10 acres in Montana is cheaper than a parking space in NYC.
We're comparing low-income areas. There's waterfront property that rents for $3,000/month in Baltimore city; about 6 miles away, there are apartments that rent for $700. I bought a $50k house, although there are $450,000 houses in Federal Hill in the same city.
Put your strawman away.
Why do you think that places like Arizona and Nevada are full of old people?
So, with no assets and $10,000/year, I can get up, move to Nevada, and have a nice, big rancher somewhere in a rural area?
We're talking about UBI. If people on UBI were migrating to rural areas, then getting a job isn't a priority. How long it takes to get to the store isn't particularly important either, since someone on UBI would have copious free time.
Let me put this to you again: they can't afford the gasoline to drive that far. They can't afford car insurance. They don't have cars. That 40 minute drive at 50mph is a 10-hour walk, each way.
How much food are they going to carry for ten hours, each way?
You're also saying that, once unemployed, fuck you, be poor forever.
I don't know. You tell me?
Because it's cheaper than a trailer park.
Who is supporting themselves in rural America on a part-time, minimum-wage job with a $165k house?
Your mortgage is almost as much as mine and I live in a nice suburb of Seattle.
Why haven't you paid it off yet? I was going to pay my mortgage off in 3 years but derived other plans. I put the maximum amount of money into HSAs and 401(k)s instead, and now have a $40k account I can use as loan collateral.
The longer one is the current law as the Supreme Court evaluates it in any case examining first-amendment rights to determine if any particular exceptions apply.
Sure, sure. Giving a man 10 acres of land is obviously cheaper than giving him 10 square feet.
Do you even think about what you're saying? I live in a dense, inner-city ghetto, near a race track, near highway, near schools. I have a $421/month, 15-year mortgage. I can walk or ride the train to get food.
In rural PA, I can buy a place for somewhere between $200k and $779k. I can drive for 40 minutes to find food. Good luck ever finding a fucking job. Not to mention poor people can't even afford that rent, unless we pack them like sardines in their isolated little rural housing with no way to get to the food they need to buy to survive.
Why do you think the poorest of poor end up in inner city ghettos? Are they too fucking stupid to find those nice, cheap rural areas where they'd live like kings and honored concubines? Hell, why aren't landlords up in those rural areas making a giant, highly-profitable business of it?
Your litmus paper is defective. A dozen litmus tests on different media immediately fail your considerations.
Average Social Security recipient gets $1,258 per month or $15k in 2013. You're a touch off, but the point is a good one.
You're asking a more-complex question than you might realize: transitioning Social Security retirement benefits is an enormous, broad-impact consideration, with concerns ranging financing, social contracts, people's economic situations and the impact on those, and even the problems with the current implementation of retirement benefits. The proposed system pays starting at age 18, whereas Social Security retirement benefits pay starting at age 60, thus changing both the utility and the financial considerations.
Minimum-wage earners in 2013 would receive something like $768/month if they retained a full-time job at minimum wage throughout their lives. Below full-time minimum wage, people quickly become ineligible, and thus go straight from somewhere around $720 to $0. The heavily-transitional underemployed, thus, do not receive Social Security retirement benefits. Keep this in mind for later.
How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?
You'll notice there's a Transition metric there. Dropping current systems hot is damaging, and OASDI is particularly-problematic. I've put a lot of time in on examining that transition specifically.
You should see the proportional chart shows a smaller OASDI cost. For the first 15 years, anyone reaching retirement age gets Social Security old-age pensions. The OASDI benefit is reduced by the size of the USS benefit, thus rendering the same total retirement benefit for this group. This eliminates the 6.2% OASDI tax from income taxes, and reduces the payroll tax to 5.59%.
There's a trend of roughly 3%-4% increase in per-capita income per year at a rate of 2% inflation, meaning the purchasing power of the USS increases each year. That, in turn, means that the USS benefit represents a larger fraction of OASDI benefits for then-current recipients entering retirement; and, of course, the retirement benefit today doesn't grow after you retire, so then-existing recipients steadily derive more income from the USS and less from OASDI. This allows a reduction of the remaining 5.59% payroll tax supporting OASDI in transition.
At 15 years, new retirees have had ample time to collect savings, aside from those with exceedingly-low incomes. That's a topic for later, though.
New retirees of average stature will receive roughly 50% of the average payout, and should have approximately 15 years's worth more from sticking the USS into a 3% fixed-income retirement growth account (standard retirement "guaranteed income" account; you might do better with some long-hold CDs, but not today). By 15 years down the line from there, it's passable--barely. It's only 15 years because I didn't want to fund a long tail transition--I could, and it would take around 60 years to finally zero out OASDI.
There's a conservative flaw in that math: two-adult households actually get two USS benefits; a two-adult household with a single working spouse eligible for OASDI benefits is actually covered for 86% of the average retirement benefit as of 2013. Spouse and survivor benefits transfer a working spouse's benefit to a non-working spouse when the OASDI earner dies, rather than clearing them from the system; we should probably also transfer the spouse's USS as deductible from the OASDI. Note that this reduces much of the actual cost of transition because a majority but not all OASDI households are two-adult. Some people do hit retirement age as single filers. Leaving this particular error in gives a more-demanding proof-of-concept without the risk of fluffing it up by trying to squeeze out more blood that's clearly there, but in unknown quantity.
As for the poorest, they'll probably actually tap the USS to survive. That means they'll get a better-secured retirement at the lowest income levels, but not the huge boon of carry
You missed the part where by implementing a system like that, we would make you, personally, poorer.
There's only so much work available in the economy. It's only able to trade around so much labor. Divert more of that labor to replacing the rotting parts of the labor force and you can make less of other shit--meaning more people live at a lower class, and middle- and upper-class people are at a lower standard-of-living than they would otherwise be.
The point of welfare is to cost less than not having welfare. If you can't figure out why, I encourage you to save money by never brushing your teeth or using condoms again.
to people today who already have decent house, cars, boat and other property, we'd use UBI to simply stop working
I actually had planned to be capable of retiring by age 35. I planned this when I was 27. I had $0 in savings and made $60k/year.
It's actually doable, but I changed my financial plans. I've put large amounts of money into my 401(k) for a loan basis. I learned to ride a motorcycle. I bought a $7,000 piano. The thing is I can pull my monthly costs to below $400; that means each year nets me ten years of retirement.
I'm 31 now. I have $1,200/month of expenses. I have a $421/month mortgage and a $255/month personal loan that can go--the mortgage has $25,000 left on it, and the loan is going away this month. My heating bill dropped by 12% after fixing some issues with a leaky room in my house; insulating one (large) wall (for $4,000) and getting a heat pump (for $6,000) will cut that by more than half. With the right food budget, I can actually get under $300/month expenses today with all of those remediated, but nah.
If I'd gone that route, I'd be sitting on enough money to barely make it to retirement in 3 years. Another 2 years and I'd have enough to offset inflation, stuffed into a 3% growth account. At retirement, Social Security pays me 3-4 times as much as I'd need.
Water heater lasts 10 years and costs $600, or $5/month. Roof needs $1000 of maintenance every 7 years, or $12/month. That home maintenance stuff amortizes well.
I think you're overestimating just how much you'd enjoy retiring early.
Besides, I already have property that they will rent from me, so I'd be getting both their UBI (partial) as well as my UBI.
Then you'd be productive in the economy, providing for the supply of some housing. You'd probably make about a 30% profit margin, like most landlords, in the end, so maybe $100 from each of them.
They're not "rights"; they're laws. It's a privilege. The concept of "rights" is a philosophical one which, essentially, suggests that some laws are somehow different from other laws in a metaphysical way. It's sort of like religion or some other belief system.
It's certainly convenient for us to have certain things codified as law, so long as enforcement operates in our benefit. From an economic standpoint, certain things which people might think should be rights aren't always possible. Food, medical care, shelter, and communication have all been cited as things which should be human rights; these things are possible to supply to everyone if your economy is sufficiently-developed, and they're cheap to supply to everyone if your economy is developed beyond that point, and yet you can't supply them in poorer economies because it simply won't work. An economy is poor because it doesn't have the means to produce; we think too much about the means to represent exchange (money), and not enough about where what we exchange comes from.
