors!
Trade is beneficial. Trade lowers prices and increases wealth. Moving the manufacture of goods which have been offshored back to America would mean that those very factory workers would work longer hours to buy the same goods they're making. Above a certain factory worker wage, there would be fewer factory workers than lost American jobs; below a certain factory worker wage, we'd come up short, and so create American jobs to fill.
So, we're talking about destroying American jobs and making all Americans poorer, or about creating a few American jobs and also making all Americans poorer.
but UBI isn't a market solution either
UBI gives you a chunk of cash and says have at it. Done. Market must figure out how to turn you into a profit source. I've already figured that part out, and simply haven't written an economic mandate to carry out a certain form of Government-directed, centrally-managed business as part of the policy.
I thought we were talking about the chronically homeless, which is generally due to mental or other health issues
Homelessness causes mental health issues. It's a lot of stress. Bad decisions and mental health problems can lead to homelessness; however, non-institutionalizing dementia doesn't generally lead to that scale of failure at life. Most people, given the means to get by, can.
The current generation will improve, albeit the issues you cite will have a minor impact. To put this to perspective: there are 1.6 million homeless Americans, and 1 million find shelter each night; 0.6 million don't get shelter. There are 50 million Americans facing hunger; and a one-time infusion of $1,000 of cash is thought to prevent homelessness of at-risk households for over a year.
That means the conversion of individuals in non-homeless households to homeless individuals is stymied by a monthly infusion of around $600 of cash (currently) (it's 17% of all taxable income; the actual buying power tracks the GDP-per-capita by mathematical necessity), while households facing hunger are most likely 100% remediated. That leaves 1.6 million homeless Americans, who cycle out roughly at the same rate other Americans become newly-homeless.
What do you think will happen to those 1.6 million homeless Americans when they're told they can walk into a bank, start an account, and start receiving $600/month (plus whatever payment they should have already received but to which the Administration had no address nor account to deposit, thus it's sitting in the Social Security Trust Fund)?
They might suddenly be able to buy a $50 tent and food.
They might eventually be able to buy into a tiny apartment, after one gets built to capitalize on these broke-ass street urchins.
There are a lot of things that might happen that won't happen now; and the next generation is facing a lot of things that won't ever happen again because they'll be prepared for it and have the means to stop it.
I think this point got lost in discussion about landlords' reasons for being a landlord, etc. I still think, though, that the effect of UBI on inflation - especially housing cost inflation - needs more consideration; without increasing the available supply of housing, more money chasing the same supply will inevitably increase prices
Yes well, the whole discussion is long, complex, and can't be stated in half a sentence, so the point gets lost. I'm also off my ADHD meds, slightly-manic, and routing around mental impulses that cause cortisol release and subsequent violent reactions--how'm I doin'?--so you're pissing me off. I need to talk to my psychiatrist ffs.
Anyway you're still thinking about these things in a narrow and unimaginative way. Inflation doesn't work that way, and you're essentially trying to wedge ECON101 bullshit supply-and-demand into reality.
The lynchpin here is that the new renters have a limited supply of money--limited income. If you have 1 million renters chasing 600 apartments, you might think supply and demand suggests rents go up. Every damn one of them dirty ghetto-rats is incapable of paying rent above $300/month. Where's your supply-and-demand now?
The same goes for building new units. There's sudden demand to build way more apartments than we have material and labor for (even though it's mostly rennovating old, empty units). Those units will rent for under $300/month. Do you really think the builders will jack their prices up like crazy? It won't happen; landlords won't pay it
I'm not sure about the wording. "Admission" sounds like guilt, which is a complex concept. Fault isn't guilt.
Uber doesn't seem to have engaged in a cover-up or avoided the issue, so they don't seem to be "admitting" anything. I can't imagine the issue wasn't noticed by others prior to this, so "disclosed" doesn't seem the right word. Perhaps "acknowledged" or "confirmed" would be more politically-neutral, with the latter being a more-favorable action word ("Uber has confirmed its engineers are working to correct a flaw...") while the former is a less-favorable statement ("Uber has acknowledged a flaw exists. They know. Stop calling them about it.").
I would like to see the next DS be a one-screen behemoth with some form of emulating two screens, to kill the stupid two-screen mandatory widget everyone uses whether it's appropriate or not simply because having one black screen is apparently terrible (except on Wii U, since nobody looks at the tablet thing anyway, so it often goes unused).
I think the problem is people take parenting as a personal thing, and so can't accept that they're wrong. If people would learn to see parenting as an engineering challenge, they'd have more success in creating better-adjusted offspring, and their offspring would be less-annoying and more-successful.
Instead of parenting in a way which is best for society and for their children, people parent in a way which is best for their ego and self-image.
I would rather see the 3DSwitch with an HDMI connector port than the Switch with its clunky design.
