What is inside the hard drive doesn't matter for this purpose. What matters is whether there is a legitimate warrant to access it. And there is one, because they have reasonable suspicion that evidence is there, so warrant could be issued.
This is because the majority of Americans don't know what they're talking about when asked basic economics and politics question.
A good example is the fact that most Americans have no clue as to what "socialism" and "capitalism" even means, and genuinely think that e.g. Sweden is socialist.
That is exactly what "private ownership of means of production" means - that private owners can do as they want with their capital (aka means of production). It's the definition of private property, and what distinguishes it from other forms of property (such as enfeoffment under feudalism) - that it is transferable, and can be exchanged for money or other property.
But, yes. Capitalism doesn't mean that all means of production are privately owned. Only that it is the dominant form of property on them.
I believe in property rights for persons, not for corpses. Once you're dead, you're no longer the owner, and you don't necessarily have any say in what happens to your former possessions; and there is no natural right to inherit property.
Now, it is still in the interests of society to allow inheritance, because it removes the burden of having to take care of the offspring of the deceased from society, and it encourages people to invest long-term to provide for their progeny. But we absolutely can regulate that process, including taxation.
If you want to exercise your property rights unimpeded, then gift your property to your inheritors while you're still alive.
What we have is capitalism. Capitalism does not necessarily imply free markets (in either Adam Smith sense, or laissez-faire sense). It only means that ownership of capital (i.e. means of production) is private, and can be transferred arbitrarily.
The important thing is that it becomes part of the feature checklist. People don't know how it works and what it can do, but they start demanding it anyway; and companies have to adapt to the market demand, or lose to their competitors.
Sorry but you can not cook the numbers to make your solution look feasible. The UBI is based on the minimum amount to live reasonably. You can't just arbitrarily set it to an amount that works.
UBI does not necessarily translate to a living wage - it's just an extra payment. Ideally, yes, it should be at least a living wage, but realistically it may not be possible depending on what the economy looks like. Just like existing minimum wage is not living wage.
Either way, if I "cooked" the numbers, then so did you - you just gave some arbitrary figures that don't correspond to real economy. Like I said, in that particular abstract economy, assuming there's no-one else other than those three guys in it, UBI (and welfare in general) cannot be as high as you've asked it to be.
Say one person makes $1000/month and the UBI is $800. he receives a cheque for $800/month how much money would he get for that month and please show your math.
Like I said, it depends on how many other people are in the economy, and how much they are getting. That defines how much income we have, and therefore what tax burden we can place and redistribute. Without those other figures, your question is meaningless. UBI doesn't work if your economy consists of a single person.
If the context is the numbers that I have offered above (which are real numbers of average income for US in 2009), then I can give an answer, but first we need to adjust the inputs, because my numbers were about households, not individuals (I couldn't find statistics for individuals quickly). So let's assume that we're talking about a household of two, each of which is like you've described - $1K income, and $800 UBI per month. The combined yearly UBI of that household would then be $19,200/year. And their combined wages would be $24,000/year.
Now, to make this work with a flat tax rate in the economy described by my numbers, you would need a tax rate on non-UBI portion to be 35% for everyone. So this particular household would pay 35% of their wages (not of their total income including UBI check!) - so $8,400/year. And, as we have already computed above, they will receive an UBI checks totalling $19,200 in that year. So they will end up getting $10,800 on top of what they have earned, after we reconcile their taxes with their UBI checks. So they're getting an extra $900 per month together - so each one of them is getting an extra $450.
And no, this system does not imply that we send them the check for the difference - we collect taxes separately, and mail the checks separately, and it's reconciled by recipient. Income tax would be collected in the same way it it collected today for most - you'd simply get it subtracted from your paycheck by your employer. But now, in addition to the paycheck every month, which will be $X dollars smaller, you would also receive the UBI check every month, which will be $Y dollars bigger. Thus, the UBI system doesn't need to keep track of anything, and tax system doesn't need to keep track of anything that it already doesn't track today (i.e. your wages).