Freedom of expression is extending to the point that obscene speech isn't considered criminal, and nudity in public isn't illegal. A Federal court recently ruled that women's breasts are legally allowed exposure in public; and a guy at MIT used to go to class in only sandals, having won a court case that said nudity without lewdness isn't illegal. That's fine for most of us who either don't care, would like more boob flashes from cute girls, or are cute girls giving the boob flashes. However, it also means that parents will have their kids exposed to such a culture, which removes their control over their childrens's values. Girls will grow up in a world where it's okay to go topless. 15-year-olds will be flashing college students 10 years their senior, and this is totally okay now.
There are multiple groups of people here with conflicting so-called rights. Of primary importance, there's a group who believe certain behavior is impropriety, and want to instill "good family values" into their kids; and another group who believe Victorian ideals are outdated and a little playfulness and eye-candy is a good thing--including the ones who don't like being told they can't show themselves off a bat as the eye candy. These groups cannot cohabitate the same space without one oppressing the other, either by force of law or by sheer influence of presence.
So yeah. Things like rights, responsibilities, and imposition are relative based on your viewpoint. A lot of words we use to describe rights have no meaning; things like "freedom", "democracy", and "justice" are contextual to the speaker's and listener's minds, and have conflicting definitions depending on who you ask. "Patriotism" is often about doing what you're told without questioning if it's right, although the revolutionaries will tell you you're not a true patriot unless you love your country enough to remove villains from power and set it back on the path of righteousness; and in America, we talk about patriotism in a context with the Constitution and the rights it lays forth to subtly suggest that not supporting whatever the American government says right now is not supporting human rights.
I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings.
You've come up with words and statements and justifications to frame things that make you personally comfortable as some kind of spiritual mandate from a higher power, and to frame laws as holy scripture. I only see that certain things make the world more convenient (for me and others), and that power hasn't stripped those things yet. I understand that someone else pays for those so-called rights as well, in the form of things they can't do because it would violate my more-important rights.
Delusion became dangerous to me at some point. This is how I responded. I was raised being taught that the governments of the world secretly trade with the half-fish people of sunken Atlantis and that carrying certain metals will cause spiritual energi
Fun fact: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution carries the following original text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
A few years ago, I was introduced to the codified version of the First Amendment. That version is the legal definition of the current law, and is nearly three pages long. It details that the original amendment intended a limited category of speech to exclude speech harmful to society, such as libel, slander, and lying under oath. Case law has refined this particular law to explicitly express its limitations and the exceptions to those limitations themselves.
They are essentially suggesting Facebook is not allowed to possess certain samples of published speech in any form anywhere in the world, and not allowed to publish certain such samples anywhere in the world. That means if someone in France publishes something that Austria says to remove, and it's stored on a US server, Facebook isn't allowed to just remove it from Austria; they have to remove it from everywhere.
Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.
Please tell me, what happens when half (or more) of the population is on UBI and the other half is taxed to the point of quitting and going on UBI.
Let's try this again.
At $50,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $40,106 today, and $46,671 under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $42,128 today, and $55,100 under the Universal Social Security.
At $200,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $144,620 today, and $145,626 under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $147,865 today, and $155,223 under the Universal Social Security.
At $25,000,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $15,138,261 today, and $15,134,880 (-$3,381; this is static after about $500k) under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $15,143,343 today, and $15,143,865 (+$522) under the Universal Social Security.
Are you suggesting single filers making over $200k will quit and live on the UBI because of a 0.67% peak increase in total income taxes (something I could buff out easily enough, but I got tired of tweaking the brackets); that single filers making $1M will quit because of a 0.34% increase in total taxes paid; that single filers making $25 million in total compensation will quit because of a 0.014% increase in total income taxes; or that married households making over $500k will quit because they only get about $500 of additional spending money per year?
But why should the reduction in work-hours be government-mandated? As long as people are free to work for whoever they wish and hire whoever they please, why wouldn't an employer gain better employees and/or higher productivity by offering shorter work-days and longer vacations?
Your original argument was that a person would decide, through the forces of capitalism, to not work as much because they were relatively well-off with shorter working hours and thus valued their time more than work. Government-mandates are the recent history of working hours, but different from your original point:
people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
As to the question, eh. A government mandate of labor standards gives the individual and the workforce as a whole the ability to cite a fair labor standard to work from. Published standards and mandates as such increase individual negotiating power. So long as your UBI policy is actually functional (there are a lot of dangerous and destructive ways to implement a UBI, and a few viable plans), the self-sufficiency of a UBI also increases individual negotiating power and reduces the need for such things as minimum-wage standard.
A government mandate of maximum working hours without penalties (e.g. 40 hours, then wage costs 50% more) is necessary for any sort of wage standard. It becomes a battle between people who will work long hours for low pay and other people who need exactly the same income but will only work fewer hours. Without the ability to walk away, employers have the power to push the trend toward longer hours and lower pay; individuals who try to push back will run out of money and become homeless and unemployable. Then we get small, unstable governments called "trade unions", who in turn can only function because the big government forces the businesses to negotiate with trade unions on whatever terms they demand.
Thus it can be argued that a government mandate of maximum working hours provides the capacity for individuals to independently scale their labor, as they can identify what a "working-hour" is as a proportion of "a job". Wage suddenly has one dimension instead of two. This in turn allows the economy to function stably due to less fluctuation in working conditions and compensation between businesses.
This largely affects part-time work and full-time expectations. The current Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, exempts salaried workers from overtime. This means a "full-time job" is 40 hours--that's a published standard codified in law--but working 60-hours won't get you 20 hours of overtime unless you're paid by the hour. It's codified in law that your employer can but isn't legally required to provide you compensation for overtime; we only expect a 40-hour work day because the law actually defines full-time as 40 hours, although some businesses define it as 37.5 because a half-hour daily lunch is accounted for your 8-hour day.
As a final thought: Historically, the government mandate has been a response to the voice of a people who feel powerless to drive change. Any argument for or against a government mandate must examine the history of the will of the people, and their success in implementing their will. Lack of a government mandate is an action of government as well, in that a government selects for the outcome of a null action by taking no action. This means that 100 years of people demanding shorter working hours and not getting them makes a government null-action position an effective mandate for current, longer working hours. That can be valid, as shortening working hours cuts back productivity per person by cutting back hours per person without increasing productivity per hour; this makes people poorer, and our choice is basically a scale between larger material wealth and no free time to enjoy it or smaller material wealth and much free time to enjoy it.
It's notable that a UBI can only actually pay income out of production, and thus is only sustainable as a fraction of GDP-per-capita. My USS takes this out to its direct conclusion by cutting welfare out of the progressive tax system and applying an additional flat tax as a funding source (i.e. bracket-plus-17%).
Basically, all money represents everything produced and sold. If you produce 100 cars and sell 50 of them, you've invested labor sufficient to produce 100 cars in the production of 50 cars. You don't have 50 cars; you have 50 car-shaped objects that nobody is going to use. You can do it and make a profitable business out of it; cars are going to cost twice as much as they need to. When the next competitor starts making an appropriate number of cars to meet market demand, he's going to sell them for half as much. He'll employ half the labor force per car that you do; as he eats into your market, there will be a net-change in number of unemployed equivalent to the full size of his direct labor force (that is: if he employs 100 people, you're going to have to scale back production enough to lay off 200 people).
In practice, the guy making twice the cars in demand goes away. He doesn't exist, anyway. Instead, you have businesses working as efficiently as possible, using the least labor they can so as to pay the least amount of total wages. More jobs appear as more shit is bought.
So there's this:
choosing to wait several years while they partied (though I suppose they might have to work part-time to pay for the parties). That, in turn, would significantly raise the relative cost of the UBI.
If these people are a significantly-small portion of the unemployment base, then they don't actually affect productivity. Basically, somebody was going to be hired anyway; because we have 5.2% unemployment (U3) and not 0.2%, it was relatively-easy to hire somebody; that somebody was somebody else because the usual somebody was busy partying.
If they're taking part-time jobs along the way, their marginal impact is reduced by the same mechanism: more job-seekers doesn't mean more jobs; more buyers means more jobs. If people keep coming into McDonalds to buy hamburgers, McDonalds needs to hire enough people to make that many hamburgers; if the register operators can't take the orders fast enough and the sandwich makers can't build them quickly enough, they need to hire more people. If their building is at-capacity, they need to put another McDonalds down the street.