Psh, you could still make great games for the Gamecube.
That doesn't magically include a bank account though.
Funny, it turns out you get social security whether you want it or not. The checks back up if you don't have a way to receive them. Further, the Social Security Administration works with state-controlled satellite sites to supply actual benefit, rather than sending money direct from the Federal government; and many states supply such benefits through banks. For example: when I took unemployment, my state created a mandatory checking account at Citi Bank, in which they put my money I was receiving as an unemployment benefit.
(emphasis added)
Yes, you emphasized the remainder risk which is present in all other tenants, notably in tenants of immediately-higher income. Did you know tenants might also die, or set their apartments on fire?
Even fairly-rich tenants might spend all their money on booze. Middle-class college kids do this. The point was that I've reduced problems that poor people have (unstable income) to problems that everyone else has, making them equivalent in nature.
Why even bother with that complexity? Why not just have the state build zero-cost housing and eliminate the intermediate steps of the bank accounts and tracking UBI?
So, rather than a self-optimizing market structure with a bounds put on bad-state behavior, you want analysts to expend massive amounts of labor trying to use incomplete information to figure out where to optimally provide service?
Even our current welfare system--which has much less management than that--doesn't fucking work. Look at HUD: 25% of HUD-qualified households get benefits, and the other 75% are told they have to wait... and they wait until they no longer qualify for HUD.
Further, have you considered that you have eighteen fucking years living with your parents to create your own bank account, register it as the direct-deposit target with the Social Security Administration, and start receiving income the week you turn 18? Do you think babies are born into homelessness? What do you think is so hard about someone walking into a bank to get a checking account as a direct deposit target for money the government has accounted for as being theirs?
A whole hell of your argument predicates on Social Security being enormous and complex and non-existent, and thus requiring a whole new system to be built from the ground-up. Unfortunately for you, the system I describe is already in existence, and is over 99% efficient.
I am making the subtle implication that he most likely took notice of her body the moment it became a sexually-mature adult--although being that that's around 12-14 years, yes, technically he's not a pedophile even if he did indeed want to bang the shit out of his 12-year-old daughter with the curvy hips and the buxom tits, simply by the fact that she had tits and ass at that age.
What will happen in the real world is that your demand for the trades will drive those prices up, as will the realization from many people making minimum wage that they can do just as well on UBI and not work. The 39,000 "new consumers" will actually be 30,000 or less as the rest simply drink or smoke up the UBI payments.
Why do people always insist everything must not work? Are you all just prone to neurosis?
It's the same thing with people claiming that public school would deteriorate and destroy children's brains, because they can't handle that kind of information overload. It's the same thing with people claiming businesses just take 100% profit as they advance technology and trade--something that history shows can't and doesn't happen, but which people insist is the only thing that ever has happened.
So, you're telling me people's #1 desire is to live in a CAFO, caged, being fed the lowest-quality rodent feed? Why don't all homeless people simply go to prison? Hell, why don't all people just go to prison? Why don't you go to prison? It's better than working.
It's nice making projections based on a zero-sum economy
The economy is not zero-sum. The stock market is, but that's not the economy.
since there will always be unemployable people for whom UBI simply won't cover the costs of surviving. How do you deal with them?
I actually built my profile UBI on current market costs, risk projections, and predicted economic fluctuations. It was designed to provide enough to cover the cost of living. It's cheaper than modern welfare by roughly $1 trillion less taxpayer burden, and 46% of the monthly income is risk-controls--only 54.1% of the money represents current retail prices for food, shelter, utilities, clothing, and personal care.
I also kept a welfare system for children of low-income families, although it's small--about 1.4% of AGI, or some $150 billion.
Let's say you pay some workers $10/hr. You have 10 of these workers. Each hour, their combined efforts produce 2 toasters.
To buy a toaster, you must pay the workers's wages. As there are ten of them, they make $100/hr; and as they produce toasters, a toaster must necessarily sell for a minimum of $50. The lowest price you will ever see for a toaster is $50.
So we invented a machine that, over its lifetime, represents roughly ten thousand hours of work at $20/hr in its manufacture, maintenance, fueling, and operation; but it has a lifetime of 20,000 hours of operation. That means this machine costs $10/hr to operate.
By employing this machine, we can use 4 human workers at $10/hr to produce 5 toasters per hour by their combined efforts. That's $50/hr of total human labor expended, 5 toasters. To pay everyone involved, that toaster must sell for a minimum of $10. Effectively, 80% of toaster makers are no longer employed in the making of the same number of toasters--although now that toasters aren't so damned expensive, they've become a staple household item and so more people (and poorer people) buy them, and otherwise we buy other things with the difference (creating replacement jobs, so long as we didn't create like 30% unemployment in one swing and crash our economy).
Following so far?