Here's the spreadsheet that I was using to make these computations. First two columns - yearly income, and number of households earning that income - are from this chart, as I have described before. The only other input is the desired UBI payout - this is the bold figure at the top. The rest of the table is automatically calculated from these two inputs, producing the tax rate on wages portion of income (at the bottom) that is necessary to produce a balanced UBI budget. The second-to-last column is how much net benefit every household in that income bracket receives from the UBI system. The last column is their total household income after all taxes are paid and UBI checks are cashed in.
Right, Mincome is not strict UBI. But the observations from that experiment can be extrapolated.
There is no one definitive answer to your question with numbers - it's a dial that we can adjust depending on what exactly we want to get, and what kind of economic productivity we're talking about (so that we break even). So, for example, I could say that all of these guys pay, say, 10% off their non-UBI income - obviously that means that all of them are in the "subsidized" category, and the ones subsidizing them are people not on your list, who get $10k/month.
If you mean this as a constrained example where A, B and C are the entirety of our model economy, then we can easily calculate the precise break-even point. We need $3600 to split between the three guys for their checks, and we have $5000 of taxable income, so the flat tax rate on non-UBI portion would have to be 72%. Effective tax rate for the entire income including UBI check would be 33% for the first guy, 40% for the second, and 49% for the third - that's our smooth progressive taxation gradient. The first two guys would be getting more from the system than they receive - first one effectively gets $480 on top of what he earns by working, and second one gets $120. Third guy is paying more than he is receiving, by $600 - which is where those $480 and $120 come from.
Now, realistically, a 72% tax rate is probably going to be a significant demotivator to work for that extra money, so in that particular economic model (where the highest earner only earns a meager $2500), a UBI level of $1200 is not feasible. Now if we slash it in half, we'll get the much more realistic non-UBI tax rate of 36%, with effective tax rates for the three guys being 23%, 26% and 29% - the arrangement is the same otherwise, with the third guy subsidizing the first two, but all numbers are slashed in half, so the third guy gets to keep most of his $2500 earned wage, whereas before we were taking more than half of it.
This all works exactly the same in a real-world economy, just that the actual numbers are different - and more interesting to crunch. We'll need something like this to begin with - because this is for households rather than people, and income is yearly rather than monthly, I'll operate in these terms, as well (but obviously it's easy to translate that to monthly check and individuals if need be). Also, because I'm lazy, I'm just going to assume that everyone in each bracket is getting the lower number on that bracket (i.e. where it says $50-$75k, I'm counting them all as $50k; the lowest bracket is counted as $0, as if they don't earn anything, and the highest bracket is all counted as $200k). I eyeballed the bars on the chart and converted them to numbers, dropping millions (because we really only need to maintain proportions).
Now, with these numbers, let's assume that UBI is $30k per household (this is equivalent to two adults working full time and earning the federal minimum wage today). This translates to tax rate on non-UBI income of 56%. The effective tax rates with that arrangement range from 0% to 48% in a smooth gradient - $0 bracket pays 0%, $10k bracket pays 14%, $15k bracket pays 18% etc. The cut-off point for when a person starts paying into the system more than they are receiving from it is somewhere between $50k and $75k - household that earn $50k get $2.5k on top of that from UBI, when taxes owed are subtracted from UBI check, while households that earn $75k pay $11.5k into the system when subtracting taxes from the check. Households in the $200k bracket end up paying $80k into the system.
Adjusting the amount of the check is not going to change the break-even cut-off point (where your tax = your UBI check) - it only affects how steep the curve is above and below it (but still, at no point does the guy above that point ends up taking home less than the guy below it - so there's always a monetary reward for extra
So if one worked their guaranteed income check would decease based on how much they earned. This is not a check to everyone. If one earned over 2 times the Mincome level they would get no check at all.
There's a very easy way to test this - poll people on whether they're happy with their current level of income. Everyone who says "no" isn't suddenly going to start working less to maintain the same income level, if they can keep working the same and get more income.
Say someone is currently making mincome + 10%. Would they be taxed 91% so that they could get that money back in their monthly check?
No, of course not. We would simply tax the non-UBI part of their income. Someone who's making 10% extra would probably still get more than they receive. But, obviously, as the non-UBI part of one's income grows, so would the tax they have to pay, and at some point (where exactly depends on the UBI amount and the tax rate) they start paying more than they are receiving.