Likewise, if they do have an impact by idling, they'll decrease the labor force participation rate (which is currently high relative to a long-stable 58%-59% up to ~1960, and relative to other developed countries) rather than increase U3 or U4 (they're not interested in working and thus not discouraged workers). Their purchasing habits will cause a decrease in U3 and U4. Relative to if they did work, the amount of income available to take for the UBI will decrease, and the purchasing power of a UBI will shrink. This poverty will make it harder to just party, and they'll need jobs.
So it could happen, and it could happen without carrying any sort of cost at all. If it goes out too far, it will become less-attractive of a life decision. Nobody with any understanding of finances will want to delay their entry to the workforce all that much, either.
There's a good chance that companies can pay less salary and give employees an overall higher take-home income with UBI.
Actually, that can't be done, and is a bad idea in flat concept. I've designed a type of UBI that reduces the cost:wage ratio; that's a thing, but reducing the actual wage isn't necessary or desirable.
It can't be done because prices are kind of an end result of all other inputs. Those inputs include cost in labor-hours; market dynamics such as size, barrier to entry, distribution, and so forth; and price of wage. Doubling everyone's wage--not just the minimum wage, but all wages--would double prices, flatly, without affecting business operating profit margins in the long run. Essentially, you'd get 100% inflation, and settle with no change to the number of labor-hours correlated with the ability to buy a thing.
Reducing wages thus will either be flat across all incomes and cause deflation (very, very bad), or it will reduce some wages but not other and thus make a certain class of people poorer relative to not reducing those wages.
My Universal Social Security stabilizes certain markets, provides better reliability in achieving welfare goals than current welfare, and overall makes efficiency gains in the economy by leveling out disturbances rather than just income. Even in its initial transition phase, where it has to hold up Social Security Retirement Benefits (OASDI) for the next 15 years of new retirees, it immediately eliminates the 6.2% income tax on your paycheck and reduces the 6.2% payroll tax to 5.8%. As technical progress continues, the gap between the USS and OASDI narrows; and eventually, we stop taking new retirees (you should have savings--you know, from the USS you've been receiving, or else you're too poor for current OASDI to currently pay you retirement benefits and you're going to get them under the USS), while old ones die off. that 5.8% payroll tax thus shrinks away.
That means, firstly, that you keep 6.2% more of your paycheck--your income goes up without increasing the cost to employers, thus there's no additional input to the price of goods. Second, your employer pays less additional taxes on your paycheck, so the cost to employers decreases--by 0.4% at first, and eventually by 6.2%. HI stays because medicare isn't going anywhere.
So long as it's possible to expand production without hitting scarcity, the cost of producing more of any given good doesn't increase. Growth without scarcity means a bigger market, lower barriers-to-entry, and more competition, which puts downward pressure on net profit margins. At a point, producing more than a certain amount of a good per unit time costs more--for example, if you run out of good farm land and try to produce more food per year, you can farm on crappy farmland for lower yields and invest more labor, more wage, more costs, making more-expensive food. If you hit that point, prices go up.
All of this should make it clear that we're really talking about shifting inefficiencies out of the economy. We're smoothing out the demand curve, reducing the cost of risks (and the labor that moves there now and then, as well as the baseline of standing labor that handles current risks), and moving that onto purchasing more consumer goods. That's why it's even possible to increase wealth in this way: it's just technology. We're making a way to invest less effort in keeping our economy running, which eliminates the need for some jobs, and gives us the purchasing power to buy things that demand other jobs.
So yeah, the cost to employers falls as payroll taxes diminish, and the tax on your paycheck sort of goes away. Caveat, of course: I accounted for that 6.2% as part of the tax bracket you're in when I shifted the taxes around, and replaced it with a lower general income tax and a 17% USS tax. It's not so simple as all that. The increase in take-home income happens because the new tax level in total minus th
The problem is that as I've seen it applied in various test programs, it has been applied as an additional program on top of existing services.
It's also been supplied as a short-term, limited benefit in a small geographical area. That prevents all sorts of large, long-term economic effects, making it difficult to gather any useful data.
I have a habit of not being wrong, and I manage that a lot on one hand by not making firm statements on things of which I'm lacking sufficient data, and on the other by adding risk controls to anything I plan on actually doing. Since I can see how economies work in broad strokes across all of human history and project what would happen by implementation of any sort of UBI, I'm pretty confident that it's doable both financially and economically--we'll collapse society with a bad plan, and end up actually strengthening the economy with a well-developed plan. Even then, I designed a plan that accounts for and behaves only sub-optimally in all kinds of bad situations.
When you design a UBI plan, you have to account for transitioning off current welfare without breaking people's livelihoods, generating shitloads of debt, or raising taxes (impolitic if nothing else). You also have to mitigate any sort of immigration free-money rush; childcare profiteering; misestimation of how much money people actually need; reduction of working hours; recessions; and so forth. If something doesn't go the way you want, it needs to come out alright.
In my Universal Social Security, I avoid the childcare profiteering thing by simply providing classical public aid for minor dependents of low-income households; and I handle the immigrant rush for free money by providing that same public aid to naturalized American citizens, while rendering the USS benefit as a non-refundable tax credit instead of a (semi-)monthly payment. That costs roughly 1.4% of AGI (the USS and current welfare both cost roughly 17%), and is no more abusable than the current system, thus doesn't expose us to new risks; I haven't eliminated existing risks in that cross-section.
The thing about solving homelessness and hunger is actually easy. It's mathematically-provable that nearly 100% of all current welfare recipients come out ahead under the USS, excepting some of the highest-income HUD housing assistance households that come out ~2% behind (most such households would only get SNAP benefits for their dependents). For the non-working unemployed, homeless, no savings, it's demonstratably possible to show a new market opportunity for profitability; that's not a guarantee. Because the USS funds by a flat percentage of all income, the purchasing power of the benefit increases with the GDP-per-capita, which trends upwards; that means the amount paid out increases faster than inflation, and so it will eventually be enough. In the interim, it's better than nothing.
I've even proposed that freeing up ~$1 trillion of taxation while providing stronger welfare guarantees would increase spendable income and cause adverse effects--labor shortages, followed by a population run-up, until stability is reached. That's okay; and, as a contingency, we could control that by redefining full-time working hours at 28-32 hours per week. This would reduce productivity and increase spending on the same goods; basically, rather than working 40 hours and trying to buy 50 hours's worth of goods, you work 32 hours and try to buy 40 hours's worth of goods. That, however, requires a technological increase in productivity; so implementing this could require a raise in taxes to prevent the glut of additional consumer spending--pay down the national debt along the way as an excuse--and then a sudden shock of a tax decrease and a working-hour decrease.
Risks. I've got a reasonable ideal of how people behave in large groups; I've got historical data to correlate; and it's still not enough. I can identify the alternate possibilities and control for them.
One of the ridiculous problems you'll encounter when trying to design a UBI policy is that UBI advocates keep asking how the fuck UBI recipients are going to live on your paltry income in New York City or San Francisco. Then they get pissed when you point out that they'll be poor in the ghettos dangled 10 miles from these urban centers, as if they expect the poorest of poor to somehow live in the richest of rich neighborhoods.
I sometimes wonder if these people have more or less annual income than credit card debt.
Only if they represent a substantial fraction of the unemployed. That's probably not possible, although the number of moving parts that make that not happen and also prevent the system from simply adjusting parasitically and spiraling into self-destruction makes it take too long to explain in great detail so many times.
First, we need to establish that we have a lot of able-bodied workers who don't engage in the productive wage economy. Stay-at-home spouses are the primary example of people who don't want or need jobs: if your husband (or wife--common today) pulls $140k and people in your area live fine on $60k, you don't need a job unless you're way too bored. In principle, you suggest the same of a UBI, that being that people will be provided for and so will see that they don't need to work.
Next, we must ask what makes people not work. A UBI can't provide a middle-class income; it's mathematically-impossible. Anyone with a job gets the UBI plus their wage, and so has more income than someone on only a UBI. That means your socioeconomic status on UBI is "lowest of low". That's just fine: we trend toward a 5% unemployment level (U3 and U4, with U4 being a few tenths of a percent higher), and the assistance provided to those people is better than no assistance at all. 1.6M Americans are homeless and only 1M find homeless shelters every night, so living in a tiny apartment is better than living in a cardboard box. The question is: how big does the apartment need to be before they cease to look for work?