That $10/hr wage isn't all take-home pay.
There's benefits, income taxes, unemployment insurance premiums, and payroll taxes to pay on workers. Obviously, income comes off your wage--if you take home $10 and pay 10% on it, that means you get $9 of that take-home--but the rest comes out of the employer's pocket.
Let's say your worker costs a 0.1% unemployment premium, 18% benefits, and 6.4% payroll tax (OASDI is 6.2%, medicare is 0.2%). That $10/hr employee thus has a $8.03 wage (and takes home $6.73/hr--10% income tax and 6.2% OASDI out of your paycheck), and $1.97 is taxes and such.
So under my Universal Social Security, OASDI and unemployment roll into the 17% income tax (on business income as well) that pays the USS. That employee is now a $9.49/hr employee, and those toasters fell from $47.45 to $9.49 when the new machine came online. Likewise, the employee might end up paying 17% tax now and take home $6.66/hr in his paycheck or $532.80 per 2-weeks (versus $538.40) , while receiving an extra $269.08 deposit from Social Security every 2 weeks.
In other words: Toasters cost 51 cents less, and the toaster-maker's paycheck is $263.48 more.
Do you really want businesses to pay money that doesn't go to the worker as a consequence for hiring a human rather than finding a way to do the same work without the human (machines, outsourcing, etc.)? Because that money is paid per labor-hour employed, anything manufactured with any technique using a particular span of labor-hours to make each unit of product will have to factor that increase in labor cost into the price--the consumer pays the payroll tax.
Think of payroll tax as almost-identical to sales tax, but invisible.
It's part of the incentive system for encouraging them not to do that.
The problem is the current system makes providing housing to people who have no stable income non-viable because the ones who turn out stable-ish won't be able to afford to offset the risk of the others--i.e. you have to charge those people more for rent than their income can pay. A UBI system ensures 100% of everyone has a stable income, thus reducing that risk.
You haven't demonstrated that there is a problem here. And add me to the list of people who aren't particularly impressed by the idea of creating a basic income just so we can have more expensive housing.
It wouldn't create more-expensive housing. Let me demonstrate how this works, today and under a UBI like USS.
Today
Lowest class: Unstable income, possibly $0. Can afford less than $500/month.
Lower class: Stable income, $1,500-$2,250/month. Can afford $500/month-$750/month.
Middle-low class: Stable income, $2,100-$3,000/month. Can afford $700-$1,000/month.
Under a Universal Social Security
Lowest class: Stable income, $600/month. Can afford $300/month.
Lower class: Stable income, $2,100-$2,850/month. Can afford $700/month-$950/month.
Middle-low class: Stable income, $2,700-$3,600. Can afford $900-$1,200/month.
As you can see, the lowest class can't afford the lowest-affordable housing right now. That means their income can't push up housing prices. We're not turning the poor into the middle-class.
At the same time, the lower- and middle-classes get richer. They can spend that money on non-housing, or on larger housing, or on a combination of both. As history has shown, societies actually do get richer, and Americans have increased their buying power tenfold over the past few generations--and housing prices didn't simply shoot through the roof to gobble up 100% of all that new money. Indeed, in 1950, the average new home was 982sqft; while by 2000, it was over 2,100sqft--more than doubling the average home size in 50 years, while Americans moved from spending 28% on housing (including utilities and home supplies) to only 33%, just a proportional 18% increase in spending to buy 114% more.
There is also the potential for people to make a choice about housing. People with few possessions and limited need for space might move into the newly-available smaller apartments, decreasing demand for larger apartments. This can have a downward effect on prices--the upward pressure on the smallest apartments is limited because a significant fraction of that market doesn't have enough money to pay for higher rent, yet represents an enormous profit potential, thus holding prices down.
Did you really think the economics were simple? Don't tell me you believed that supply-and-demand fluff they taught you in ECON 101. You should see the look on people's faces when they realize real scarcity can happen while there's well more than enough supply to meet demand.
Money is intrinsically is tied to human labor, NOT the end product
Correct. Money is tied to human labor. Thus if I make $20/hr and you make $10/hr, I work for 1 hour and can induce you to work for 2 hours.
Consider that a moment. What happens when you raise some wages, and not all wages? Minimum wage increases. Well, I work for 1 hour and can induce someone else to work for 1.5 hours instead of 2. I've lost the ability to induce half an hour of work in exchange for my hour of work. At the same time, the minimum-wage worker's 1 hour makes 1.5 times the money--and he can induce another minimum-wage worker to work for ... 1 hour. Now, mind you, with his 1.5 times the money, he can induce me to work for 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes for every 1 hour of his work, so he's richer; but the total number of working-hours to be induced into useful labor by exchange in this system has been reduced, and some other workers have thus become unemployed.
