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Hey Y'all Let's Talk about Basic Income
Quid
Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
Definitely not a bananaRegistered User regular
Basic income is something I like very much like the idea of. From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
This is something that's becoming more a more important to consider as our country develops. The reality is that many people don't need to work as much as they used to. Basic income seeks to ensure that people who aren't working or are only partially employed still get income to live off of. Ideally with no obligations to be met.
This is something I'd love to see implemented one day. We're one of the richest countries in the world so there's no reason anyone shouldn't have enough for the essentials and a bit more. And every time this concept has been tested it's only resulted in that area making more money.
An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant, or citizen’s income) is a form of social security system in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
This is something that's becoming more a more important to consider as our country develops. The reality is that many people don't need to work as much as they used to. Basic income seeks to ensure that people who aren't working or are only partially employed still get income to live off of. Ideally with no obligations to be met.
This is something I'd love to see implemented one day. We're one of the richest countries in the world so there's no reason anyone shouldn't have enough for the essentials and a bit more. And every time this concept has been tested it's only resulted in that area making more money.
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That's not the point. The person's children receiving the inheritance don't "deserve" that money any more than the next person. There is zero reason to differentiate someone receiving inheritance and someone receiving guaranteed income from the government.
The cost of living already constantly increases due to inflation.
If the cost of living increases due to demand, well that means that there were a bunch of people who were not getting enough income to even meet the basic cost of living, and now they are. The US already has more then enough resources to make sure everyone can have a basic standard of living, and a lot of it goes to waste because people in poverty don't make enough money to afford it. Putting money in their hands so that they can afford it only makes the economy more efficient.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Don't have time to jump into specifics, but here's an article about an experiment in Canada. Might not assuage all issues because it's just one town instead of a national thing, but here ya go:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/12/23/mincome-in-dauphin-manitoba_n_6335682.html
I don't see how.
Seems to me people only working when and on what they want to is the symptom of an extremely successful society.
People aren't fungible. A person raised by someone with a large inheritance to bequeath has had different perspectives, values and education installed, and is more prepared to do something great with a large inheritance. Compare how many lottery winners go bankrupt very quickly versus people who inherit equally large sums of money.
What does this mean
is it nothing
Plenty of people squander their inheritance just as quickly as a lottery winner. And even if they are better with their money, so what? They still didn't do anything more to "earn" that money than someone who's attended some finance classes.
Once more, inheritance isn't any more "earned" than basic income.
That breaks down after about a generation or two. Great as a patch but hardly something to build a foundation of society on.
like use their incredible advantage and head start to amass even more capital because capital begets capital in a world where labor scarcity is not a controlling factor.
How do you know basic income breaks down after a generation or two when it's literally only been tested in pilot programs?
What is your solution for there being more people than jobs?
That doesn't make it "unearned".
Then please explain the difference that makes inheritance earned and basic income not.
318.9million *40*52*7.25= 4,809,012,000,000 - almost 5 trillion dollars a year. The total annual expenditure of the US federal government is less than 3.7 billion.
For the purpose of discouraging work, which would almost certainly have a depressing effect on the economy.
Its not a feasible idea. Yeah we're the richest country in the world. Most of that is because people work. Its not a birthright.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Money is a medium of exchange. How much money you hold is a measure of how much of our economic output or economic capital you can purchase in the market.
If you give a person enough money to meet a basic standard of living, you're giving him the opportunity to purchase that slice of economic output necessary for that standard from the market.
The government deciding on who gets what and directly giving the person the economic output instead of just giving money wastes a ton of resources on deciding who gets what when as a capitalist society we already have a mechanism for that decision making - the market.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
That would be a reason not to implement poorly planned basic income.
Most programs gradually decrease money received as a person earned money. IE Canada's model that decreased benefits 50 cents for every dollar earned.
People being paid to do so.
Someone built up an inheritance for the purpose of bestowing it on to future generations of their kin, possibly well beyond the immediate benefactor. I'm seeing this more as a "passing the torch" type thing rather than the "free money" thing you are painting it as.
It also gives them an opportunity to be completely awful at managing their money.
It's still just free money. It doesn't matter if it's from the government or their parents. You haven't shown what that person has done to earn it any more than the next person.
This is not a closed loop. It expects a person will eventually begin to earn their own money. What if that doesn't start happening fast enough?
That's how a great society ends.
Crippled.
Those people weren't earning money to begin with. So I'm not really following your logic here.
Because now it's the entire government's problem. Not the individual.
Taking care of the poor is the government's problem. This is a method of solving that problem that has been proven to work in every test program. Every time it's been implemented the local economy improved. And you've yet to provide actual reasoning as to why you think it wouldn't.
It is one of the government's problems.
That doesn't mean the government should go bankrupt trying to solve it.
No test program has been run long enough or on a large enough scale to show how eventually basic income breaks down the entire society. I'm considering programming a simulation.
People will spend their money on what they need to survive, until they're past the point of worrying about their basic survival.
To argue against that, is to argue against pretty much every economic study on the impact of welfare programs on the economy ever done in history.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
From an old [chat] post in which TL DR argues for basic income.
So the math isn't as bonkers as it might look at first blush, and the reduction of labor supply is focused exactly where you'd hope it would be.
The 'less people will work' question is somewhat circular, though, since mincome attempts to address the question "How are people to maintain a dignified existence as demand for labor decreases?" Capitalism attempts to answer this with perpetual growth, which is a logical impossibility.
Mincome can also be interpreted as allowing markets to continue allocating resources while enabling the government to fulfill its obligation to the public welfare. The state could just as easily dispense food and build public housing, but we already have systems in place to innovate, produce, and distribute these things so it is more efficient to just give people a refundable tax credit and let them choose for themselves how to spend it.
How does it break down society?
People are not satisfied with the basic standard of living. They will work so that they can live better lives, and give their children a better future, if that work is available and pays enough money to be worth the effort.
What is does end is abusive employer/employee relationships where the employer works the employee to the bone under the threat of cutting off the income the employee, and possibly the employee's family, needs to survive. Labor actually becomes a fair market instead of one operating under the threat of distitution.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
People are irrational and not always well educated. Some money will, but not all of it. Money spent wrongly is more damaging than more money spent on the right things.
I feel like this idea assumes a premise I'm not prepared to grant, namely that the resources in the US belong to all the citizens of the US, and they're just not distributed properly.
Most of the the resources in the US belong to the individual people in the US, not to the citizens as a whole.
No it isn't. If a person spend all the money he needs to survive, then spends the money on random other stuff, that does not hurt anyone.
The essentials for that person have been met, everything else is a luxury. By definition the luxuries are non-essential, so it doesn't matter who ends up with them.
What each person considers to be essential will vary from person to person, but at the very least it will consist of food, water, and shelter.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I feel like it doesn't matter what they did. The money belongs to someone, and they want to make sure it is given to someone else. It's not really our business whether the child deserves it according to your definition, or mine! It's not our money.
Those resources are up for sale on the market.
Some of those resources are perishable, like food, and some portion of it goes unsold because people don't have the money to buy it.
If someone is given money to buy that food for themselves because they need it, then everyone wins.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Maybe people today. But I'm thinking on a longer timeline. Millennials are already having less kids and spend less on material goods, opting more to have great experiences and memories they can post all over social media and make people jealous. Following generations will be even more like that.
The rest of your post is getting off topic.