Obviously, between these, we can conjecture a sort of scale. We know that some people get jobs when their spouse is the provider because they want additional spending money (luxury). We know that poorer people who can passably get second jobs or have a working spouse because they feel unstable being so poor. In general, people consider your economic status as an indicator of your social value, and so try to increase their economic status by work.
Living in poor areas and having frequented public transport, I've had the opportunity to hear some of the lowest-class people discuss how glad they are to be working--people who are obviously not what anyone would consider "good people", being rowdy, impolite, and generally of low-esteem for laws. Not gang members, but more the type who ride around on dirt bikes, use illegal intoxicants, and make a lot of noise pollution at night. Generally, while these people have a less-refined set of social rules, they appear to value society of a sort; they might behave in ways we disapprove of and take little time to think about the dangers of some of their actions to others, but they don't seem to be out to cause any harm to random passers-by, and are quite willing to work for their means.
In general, two things make people not work. An overabundance of relative living standard reduces the perceived value (valuation) of income from work. Aside from that, it's depression: people with no personal motivation won't engage in effort to achieve rewards, even the reward of eliminating some suffering they've learned to tolerate.
Overabundance isn't a problem. We can't raise everyone up to a middle-class standard without eliminating all rich people; doing that would collapse your economy in some other way than by giving people money. Disruption to productivity raises the proportion of income required to pay for a UBI at a given standard-of-living, so trying to level out the rich by taking all their money and giving it to everyone else would trigger an economic collapse. Besides that, money isn't wealth, and we'd be hard-pressed to support the demand that would come with that much money being redistributed; we'd just get inflation, and then a collapse.
In short: a UBI will always represent a fraction of the median. You can only fund a median UBI, in theory, by taking the amount of money represented by the median income; in practice, you have to take a
Stagnant wages is a myth. A median income in 1970 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1980; a median income in 1980 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1990; nor 1990 for 2000.
I've lived my life through a constant run-up of technology. Cars getting better with new safety systems, more power out of smaller engines, better mileage, highly-complex mechanical and electrical systems like EFI, improved braking systems, high-end radios with digital media and bluetooth integrated, and even things like traction control and pre-crash systems built into the $1,500 options package on economy models. We traded away $30/month landlines and $10/month dial-up for $17/year smart phones and $87/month 200Mbit Internet. Televisions aren't giant, bulbous tubes anymore. Even the new things I have--game systems, computers, cell phones--have changed, substantially, since they became available.
People eat out of home more instead of preparing food in home, and they spend less on food every year despite eating more-expensively year after year--at the median income level; the lowest 20% still spend roughly 16% of their income on food. Clothing has fallen from 12% to nearly 3% of our income.
Medical care is ridiculous: prescription drugs have gone through the roof; yet people in 2005 spent 6% of their income on medical care instead of 4% of the 1950s, purchasing more and better-quality medical care. Today it's just under 8%, and people go in for regular wellness care much more consistently than anyone did in the 90s--part of that is their insurance plan gives them 100%, no-deductible coverage, but charges them $40/month for any year in which they didn't get a sign-off from their doctor stating they've had appropriate care at the full discretion of the doctor's professional opinion.
The percentage of median-income household spending that goes to purchase the same things is constantly falling; and for many goods, either prices stay mainly-level (small goods like cell phones and computers) or they keep to the same percentage of spending (large goods like cars). Housing costs as rent or mortgage payments (not house sale prices) have generally trended downward on the span of decades; on shorter spans (notably in recent times), housing trades as a commodity and is heavily-influenced by fluctuations in perceptions about the housing market. This is confounded by new single-family homes constantly getting bigger, and so housing prices have to adjust against square footage to get a good read on the price of housing.
I've been around to see things get more and more affordable for the average American, and the average American continue to complain about getting poorer and poorer. Stop spending all your money and you won't be broke all the time; you won't have all this new stuff, either.
which would probably end when they realize the amount would not even pay their rent
...for a place they'd actually want to live.
Please point out, mathematically, how say 960 euros a month (the Netherlands experiment) would be able to pay for rent/mortgage, a car, food, utilities, vacation, and other entertainment, please show your work.
Don't have Netherlands data. I worked it out for the United States only, and would be interested in other economic units like England or Germany. Designing a UBI policy requires a strong understanding of a government's finances, the economy's structure, tax systems, welfare costs, retail pricing, and the like. You can't design any sort of UBI policy by knowing or estimating the cost of goods, because the gross cost of a good doesn't tell you about the total cost of producing it--shipping, logistics, business administration, cost of risk, and the like. For highly-competitive goods like food and clothing, the current price is likely the lowest-viable price, although that comes down a bit when a market gets bigger (that's actually doable with rent, in the form of selling smaller units by reducing the risk of empty units at the relevant income levels).
I didn't record the full analysis or write any sorts of papers on this stuff even in America. After performing as much research as I could, I used the current retail prices and added risk margins--that is, if I could find retail of a month's worth of food for $25, consistently, I'd estimate the risk of trying to sustain that as an individual, and then put down a 300% risk reserve ($100/month budget). Some of the rambling on that from an age past made its way online.
The big one is housing. Rent per square foot easily scales down to a 224sqft single-occupancy apartment in $1-$1.06/sqft circa 2013 (my Universal Social Security takes a percentage of all income as a funding source, so gets bigger each year--faster than inflation). That's a maximum estimate of $238/month at the same margin as a 700sqft apartment; I originally budgeted $300/month, providing a 26% risk reserve (up to 33%, in the case of scaling against $1/sqft). I know the actual costs scale; that risk reserve is entirely a coverage of landlord risk (potential for additional costs as consequence of renting to a low-income tennat), not the risk of me misestimating standard costs.
It's not exactly cramped, but it's smaller than most Americans want to deal with. It's actually something like twice the size of a cozy hotel room, and I've spent time examining hotel rooms and expanding the planograms into microunit apartments with full amenities. Thing is, it's still better than living in a soggy cardboard box.
So, again: they'd quickly realize it won't pay rent for a place in which they'd actually like to live.
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
You mean less than 96 hours?
Oh, right, you're a child. You grew up with the eight-hour day. Sorry, I forgot, most people haven't had the adults educate them about work yet.
So let's start with how lazy and entitled you little shits are.
First off, back in the 1830s, your kind were already crying out about how utterly lazy they were and how the government should fix it so they don't have to work. "From six to six", they used to say. Twelve hours--twelve hours--and with two full hours of meal breaks! Not even twelve hours of straight work for six days a week (nobody worked on the Lord's Day), for a halfway-unreasonable 72 hour work week; they demanded sixty hours of work.
The French, the laziest people in the world at the time, achieved a 12-hour, 6-day work week by 1850. America started going downhill in 1868, when Federal employees--the most entitled employees, after anyone who's ever been marginally attached to the military--achieved an eight-hour work day. Most Americans still worked a good, solid 12-14 hour work day in 1905, until people like Ford started cutting back to 8-hour shifts and giving pay raises.
America didn't lose the war against laziness until the Adamson Act of 1916, establishing 8-hour days with additional overtime wages for railroad workers. After that, it was all over; the Fair Labor Standards Act was so ludicrous as to cut all good laborers down to 40 hours per week, except the good farm workers who still considered 50 hours full-time, and establish a mandatory minimum wage.
So that ship has sailed, and I don't see you out there working three full-time jobs like any real American would. You laze around for most of the week and complain just as much about too much work while you don't really work anyway; you may as well complain that other people might work 32 hours one day too, I suppose.
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10 acres in Montana is cheaper than a parking space in NYC.
We're comparing low-income areas. There's waterfront property that rents for $3,000/month in Baltimore city; about 6 miles away, there are apartments that rent for $700. I bought a $50k house, although there are $450,000 houses in Federal Hill in the same city.
Put your strawman away.
Why do you think that places like Arizona and Nevada are full of old people?
So, with no assets and $10,000/year, I can get up, move to Nevada, and have a nice, big rancher somewhere in a rural area?