This is not really any different from the welfare approach today, except the transition between donors and recipients is a smooth gradient, rather than an abrupt cut-off (where a person can suddenly become ineligible for some payout if their income goes up by $100, say).
Why tax it when you are just going to give it back?
To simplify administration. If everyone gets the UBI check, you don't need to maintain a system to determine who gets it and who doesn't (and how much). You just mail out the checks uniformly, and collect the taxes uniformly (a further simplification here is moving to flat rate for income, since non-taxed UBI portion would effectively make it progressive, anyway). By adjusting the payout vs the tax rate, you effectively define how many people are subsidizing, and how many are being subsidized. This can thus be easily adjusted to be essentially the same as the current system to begin with (but with reduced administration costs), and then we can go from there and see where the sweet spot is.
What do you mean by "people who are currently above UBI"? UBI, by definition, applies to everyone. It's not "some plans" where everyone gets a monthly check. It's the very definition of UBI - it's what "universal" means.
UBI has been tried in some localized experiments, the most notable of which is Mincome in Canada. It did not show people massively refusing to work, regardless of their level. It did show that people were more likely to take time off to take care of the kids when they had them etc, but the overall economic effect was positive.
Logically speaking, your concerns don't make much sense, either. UBI is basic income - enough to live on, ideally, but you'd still need to be rather thrifty. Someone who is not getting any welfare today because they are not eligible, are, in most cases, already living better than that. The motivation to earn the extra money to cover that delta doesn't really go anywhere. Quitting the job and going to UBI would mean a drop in the quality of life. It's basically the same concern as "welfare queens" - a largely invented phenomenon, often used as a justification as politics, but not supported by any real world studies. There's no reason to believe that it would be any different here.
Where does the money come from? Same place as all welfare comes from today, of course - taxes. The fact that everyone receives it is immaterial - people above a certain income level simply end up paying more into the system than they are receiving from it, and it's that difference that effectively funds it for everyone else. This is, again, not really any different from the existing welfare system in any substantive way - except it's easier to manage, because instead of having long lists of people who are and aren't eligible, you achieve the same effective distribution of money by a careful alignment of UBI amount and tax rate.
The point is to replace the existing conditional welfare / safety net programs with UBI, for the most part. You will likely end up actually saving money, because a lot of the same people will be receiving the checks that already do now, but administrative overhead is much lower. And the wealthier guys who get those checks actually pay them back (and then some) with taxes - it needs some rejiggling of the tax brackets to get it right, but it's pretty simple math.
We already do this for many people already. It's called Social Security and Disability.
And unemployment insurance and minimum wage.
What many people don't realize is that we do kinda sorta have UBI already, between all these things. It's not quite universal, but extremely broad in practice, applying to most of population. And it's extremely expensive, because it consists of numerous welfare programs, laws (like minimum wage), taxation schemes etc, that were not really designed to work to produce that result, and so incur massive administrative and economic overhead to get there.
Once we have UBI, we no longer need minimum wage, most forms of welfare, and progressive income taxation. Think of how many government bureaucrats we can get rid of!
So you would rather pay more money to maintain the huge bureaucracy that is necessary for the existing complicated and expensive welfare system (with many bureaucrats and offices, whose task is basically determining and proving who's eligible and who's not)?
Socialism is not high taxes and welfare. A welfare state, like Netherlands or Sweden, is not automatically socialist. In Europe, they call this "social democracy".
Actual socialism is public, or shared, ownership of the means of production. Basically, if anyone (with enough money) can privately own, say, a factory in a country, and can sell it to anyone else willing to buy, then that is not a socialist country.
You're assuming that the current state of affairs is stable and won't result in a ruined economy if we don't touch it. Have you looked at the current levels, and, more importantly, trends for income and wealth inequality, social mobility, and private debt?
Basic income is exactly that - it's literally giving everyone the same amount of money, no qualifications required.
The reason why it works great as a welfare scheme in practice is because you simply take back the "extra" for those who don't need it in form of taxes. In fact, it lets you ditch progressive personal income taxation completely, and replace it with a flat rate that simply doesn't apply to the basic income check. Then you get taxed on the amount over and above that, which nicely translates to progressive taxation in practice; and with a bit of fidgeting with the rate, you can have the cutoff point (at which a person pays more in taxes than they receive from BI) at any place on the income chart that you want.