Right now, automation combined with globalism is having a a one-two punch on western civilization. On one hand, it's driving the cost of human labor down - hence a deflationary pressure on the value of money. At the same time, governments in said western nations are printing money (thus devaluing the current supply of money now in circulation) in order to inject velocity in the market place
Global trade is making America richer. Normal Americans are becoming richer. There's an argument about job growth, and it's both complex and simple.
The complex explanation is that jobs can be created or destroyed by trade. In America, if we stopped importing Chinese Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, we'd have a break-even at $18/hr: paying the American factory workers above $18/hr would reduce the total American jobs compared to importing from China, while paying American factory workers below $18/hr would increase the total American jobs.
At the same time, you have a cost issue. Americans pay, on average, $14.97 for these MBCT now. At $21/hr, the price would rise to $50.57; while $8.25/hr minimum wage workers would produce those pants for only just a hair above $25/hr. That means, for the respective line-worker wages, a $21/hr American worker's labor-hours expense to buy pants would change from 0.71 to 2.4 hours; while a minimum-wage worker's would change from 1.8 to 3.0 hours. Pants get 3.38 times more expensive for $21/hr American workers if $21/hr American workers make pants; they get 1.65 times as expensive for $8.25/hr American workers if $8.25/hr American workers make pants.
Bring poverty back to America, right?
The simple explanation is it doesn't actually affect jobs. With an excessively-low unemployment, the labor force tends to grow to fill to 4%-5% unemployment; while a high unemployment tends to slow labor force growth. This is mediated by things like early/late retirement or college students going to grad school to wait for the employment market to improve. In the worst case, poor people simply die when unemployment is high and welfare is ineffective (effective welfare tends to create jobs).
At some point, it will stall out, along with economic growth, and supply of goods/services will be limited.
Technical progress increases our reach and reduces scarcity. For example: genetically modified organisms and more-effective pesticides allow us to get more food off the same land, expending less labor, less pesticide (made by labor), less seed (collected by labor), less fertilizer (made by labor), and less irrigation (labor) for the same amount of food.
Automation is a form of technical progress. If you remove the jobs slowly, then consumer buying power increases and creates new jobs. Do it too quickly, and you get high unemployment and a sick economy.
Wages are paid by revenue. You buy a toaster, you have to pay
Sadly, many of them would not have the ability to even register for the UBI program. Are you advocating rounding them up and forcing them to register
Actually, I've already rounded them all up and forced them to register. In fact, I have my registration card in my wallet. It looks almost exactly like this, except with my information on it instead of fake information.
the example does not seem to be complete. If landlord A can't make it work with $105 million in revenue because it costs $117 million, what is preventing some more efficient operation from coming in and building it for $95 million and being able to profit at $105 million in revenue?
Landlord A can't make it work because tenants have a high chance of losing their income stream. Landlord A is "Landlord Today", and his tenants will lose physical possession of money required to pay rent when their employment situation changes. That means Landlord A's tenants can lose their welfare, they can lose job hours, or they can flat out get fired; then the checks will stop coming in, their bank accounts will be empty, and they'll get evicted--leaving the landlord with an empty unit, not to mention the three-month process of eviction, and the unpaid month leading into eviction anyway, and the cost to hire movers to throw all of the tenant's shit onto the street.
When Landlord A's tenants get evicted, he has to cover that loss. To do this, he needs to include the diffused cost of eviction and empty units across his other tenants. Unstable tenants thus raise the rent the landlord must charge all tenants.
Landlord B lives in our alternate future. Landlord B's tenants have a guaranteed amount of income. If Landlord B's tenants have no job, no welfare, and no income, those tenants still have a known, unchanging amount of money simply appearing in their bank accounts month after month. If those tenants get fired, that base amount of money keeps coming in. That money can't be taken away; it can only be spent.
Landlord B can make a 100% absolute, perfect guarantee that every single tenant will have an income no less than this.
If Landlord B rents a unit which can be rented at a price within what that income can stably pay month-to-month, then Landlord B has 100%, inviolable guarantee that his tenants will receive income sufficient to pay rent each month. That makes Landlord B's lowest-income tenants similar to Landlord B's lower-income tenants: the lower-income tenants tend to have consistent income, and so only fail to pay rent when financial troubles or irresponsible spending consumes their income before they pay rent.
You've now completely eliminated the risk that the lowest-income tenants will fail to pay rent for reasons beyond their control. Ghetto tenants without stable jobs are now functionally-equivalent to ghetto tenants with stable jobs, except they rent smaller units because they have less money.
If you have a random sampling of women of different backgrounds and interests, you're already controlling for most variables. A lot of similarities become randomized; the remainder can be idenitfied as a part of pregnancy, as they're likely behavioral changes caused as a part of the process, like nesting behavior in pregnant animals which don't build nests when not preparing to reproduce.