We're talking about UBI. If people on UBI were migrating to rural areas, then getting a job isn't a priority. How long it takes to get to the store isn't particularly important either, since someone on UBI would have copious free time.
Let me put this to you again: they can't afford the gasoline to drive that far. They can't afford car insurance. They don't have cars. That 40 minute drive at 50mph is a 10-hour walk, each way.
How much food are they going to carry for ten hours, each way?
You're also saying that, once unemployed, fuck you, be poor forever.
I don't know. You tell me?
Because it's cheaper than a trailer park.
Who is supporting themselves in rural America on a part-time, minimum-wage job with a $165k house?
Your mortgage is almost as much as mine and I live in a nice suburb of Seattle.
Why haven't you paid it off yet? I was going to pay my mortgage off in 3 years but derived other plans. I put the maximum amount of money into HSAs and 401(k)s instead, and now have a $40k account I can use as loan collateral.
The longer one is the current law as the Supreme Court evaluates it in any case examining first-amendment rights to determine if any particular exceptions apply.
Sure, sure. Giving a man 10 acres of land is obviously cheaper than giving him 10 square feet.
Do you even think about what you're saying? I live in a dense, inner-city ghetto, near a race track, near highway, near schools. I have a $421/month, 15-year mortgage. I can walk or ride the train to get food.
In rural PA, I can buy a place for somewhere between $200k and $779k. I can drive for 40 minutes to find food. Good luck ever finding a fucking job. Not to mention poor people can't even afford that rent, unless we pack them like sardines in their isolated little rural housing with no way to get to the food they need to buy to survive.
Why do you think the poorest of poor end up in inner city ghettos? Are they too fucking stupid to find those nice, cheap rural areas where they'd live like kings and honored concubines? Hell, why aren't landlords up in those rural areas making a giant, highly-profitable business of it?
Your litmus paper is defective. A dozen litmus tests on different media immediately fail your considerations.
Average Social Security recipient gets $1,258 per month or $15k in 2013. You're a touch off, but the point is a good one.
You're asking a more-complex question than you might realize: transitioning Social Security retirement benefits is an enormous, broad-impact consideration, with concerns ranging financing, social contracts, people's economic situations and the impact on those, and even the problems with the current implementation of retirement benefits. The proposed system pays starting at age 18, whereas Social Security retirement benefits pay starting at age 60, thus changing both the utility and the financial considerations.
Minimum-wage earners in 2013 would receive something like $768/month if they retained a full-time job at minimum wage throughout their lives. Below full-time minimum wage, people quickly become ineligible, and thus go straight from somewhere around $720 to $0. The heavily-transitional underemployed, thus, do not receive Social Security retirement benefits. Keep this in mind for later.
How much does that person get with the USS system described in that link?
You'll notice there's a Transition metric there. Dropping current systems hot is damaging, and OASDI is particularly-problematic. I've put a lot of time in on examining that transition specifically.
You should see the proportional chart shows a smaller OASDI cost. For the first 15 years, anyone reaching retirement age gets Social Security old-age pensions. The OASDI benefit is reduced by the size of the USS benefit, thus rendering the same total retirement benefit for this group. This eliminates the 6.2% OASDI tax from income taxes, and reduces the payroll tax to 5.59%.
There's a trend of roughly 3%-4% increase in per-capita income per year at a rate of 2% inflation, meaning the purchasing power of the USS increases each year. That, in turn, means that the USS benefit represents a larger fraction of OASDI benefits for then-current recipients entering retirement; and, of course, the retirement benefit today doesn't grow after you retire, so then-existing recipients steadily derive more income from the USS and less from OASDI. This allows a reduction of the remaining 5.59% payroll tax supporting OASDI in transition.
At 15 years, new retirees have had ample time to collect savings, aside from those with exceedingly-low incomes. That's a topic for later, though.
New retirees of average stature will receive roughly 50% of the average payout, and should have approximately 15 years's worth more from sticking the USS into a 3% fixed-income retirement growth account (standard retirement "guaranteed income" account; you might do better with some long-hold CDs, but not today). By 15 years down the line from there, it's passable--barely. It's only 15 years because I didn't want to fund a long tail transition--I could, and it would take around 60 years to finally zero out OASDI.
There's a conservative flaw in that math: two-adult households actually get two USS benefits; a two-adult household with a single working spouse eligible for OASDI benefits is actually covered for 86% of the average retirement benefit as of 2013. Spouse and survivor benefits transfer a working spouse's benefit to a non-working spouse when the OASDI earner dies, rather than clearing them from the system; we should probably also transfer the spouse's USS as deductible from the OASDI. Note that this reduces much of the actual cost of transition because a majority but not all OASDI households are two-adult. Some people do hit retirement age as single filers. Leaving this particular error in gives a more-demanding proof-of-concept without the risk of fluffing it up by trying to squeeze out more blood that's clearly there, but in unknown quantity.
As for the poorest, they'll probably actually tap the USS to survive. That means they'll get a better-secured retirement at the lowest income levels, but not the huge boon of carry
Property tax is bullshit.
You just made an argument with no backing. You suggest some numbers are a misunderstanding or purposely inflated, but don't suggest which.
Try me. I bet you can't.
You missed the part where by implementing a system like that, we would make you, personally, poorer.
There's only so much work available in the economy. It's only able to trade around so much labor. Divert more of that labor to replacing the rotting parts of the labor force and you can make less of other shit--meaning more people live at a lower class, and middle- and upper-class people are at a lower standard-of-living than they would otherwise be.
The point of welfare is to cost less than not having welfare. If you can't figure out why, I encourage you to save money by never brushing your teeth or using condoms again.
to people today who already have decent house, cars, boat and other property, we'd use UBI to simply stop working
I actually had planned to be capable of retiring by age 35. I planned this when I was 27. I had $0 in savings and made $60k/year.
It's actually doable, but I changed my financial plans. I've put large amounts of money into my 401(k) for a loan basis. I learned to ride a motorcycle. I bought a $7,000 piano. The thing is I can pull my monthly costs to below $400; that means each year nets me ten years of retirement.
I'm 31 now. I have $1,200/month of expenses. I have a $421/month mortgage and a $255/month personal loan that can go--the mortgage has $25,000 left on it, and the loan is going away this month. My heating bill dropped by 12% after fixing some issues with a leaky room in my house; insulating one (large) wall (for $4,000) and getting a heat pump (for $6,000) will cut that by more than half. With the right food budget, I can actually get under $300/month expenses today with all of those remediated, but nah.
If I'd gone that route, I'd be sitting on enough money to barely make it to retirement in 3 years. Another 2 years and I'd have enough to offset inflation, stuffed into a 3% growth account. At retirement, Social Security pays me 3-4 times as much as I'd need.
Water heater lasts 10 years and costs $600, or $5/month. Roof needs $1000 of maintenance every 7 years, or $12/month. That home maintenance stuff amortizes well.
I think you're overestimating just how much you'd enjoy retiring early.
Besides, I already have property that they will rent from me, so I'd be getting both their UBI (partial) as well as my UBI.
Then you'd be productive in the economy, providing for the supply of some housing. You'd probably make about a 30% profit margin, like most landlords, in the end, so maybe $100 from each of them.
That's actually a job that needs doing.
It doesn't work that way.
Maximum cost efficiency is attained in apartment complexes and densely-packed urban areas. Mountain cabins and farming villages are luxurious sprawl.
You can't afford to house the poor unless they're vacuum-packed.
They're not "rights"; they're laws. It's a privilege. The concept of "rights" is a philosophical one which, essentially, suggests that some laws are somehow different from other laws in a metaphysical way. It's sort of like religion or some other belief system.
It's certainly convenient for us to have certain things codified as law, so long as enforcement operates in our benefit. From an economic standpoint, certain things which people might think should be rights aren't always possible. Food, medical care, shelter, and communication have all been cited as things which should be human rights; these things are possible to supply to everyone if your economy is sufficiently-developed, and they're cheap to supply to everyone if your economy is developed beyond that point, and yet you can't supply them in poorer economies because it simply won't work. An economy is poor because it doesn't have the means to produce; we think too much about the means to represent exchange (money), and not enough about where what we exchange comes from.