The huge benefit of this scheme is the simplicity. It completely replaces unemployment insurance and most other targeted welfare payouts, and removes the bureaucracy that is necessary to maintain them (especially as the list of requirements to "deserve" welfare grows longer and longer, as it tends to - drug testing etc). You don't need a large office to mail everyone a check in the same amount. It can also simplify taxes (and hence IRS) dramatically.
Coincidentally, this is why some more pragmatic libertarians, who recognize the need for some welfare / safety net in a stable society, are on board with this scheme - it is compatible with their ideal of a small, lean government.
Yes, Trump doesn't bother with laws and courts. He simply encourages his supporters to get violent against those he doesn't like, translating metaphorical punches into physical ones.
SCOTUS has also ruled in Yates v. US that political beliefs, even including belief in violent overthrow of existing government, are constitutionally protected free speech so long as they are "abstract doctrines". This applies to CCA in a very obvious and direct way, effectively rendering it unconstitutional outright, even if it wasn't the target of the case - just as Lawrence v. Texas applied to all sodomy laws everywhere in US, even though the case only involved one particular law.
Did you try to read the comment beyond that first sentence? It's fairly obvious that what I'm talking about is not some innate ability that men have, but rather different expectations that society sets for them. A better way to say it is that men are allowed to negotiate far more aggressively than women are, before aggressiveness starts having a detrimental effect on the outcome.
Yes, it could be because of that. The word that we have for it is "cultural gender bias".
You can think any kind of crap, that's up to you. It's when crap you think starts affecting how you treat others that SJW gestapo has a problem with that. Verstehst?
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What is inside the hard drive doesn't matter for this purpose. What matters is whether there is a legitimate warrant to access it. And there is one, because they have reasonable suspicion that evidence is there, so warrant could be issued.
This is because the majority of Americans don't know what they're talking about when asked basic economics and politics question.
A good example is the fact that most Americans have no clue as to what "socialism" and "capitalism" even means, and genuinely think that e.g. Sweden is socialist.
That is exactly what "private ownership of means of production" means - that private owners can do as they want with their capital (aka means of production). It's the definition of private property, and what distinguishes it from other forms of property (such as enfeoffment under feudalism) - that it is transferable, and can be exchanged for money or other property.
But, yes. Capitalism doesn't mean that all means of production are privately owned. Only that it is the dominant form of property on them.
Socialism for me is having the money spread around the members of society.
That isn't socialism, that's welfare state. A subset of which is social democracy (like Sweden etc).
I believe in property rights for persons, not for corpses. Once you're dead, you're no longer the owner, and you don't necessarily have any say in what happens to your former possessions; and there is no natural right to inherit property.
Now, it is still in the interests of society to allow inheritance, because it removes the burden of having to take care of the offspring of the deceased from society, and it encourages people to invest long-term to provide for their progeny. But we absolutely can regulate that process, including taxation.
If you want to exercise your property rights unimpeded, then gift your property to your inheritors while you're still alive.
What we have is capitalism. Capitalism does not necessarily imply free markets (in either Adam Smith sense, or laissez-faire sense). It only means that ownership of capital (i.e. means of production) is private, and can be transferred arbitrarily.
Don't worry, it's okay, because the password is classified "TOP SECRET". ~
The important thing is that it becomes part of the feature checklist. People don't know how it works and what it can do, but they start demanding it anyway; and companies have to adapt to the market demand, or lose to their competitors.
When I see people in hoodies, I think "smart guy, dresses for the weather".
Then again, I live in Western Washington.
Sorry but you can not cook the numbers to make your solution look feasible. The UBI is based on the minimum amount to live reasonably. You can't just arbitrarily set it to an amount that works.
UBI does not necessarily translate to a living wage - it's just an extra payment. Ideally, yes, it should be at least a living wage, but realistically it may not be possible depending on what the economy looks like. Just like existing minimum wage is not living wage.