Freedom of expression is extending to the point that obscene speech isn't considered criminal, and nudity in public isn't illegal. A Federal court recently ruled that women's breasts are legally allowed exposure in public; and a guy at MIT used to go to class in only sandals, having won a court case that said nudity without lewdness isn't illegal. That's fine for most of us who either don't care, would like more boob flashes from cute girls, or are cute girls giving the boob flashes. However, it also means that parents will have their kids exposed to such a culture, which removes their control over their childrens's values. Girls will grow up in a world where it's okay to go topless. 15-year-olds will be flashing college students 10 years their senior, and this is totally okay now.
There are multiple groups of people here with conflicting so-called rights. Of primary importance, there's a group who believe certain behavior is impropriety, and want to instill "good family values" into their kids; and another group who believe Victorian ideals are outdated and a little playfulness and eye-candy is a good thing--including the ones who don't like being told they can't show themselves off a bat as the eye candy. These groups cannot cohabitate the same space without one oppressing the other, either by force of law or by sheer influence of presence.
So yeah. Things like rights, responsibilities, and imposition are relative based on your viewpoint. A lot of words we use to describe rights have no meaning; things like "freedom", "democracy", and "justice" are contextual to the speaker's and listener's minds, and have conflicting definitions depending on who you ask. "Patriotism" is often about doing what you're told without questioning if it's right, although the revolutionaries will tell you you're not a true patriot unless you love your country enough to remove villains from power and set it back on the path of righteousness; and in America, we talk about patriotism in a context with the Constitution and the rights it lays forth to subtly suggest that not supporting whatever the American government says right now is not supporting human rights.
I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings.
You've come up with words and statements and justifications to frame things that make you personally comfortable as some kind of spiritual mandate from a higher power, and to frame laws as holy scripture. I only see that certain things make the world more convenient (for me and others), and that power hasn't stripped those things yet. I understand that someone else pays for those so-called rights as well, in the form of things they can't do because it would violate my more-important rights.
Delusion became dangerous to me at some point. This is how I responded. I was raised being taught that the governments of the world secretly trade with the half-fish people of sunken Atlantis and that carrying certain metals will cause spiritual energi
The only times I've heard of this hate speech Pepe thing have been a Slahdot article posted several months ago and this one today.
Maybe I don't spend my time steeped in communities with so little power that only people who go there intentionally know about them.
No, they said specifically that blocking it in Austria doesn't remove it from the world, and it needs to be removed from the whole world.
Fun fact: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution carries the following original text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
A few years ago, I was introduced to the codified version of the First Amendment. That version is the legal definition of the current law, and is nearly three pages long. It details that the original amendment intended a limited category of speech to exclude speech harmful to society, such as libel, slander, and lying under oath. Case law has refined this particular law to explicitly express its limitations and the exceptions to those limitations themselves.
They are essentially suggesting Facebook is not allowed to possess certain samples of published speech in any form anywhere in the world, and not allowed to publish certain such samples anywhere in the world. That means if someone in France publishes something that Austria says to remove, and it's stored on a US server, Facebook isn't allowed to just remove it from Austria; they have to remove it from everywhere.
Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.
Please tell me, what happens when half (or more) of the population is on UBI and the other half is taxed to the point of quitting and going on UBI.
Let's try this again.
At $50,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $40,106 today, and $46,671 under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $42,128 today, and $55,100 under the Universal Social Security.
At $200,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $144,620 today, and $145,626 under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $147,865 today, and $155,223 under the Universal Social Security.
At $25,000,000 of gross income, a 1-adult household takes home $15,138,261 today, and $15,134,880 (-$3,381; this is static after about $500k) under the Universal Social Security. A 2-adult, married household takes home $15,143,343 today, and $15,143,865 (+$522) under the Universal Social Security.
Are you suggesting single filers making over $200k will quit and live on the UBI because of a 0.67% peak increase in total income taxes (something I could buff out easily enough, but I got tired of tweaking the brackets); that single filers making $1M will quit because of a 0.34% increase in total taxes paid; that single filers making $25 million in total compensation will quit because of a 0.014% increase in total income taxes; or that married households making over $500k will quit because they only get about $500 of additional spending money per year?
Please specify.
But why should the reduction in work-hours be government-mandated? As long as people are free to work for whoever they wish and hire whoever they please, why wouldn't an employer gain better employees and/or higher productivity by offering shorter work-days and longer vacations?
Your original argument was that a person would decide, through the forces of capitalism, to not work as much because they were relatively well-off with shorter working hours and thus valued their time more than work. Government-mandates are the recent history of working hours, but different from your original point:
people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
As to the question, eh. A government mandate of labor standards gives the individual and the workforce as a whole the ability to cite a fair labor standard to work from. Published standards and mandates as such increase individual negotiating power. So long as your UBI policy is actually functional (there are a lot of dangerous and destructive ways to implement a UBI, and a few viable plans), the self-sufficiency of a UBI also increases individual negotiating power and reduces the need for such things as minimum-wage standard.
A government mandate of maximum working hours without penalties (e.g. 40 hours, then wage costs 50% more) is necessary for any sort of wage standard. It becomes a battle between people who will work long hours for low pay and other people who need exactly the same income but will only work fewer hours. Without the ability to walk away, employers have the power to push the trend toward longer hours and lower pay; individuals who try to push back will run out of money and become homeless and unemployable. Then we get small, unstable governments called "trade unions", who in turn can only function because the big government forces the businesses to negotiate with trade unions on whatever terms they demand.
Thus it can be argued that a government mandate of maximum working hours provides the capacity for individuals to independently scale their labor, as they can identify what a "working-hour" is as a proportion of "a job". Wage suddenly has one dimension instead of two. This in turn allows the economy to function stably due to less fluctuation in working conditions and compensation between businesses.
This largely affects part-time work and full-time expectations. The current Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, exempts salaried workers from overtime. This means a "full-time job" is 40 hours--that's a published standard codified in law--but working 60-hours won't get you 20 hours of overtime unless you're paid by the hour. It's codified in law that your employer can but isn't legally required to provide you compensation for overtime; we only expect a 40-hour work day because the law actually defines full-time as 40 hours, although some businesses define it as 37.5 because a half-hour daily lunch is accounted for your 8-hour day.
As a final thought: Historically, the government mandate has been a response to the voice of a people who feel powerless to drive change. Any argument for or against a government mandate must examine the history of the will of the people, and their success in implementing their will. Lack of a government mandate is an action of government as well, in that a government selects for the outcome of a null action by taking no action. This means that 100 years of people demanding shorter working hours and not getting them makes a government null-action position an effective mandate for current, longer working hours. That can be valid, as shortening working hours cuts back productivity per person by cutting back hours per person without increasing productivity per hour; this makes people poorer, and our choice is basically a scale between larger material wealth and no free time to enjoy it or smaller material wealth and much free time to enjoy it.
Bu
It's notable that a UBI can only actually pay income out of production, and thus is only sustainable as a fraction of GDP-per-capita. My USS takes this out to its direct conclusion by cutting welfare out of the progressive tax system and applying an additional flat tax as a funding source (i.e. bracket-plus-17%).
Basically, all money represents everything produced and sold. If you produce 100 cars and sell 50 of them, you've invested labor sufficient to produce 100 cars in the production of 50 cars. You don't have 50 cars; you have 50 car-shaped objects that nobody is going to use. You can do it and make a profitable business out of it; cars are going to cost twice as much as they need to. When the next competitor starts making an appropriate number of cars to meet market demand, he's going to sell them for half as much. He'll employ half the labor force per car that you do; as he eats into your market, there will be a net-change in number of unemployed equivalent to the full size of his direct labor force (that is: if he employs 100 people, you're going to have to scale back production enough to lay off 200 people).
In practice, the guy making twice the cars in demand goes away. He doesn't exist, anyway. Instead, you have businesses working as efficiently as possible, using the least labor they can so as to pay the least amount of total wages. More jobs appear as more shit is bought.
So there's this:
choosing to wait several years while they partied (though I suppose they might have to work part-time to pay for the parties). That, in turn, would significantly raise the relative cost of the UBI.
If these people are a significantly-small portion of the unemployment base, then they don't actually affect productivity. Basically, somebody was going to be hired anyway; because we have 5.2% unemployment (U3) and not 0.2%, it was relatively-easy to hire somebody; that somebody was somebody else because the usual somebody was busy partying.
If they're taking part-time jobs along the way, their marginal impact is reduced by the same mechanism: more job-seekers doesn't mean more jobs; more buyers means more jobs. If people keep coming into McDonalds to buy hamburgers, McDonalds needs to hire enough people to make that many hamburgers; if the register operators can't take the orders fast enough and the sandwich makers can't build them quickly enough, they need to hire more people. If their building is at-capacity, they need to put another McDonalds down the street.
Likewise, if they do have an impact by idling, they'll decrease the labor force participation rate (which is currently high relative to a long-stable 58%-59% up to ~1960, and relative to other developed countries) rather than increase U3 or U4 (they're not interested in working and thus not discouraged workers). Their purchasing habits will cause a decrease in U3 and U4. Relative to if they did work, the amount of income available to take for the UBI will decrease, and the purchasing power of a UBI will shrink. This poverty will make it harder to just party, and they'll need jobs.
So it could happen, and it could happen without carrying any sort of cost at all. If it goes out too far, it will become less-attractive of a life decision. Nobody with any understanding of finances will want to delay their entry to the workforce all that much, either.
There's a good chance that companies can pay less salary and give employees an overall higher take-home income with UBI.
Actually, that can't be done, and is a bad idea in flat concept. I've designed a type of UBI that reduces the cost:wage ratio; that's a thing, but reducing the actual wage isn't necessary or desirable.
It can't be done because prices are kind of an end result of all other inputs. Those inputs include cost in labor-hours; market dynamics such as size, barrier to entry, distribution, and so forth; and price of wage. Doubling everyone's wage--not just the minimum wage, but all wages--would double prices, flatly, without affecting business operating profit margins in the long run. Essentially, you'd get 100% inflation, and settle with no change to the number of labor-hours correlated with the ability to buy a thing.
Reducing wages thus will either be flat across all incomes and cause deflation (very, very bad), or it will reduce some wages but not other and thus make a certain class of people poorer relative to not reducing those wages.
My Universal Social Security stabilizes certain markets, provides better reliability in achieving welfare goals than current welfare, and overall makes efficiency gains in the economy by leveling out disturbances rather than just income. Even in its initial transition phase, where it has to hold up Social Security Retirement Benefits (OASDI) for the next 15 years of new retirees, it immediately eliminates the 6.2% income tax on your paycheck and reduces the 6.2% payroll tax to 5.8%. As technical progress continues, the gap between the USS and OASDI narrows; and eventually, we stop taking new retirees (you should have savings--you know, from the USS you've been receiving, or else you're too poor for current OASDI to currently pay you retirement benefits and you're going to get them under the USS), while old ones die off. that 5.8% payroll tax thus shrinks away.
That means, firstly, that you keep 6.2% more of your paycheck--your income goes up without increasing the cost to employers, thus there's no additional input to the price of goods. Second, your employer pays less additional taxes on your paycheck, so the cost to employers decreases--by 0.4% at first, and eventually by 6.2%. HI stays because medicare isn't going anywhere.
So long as it's possible to expand production without hitting scarcity, the cost of producing more of any given good doesn't increase. Growth without scarcity means a bigger market, lower barriers-to-entry, and more competition, which puts downward pressure on net profit margins. At a point, producing more than a certain amount of a good per unit time costs more--for example, if you run out of good farm land and try to produce more food per year, you can farm on crappy farmland for lower yields and invest more labor, more wage, more costs, making more-expensive food. If you hit that point, prices go up.
All of this should make it clear that we're really talking about shifting inefficiencies out of the economy. We're smoothing out the demand curve, reducing the cost of risks (and the labor that moves there now and then, as well as the baseline of standing labor that handles current risks), and moving that onto purchasing more consumer goods. That's why it's even possible to increase wealth in this way: it's just technology. We're making a way to invest less effort in keeping our economy running, which eliminates the need for some jobs, and gives us the purchasing power to buy things that demand other jobs.
So yeah, the cost to employers falls as payroll taxes diminish, and the tax on your paycheck sort of goes away. Caveat, of course: I accounted for that 6.2% as part of the tax bracket you're in when I shifted the taxes around, and replaced it with a lower general income tax and a 17% USS tax. It's not so simple as all that. The increase in take-home income happens because the new tax level in total minus th
Done.
What did I win?
The problem is that as I've seen it applied in various test programs, it has been applied as an additional program on top of existing services.
It's also been supplied as a short-term, limited benefit in a small geographical area. That prevents all sorts of large, long-term economic effects, making it difficult to gather any useful data.
I have a habit of not being wrong, and I manage that a lot on one hand by not making firm statements on things of which I'm lacking sufficient data, and on the other by adding risk controls to anything I plan on actually doing. Since I can see how economies work in broad strokes across all of human history and project what would happen by implementation of any sort of UBI, I'm pretty confident that it's doable both financially and economically--we'll collapse society with a bad plan, and end up actually strengthening the economy with a well-developed plan. Even then, I designed a plan that accounts for and behaves only sub-optimally in all kinds of bad situations.
When you design a UBI plan, you have to account for transitioning off current welfare without breaking people's livelihoods, generating shitloads of debt, or raising taxes (impolitic if nothing else). You also have to mitigate any sort of immigration free-money rush; childcare profiteering; misestimation of how much money people actually need; reduction of working hours; recessions; and so forth. If something doesn't go the way you want, it needs to come out alright.
In my Universal Social Security, I avoid the childcare profiteering thing by simply providing classical public aid for minor dependents of low-income households; and I handle the immigrant rush for free money by providing that same public aid to naturalized American citizens, while rendering the USS benefit as a non-refundable tax credit instead of a (semi-)monthly payment. That costs roughly 1.4% of AGI (the USS and current welfare both cost roughly 17%), and is no more abusable than the current system, thus doesn't expose us to new risks; I haven't eliminated existing risks in that cross-section.
The thing about solving homelessness and hunger is actually easy. It's mathematically-provable that nearly 100% of all current welfare recipients come out ahead under the USS, excepting some of the highest-income HUD housing assistance households that come out ~2% behind (most such households would only get SNAP benefits for their dependents). For the non-working unemployed, homeless, no savings, it's demonstratably possible to show a new market opportunity for profitability; that's not a guarantee. Because the USS funds by a flat percentage of all income, the purchasing power of the benefit increases with the GDP-per-capita, which trends upwards; that means the amount paid out increases faster than inflation, and so it will eventually be enough. In the interim, it's better than nothing.
I've even proposed that freeing up ~$1 trillion of taxation while providing stronger welfare guarantees would increase spendable income and cause adverse effects--labor shortages, followed by a population run-up, until stability is reached. That's okay; and, as a contingency, we could control that by redefining full-time working hours at 28-32 hours per week. This would reduce productivity and increase spending on the same goods; basically, rather than working 40 hours and trying to buy 50 hours's worth of goods, you work 32 hours and try to buy 40 hours's worth of goods. That, however, requires a technological increase in productivity; so implementing this could require a raise in taxes to prevent the glut of additional consumer spending--pay down the national debt along the way as an excuse--and then a sudden shock of a tax decrease and a working-hour decrease.
Risks. I've got a reasonable ideal of how people behave in large groups; I've got historical data to correlate; and it's still not enough. I can identify the alternate possibilities and control for them.
One of the ridiculous problems you'll encounter when trying to design a UBI policy is that UBI advocates keep asking how the fuck UBI recipients are going to live on your paltry income in New York City or San Francisco. Then they get pissed when you point out that they'll be poor in the ghettos dangled 10 miles from these urban centers, as if they expect the poorest of poor to somehow live in the richest of rich neighborhoods.
I sometimes wonder if these people have more or less annual income than credit card debt.
That's detrimental to society
Only if they represent a substantial fraction of the unemployed. That's probably not possible, although the number of moving parts that make that not happen and also prevent the system from simply adjusting parasitically and spiraling into self-destruction makes it take too long to explain in great detail so many times.
First, we need to establish that we have a lot of able-bodied workers who don't engage in the productive wage economy. Stay-at-home spouses are the primary example of people who don't want or need jobs: if your husband (or wife--common today) pulls $140k and people in your area live fine on $60k, you don't need a job unless you're way too bored. In principle, you suggest the same of a UBI, that being that people will be provided for and so will see that they don't need to work.