Either way, if I "cooked" the numbers, then so did you - you just gave some arbitrary figures that don't correspond to real economy. Like I said, in that particular abstract economy, assuming there's no-one else other than those three guys in it, UBI (and welfare in general) cannot be as high as you've asked it to be.
Say one person makes $1000/month and the UBI is $800. he receives a cheque for $800/month how much money would he get for that month and please show your math.
Like I said, it depends on how many other people are in the economy, and how much they are getting. That defines how much income we have, and therefore what tax burden we can place and redistribute. Without those other figures, your question is meaningless. UBI doesn't work if your economy consists of a single person.
If the context is the numbers that I have offered above (which are real numbers of average income for US in 2009), then I can give an answer, but first we need to adjust the inputs, because my numbers were about households, not individuals (I couldn't find statistics for individuals quickly). So let's assume that we're talking about a household of two, each of which is like you've described - $1K income, and $800 UBI per month. The combined yearly UBI of that household would then be $19,200/year. And their combined wages would be $24,000/year.
Now, to make this work with a flat tax rate in the economy described by my numbers, you would need a tax rate on non-UBI portion to be 35% for everyone. So this particular household would pay 35% of their wages (not of their total income including UBI check!) - so $8,400/year. And, as we have already computed above, they will receive an UBI checks totalling $19,200 in that year. So they will end up getting $10,800 on top of what they have earned, after we reconcile their taxes with their UBI checks. So they're getting an extra $900 per month together - so each one of them is getting an extra $450.
And no, this system does not imply that we send them the check for the difference - we collect taxes separately, and mail the checks separately, and it's reconciled by recipient. Income tax would be collected in the same way it it collected today for most - you'd simply get it subtracted from your paycheck by your employer. But now, in addition to the paycheck every month, which will be $X dollars smaller, you would also receive the UBI check every month, which will be $Y dollars bigger. Thus, the UBI system doesn't need to keep track of anything, and tax system doesn't need to keep track of anything that it already doesn't track today (i.e. your wages).
Here's the spreadsheet that I was using to make these computations. First two columns - yearly income, and number of households earning that income - are from this chart, as I have described before. The only other input is the desired UBI payout - this is the bold figure at the top. The rest of the table is automatically calculated from these two inputs, producing the tax rate on wages portion of income (at the bottom) that is necessary to produce a balanced UBI budget. The second-to-last column is how much net benefit every household in that income bracket receives from the UBI system. The last column is their total household income after all taxes are paid and UBI checks are cashed in.
Does that make sense now?
Right, Mincome is not strict UBI. But the observations from that experiment can be extrapolated.
There is no one definitive answer to your question with numbers - it's a dial that we can adjust depending on what exactly we want to get, and what kind of economic productivity we're talking about (so that we break even). So, for example, I could say that all of these guys pay, say, 10% off their non-UBI income - obviously that means that all of them are in the "subsidized" category, and the ones subsidizing them are people not on your list, who get $10k/month.
If you mean this as a constrained example where A, B and C are the entirety of our model economy, then we can easily calculate the precise break-even point. We need $3600 to split between the three guys for their checks, and we have $5000 of taxable income, so the flat tax rate on non-UBI portion would have to be 72%. Effective tax rate for the entire income including UBI check would be 33% for the first guy, 40% for the second, and 49% for the third - that's our smooth progressive taxation gradient. The first two guys would be getting more from the system than they receive - first one effectively gets $480 on top of what he earns by working, and second one gets $120. Third guy is paying more than he is receiving, by $600 - which is where those $480 and $120 come from.
Now, realistically, a 72% tax rate is probably going to be a significant demotivator to work for that extra money, so in that particular economic model (where the highest earner only earns a meager $2500), a UBI level of $1200 is not feasible. Now if we slash it in half, we'll get the much more realistic non-UBI tax rate of 36%, with effective tax rates for the three guys being 23%, 26% and 29% - the arrangement is the same otherwise, with the third guy subsidizing the first two, but all numbers are slashed in half, so the third guy gets to keep most of his $2500 earned wage, whereas before we were taking more than half of it.