Next, we must ask what makes people not work. A UBI can't provide a middle-class income; it's mathematically-impossible. Anyone with a job gets the UBI plus their wage, and so has more income than someone on only a UBI. That means your socioeconomic status on UBI is "lowest of low". That's just fine: we trend toward a 5% unemployment level (U3 and U4, with U4 being a few tenths of a percent higher), and the assistance provided to those people is better than no assistance at all. 1.6M Americans are homeless and only 1M find homeless shelters every night, so living in a tiny apartment is better than living in a cardboard box. The question is: how big does the apartment need to be before they cease to look for work?
Obviously, between these, we can conjecture a sort of scale. We know that some people get jobs when their spouse is the provider because they want additional spending money (luxury). We know that poorer people who can passably get second jobs or have a working spouse because they feel unstable being so poor. In general, people consider your economic status as an indicator of your social value, and so try to increase their economic status by work.
Living in poor areas and having frequented public transport, I've had the opportunity to hear some of the lowest-class people discuss how glad they are to be working--people who are obviously not what anyone would consider "good people", being rowdy, impolite, and generally of low-esteem for laws. Not gang members, but more the type who ride around on dirt bikes, use illegal intoxicants, and make a lot of noise pollution at night. Generally, while these people have a less-refined set of social rules, they appear to value society of a sort; they might behave in ways we disapprove of and take little time to think about the dangers of some of their actions to others, but they don't seem to be out to cause any harm to random passers-by, and are quite willing to work for their means.
In general, two things make people not work. An overabundance of relative living standard reduces the perceived value (valuation) of income from work. Aside from that, it's depression: people with no personal motivation won't engage in effort to achieve rewards, even the reward of eliminating some suffering they've learned to tolerate.
Overabundance isn't a problem. We can't raise everyone up to a middle-class standard without eliminating all rich people; doing that would collapse your economy in some other way than by giving people money. Disruption to productivity raises the proportion of income required to pay for a UBI at a given standard-of-living, so trying to level out the rich by taking all their money and giving it to everyone else would trigger an economic collapse. Besides that, money isn't wealth, and we'd be hard-pressed to support the demand that would come with that much money being redistributed; we'd just get inflation, and then a collapse.
In short: a UBI will always represent a fraction of the median. You can only fund a median UBI, in theory, by taking the amount of money represented by the median income; in practice, you have to take a
Stagnant wages is a myth. A median income in 1970 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1980; a median income in 1980 could not purchase the standard-of-living of a median income in 1990; nor 1990 for 2000.
I've lived my life through a constant run-up of technology. Cars getting better with new safety systems, more power out of smaller engines, better mileage, highly-complex mechanical and electrical systems like EFI, improved braking systems, high-end radios with digital media and bluetooth integrated, and even things like traction control and pre-crash systems built into the $1,500 options package on economy models. We traded away $30/month landlines and $10/month dial-up for $17/year smart phones and $87/month 200Mbit Internet. Televisions aren't giant, bulbous tubes anymore. Even the new things I have--game systems, computers, cell phones--have changed, substantially, since they became available.
People eat out of home more instead of preparing food in home, and they spend less on food every year despite eating more-expensively year after year--at the median income level; the lowest 20% still spend roughly 16% of their income on food. Clothing has fallen from 12% to nearly 3% of our income.
Medical care is ridiculous: prescription drugs have gone through the roof; yet people in 2005 spent 6% of their income on medical care instead of 4% of the 1950s, purchasing more and better-quality medical care. Today it's just under 8%, and people go in for regular wellness care much more consistently than anyone did in the 90s--part of that is their insurance plan gives them 100%, no-deductible coverage, but charges them $40/month for any year in which they didn't get a sign-off from their doctor stating they've had appropriate care at the full discretion of the doctor's professional opinion.
The percentage of median-income household spending that goes to purchase the same things is constantly falling; and for many goods, either prices stay mainly-level (small goods like cell phones and computers) or they keep to the same percentage of spending (large goods like cars). Housing costs as rent or mortgage payments (not house sale prices) have generally trended downward on the span of decades; on shorter spans (notably in recent times), housing trades as a commodity and is heavily-influenced by fluctuations in perceptions about the housing market. This is confounded by new single-family homes constantly getting bigger, and so housing prices have to adjust against square footage to get a good read on the price of housing.
I've been around to see things get more and more affordable for the average American, and the average American continue to complain about getting poorer and poorer. Stop spending all your money and you won't be broke all the time; you won't have all this new stuff, either.
which would probably end when they realize the amount would not even pay their rent
Please point out, mathematically, how say 960 euros a month (the Netherlands experiment) would be able to pay for rent/mortgage, a car, food, utilities, vacation, and other entertainment, please show your work.
Don't have Netherlands data. I worked it out for the United States only, and would be interested in other economic units like England or Germany. Designing a UBI policy requires a strong understanding of a government's finances, the economy's structure, tax systems, welfare costs, retail pricing, and the like. You can't design any sort of UBI policy by knowing or estimating the cost of goods, because the gross cost of a good doesn't tell you about the total cost of producing it--shipping, logistics, business administration, cost of risk, and the like. For highly-competitive goods like food and clothing, the current price is likely the lowest-viable price, although that comes down a bit when a market gets bigger (that's actually doable with rent, in the form of selling smaller units by reducing the risk of empty units at the relevant income levels).
I didn't record the full analysis or write any sorts of papers on this stuff even in America. After performing as much research as I could, I used the current retail prices and added risk margins--that is, if I could find retail of a month's worth of food for $25, consistently, I'd estimate the risk of trying to sustain that as an individual, and then put down a 300% risk reserve ($100/month budget). Some of the rambling on that from an age past made its way online.
The big one is housing. Rent per square foot easily scales down to a 224sqft single-occupancy apartment in $1-$1.06/sqft circa 2013 (my Universal Social Security takes a percentage of all income as a funding source, so gets bigger each year--faster than inflation). That's a maximum estimate of $238/month at the same margin as a 700sqft apartment; I originally budgeted $300/month, providing a 26% risk reserve (up to 33%, in the case of scaling against $1/sqft). I know the actual costs scale; that risk reserve is entirely a coverage of landlord risk (potential for additional costs as consequence of renting to a low-income tennat), not the risk of me misestimating standard costs.
It's not exactly cramped, but it's smaller than most Americans want to deal with. It's actually something like twice the size of a cozy hotel room, and I've spent time examining hotel rooms and expanding the planograms into microunit apartments with full amenities. Thing is, it's still better than living in a soggy cardboard box.
So, again: they'd quickly realize it won't pay rent for a place in which they'd actually like to live.
It is not an "all or nothing". The fact acknowledged by TFA itself is that people receiving assistance begin working less than they used to.
You mean less than 96 hours?
Oh, right, you're a child. You grew up with the eight-hour day. Sorry, I forgot, most people haven't had the adults educate them about work yet.
So let's start with how lazy and entitled you little shits are.
First off, back in the 1830s, your kind were already crying out about how utterly lazy they were and how the government should fix it so they don't have to work. "From six to six", they used to say. Twelve hours--twelve hours--and with two full hours of meal breaks! Not even twelve hours of straight work for six days a week (nobody worked on the Lord's Day), for a halfway-unreasonable 72 hour work week; they demanded sixty hours of work.
The French, the laziest people in the world at the time, achieved a 12-hour, 6-day work week by 1850. America started going downhill in 1868, when Federal employees--the most entitled employees, after anyone who's ever been marginally attached to the military--achieved an eight-hour work day. Most Americans still worked a good, solid 12-14 hour work day in 1905, until people like Ford started cutting back to 8-hour shifts and giving pay raises.
America didn't lose the war against laziness until the Adamson Act of 1916, establishing 8-hour days with additional overtime wages for railroad workers. After that, it was all over; the Fair Labor Standards Act was so ludicrous as to cut all good laborers down to 40 hours per week, except the good farm workers who still considered 50 hours full-time, and establish a mandatory minimum wage.
So that ship has sailed, and I don't see you out there working three full-time jobs like any real American would. You laze around for most of the week and complain just as much about too much work while you don't really work anyway; you may as well complain that other people might work 32 hours one day too, I suppose.