This all works exactly the same in a real-world economy, just that the actual numbers are different - and more interesting to crunch. We'll need something like this to begin with - because this is for households rather than people, and income is yearly rather than monthly, I'll operate in these terms, as well (but obviously it's easy to translate that to monthly check and individuals if need be). Also, because I'm lazy, I'm just going to assume that everyone in each bracket is getting the lower number on that bracket (i.e. where it says $50-$75k, I'm counting them all as $50k; the lowest bracket is counted as $0, as if they don't earn anything, and the highest bracket is all counted as $200k). I eyeballed the bars on the chart and converted them to numbers, dropping millions (because we really only need to maintain proportions).
Now, with these numbers, let's assume that UBI is $30k per household (this is equivalent to two adults working full time and earning the federal minimum wage today). This translates to tax rate on non-UBI income of 56%. The effective tax rates with that arrangement range from 0% to 48% in a smooth gradient - $0 bracket pays 0%, $10k bracket pays 14%, $15k bracket pays 18% etc. The cut-off point for when a person starts paying into the system more than they are receiving from it is somewhere between $50k and $75k - household that earn $50k get $2.5k on top of that from UBI, when taxes owed are subtracted from UBI check, while households that earn $75k pay $11.5k into the system when subtracting taxes from the check. Households in the $200k bracket end up paying $80k into the system.
Adjusting the amount of the check is not going to change the break-even cut-off point (where your tax = your UBI check) - it only affects how steep the curve is above and below it (but still, at no point does the guy above that point ends up taking home less than the guy below it - so there's always a monetary reward for extra
So if one worked their guaranteed income check would decease based on how much they earned. This is not a check to everyone. If one earned over 2 times the Mincome level they would get no check at all.
There's a very easy way to test this - poll people on whether they're happy with their current level of income. Everyone who says "no" isn't suddenly going to start working less to maintain the same income level, if they can keep working the same and get more income.
Say someone is currently making mincome + 10%. Would they be taxed 91% so that they could get that money back in their monthly check?
No, of course not. We would simply tax the non-UBI part of their income. Someone who's making 10% extra would probably still get more than they receive. But, obviously, as the non-UBI part of one's income grows, so would the tax they have to pay, and at some point (where exactly depends on the UBI amount and the tax rate) they start paying more than they are receiving.
This is not really any different from the welfare approach today, except the transition between donors and recipients is a smooth gradient, rather than an abrupt cut-off (where a person can suddenly become ineligible for some payout if their income goes up by $100, say).
Why tax it when you are just going to give it back?
To simplify administration. If everyone gets the UBI check, you don't need to maintain a system to determine who gets it and who doesn't (and how much). You just mail out the checks uniformly, and collect the taxes uniformly (a further simplification here is moving to flat rate for income, since non-taxed UBI portion would effectively make it progressive, anyway). By adjusting the payout vs the tax rate, you effectively define how many people are subsidizing, and how many are being subsidized. This can thus be easily adjusted to be essentially the same as the current system to begin with (but with reduced administration costs), and then we can go from there and see where the sweet spot is.
What do you mean by "people who are currently above UBI"? UBI, by definition, applies to everyone. It's not "some plans" where everyone gets a monthly check. It's the very definition of UBI - it's what "universal" means.
UBI has been tried in some localized experiments, the most notable of which is Mincome in Canada. It did not show people massively refusing to work, regardless of their level. It did show that people were more likely to take time off to take care of the kids when they had them etc, but the overall economic effect was positive.
Logically speaking, your concerns don't make much sense, either. UBI is basic income - enough to live on, ideally, but you'd still need to be rather thrifty. Someone who is not getting any welfare today because they are not eligible, are, in most cases, already living better than that. The motivation to earn the extra money to cover that delta doesn't really go anywhere. Quitting the job and going to UBI would mean a drop in the quality of life. It's basically the same concern as "welfare queens" - a largely invented phenomenon, often used as a justification as politics, but not supported by any real world studies. There's no reason to believe that it would be any different here.
Where does the money come from? Same place as all welfare comes from today, of course - taxes. The fact that everyone receives it is immaterial - people above a certain income level simply end up paying more into the system than they are receiving from it, and it's that difference that effectively funds it for everyone else. This is, again, not really any different from the existing welfare system in any substantive way - except it's easier to manage, because instead of having long lists of people who are and aren't eligible, you achieve the same effective distribution of money by a careful alignment of UBI amount and tax rate.
The point is to replace the existing conditional welfare / safety net programs with UBI, for the most part. You will likely end up actually saving money, because a lot of the same people will be receiving the checks that already do now, but administrative overhead is much lower. And the wealthier guys who get those checks actually pay them back (and then some) with taxes - it needs some rejiggling of the tax brackets to get it right, but it's pretty simple math.
We already do this for many people already. It's called Social Security and Disability.
And unemployment insurance and minimum wage.
What many people don't realize is that we do kinda sorta have UBI already, between all these things. It's not quite universal, but extremely broad in practice, applying to most of population. And it's extremely expensive, because it consists of numerous welfare programs, laws (like minimum wage), taxation schemes etc, that were not really designed to work to produce that result, and so incur massive administrative and economic overhead to get there.
Once we have UBI, we no longer need minimum wage, most forms of welfare, and progressive income taxation. Think of how many government bureaucrats we can get rid of!
So you would rather pay more money to maintain the huge bureaucracy that is necessary for the existing complicated and expensive welfare system (with many bureaucrats and offices, whose task is basically determining and proving who's eligible and who's not)?
Socialism is not high taxes and welfare. A welfare state, like Netherlands or Sweden, is not automatically socialist. In Europe, they call this "social democracy".
Actual socialism is public, or shared, ownership of the means of production. Basically, if anyone (with enough money) can privately own, say, a factory in a country, and can sell it to anyone else willing to buy, then that is not a socialist country.
You're assuming that the current state of affairs is stable and won't result in a ruined economy if we don't touch it. Have you looked at the current levels, and, more importantly, trends for income and wealth inequality, social mobility, and private debt?
Basic income is exactly that - it's literally giving everyone the same amount of money, no qualifications required.
The reason why it works great as a welfare scheme in practice is because you simply take back the "extra" for those who don't need it in form of taxes. In fact, it lets you ditch progressive personal income taxation completely, and replace it with a flat rate that simply doesn't apply to the basic income check. Then you get taxed on the amount over and above that, which nicely translates to progressive taxation in practice; and with a bit of fidgeting with the rate, you can have the cutoff point (at which a person pays more in taxes than they receive from BI) at any place on the income chart that you want.
The huge benefit of this scheme is the simplicity. It completely replaces unemployment insurance and most other targeted welfare payouts, and removes the bureaucracy that is necessary to maintain them (especially as the list of requirements to "deserve" welfare grows longer and longer, as it tends to - drug testing etc). You don't need a large office to mail everyone a check in the same amount. It can also simplify taxes (and hence IRS) dramatically.
Coincidentally, this is why some more pragmatic libertarians, who recognize the need for some welfare / safety net in a stable society, are on board with this scheme - it is compatible with their ideal of a small, lean government.
Yes, Trump doesn't bother with laws and courts. He simply encourages his supporters to get violent against those he doesn't like, translating metaphorical punches into physical ones.
SCOTUS has also ruled in Yates v. US that political beliefs, even including belief in violent overthrow of existing government, are constitutionally protected free speech so long as they are "abstract doctrines". This applies to CCA in a very obvious and direct way, effectively rendering it unconstitutional outright, even if it wasn't the target of the case - just as Lawrence v. Texas applied to all sodomy laws everywhere in US, even though the case only involved one particular law.
Slander has actual measurable harm associated with the speech. Holding political opinions does not.
Sure, it's your right. But your motivations for exercising said right in any particular case may be driven by xenophobia, and in this case, they are.
Did you try to read the comment beyond that first sentence? It's fairly obvious that what I'm talking about is not some innate ability that men have, but rather different expectations that society sets for them. A better way to say it is that men are allowed to negotiate far more aggressively than women are, before aggressiveness starts having a detrimental effect on the outcome.
Yes, it could be because of that. The word that we have for it is "cultural gender bias".
You can think any kind of crap, that's up to you. It's when crap you think starts affecting how you treat others that SJW gestapo has a problem with that. Verstehst?