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Hey Y'all Let's Talk about Basic Income
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And yet despite that virtually every person arguing against it here is making that exact argument. It's funny how much it looks like the same argument that gets deployed against every social program ever. It's almost like the real issue is a bunch of Calvanist/Protestant cultural bullshit that is indiscriminatingly applied to anything that doesn't just shit on the poor because if you give the poor help, they will be lazy or something.
PantsB's cost argument is the only one not explicitly stemming from this crap.
Good to know. It is still 50% greater than the national minimum wage.
It has to start somewhere. Most major social changes are started at a city/state level and can take decades to filter up to the federal level.
I fully acknowledge that it's not perfect nor representative of the US as a whole. But I think it's better than just having hypotheticals to look at.
Makes me wish someone would have created an automatic burger assembling machine already.
Well, if you haven't looked recently, grown adults are taking those jobs not because they want to--I don't know what you're insinuating here, slack off?--but because they can't find any better jobs.
Also $15/hr in Seattle certainly isn't "making a career". It's more "just scraping by".
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I don't know, what is wrong with you?
Cause all your posts in this thread and the one that spawned it can basically be summed up as disgust and contempt for people with not alot of money.
Why would someone make a career out of a menial job? Because they have nothing else.
I don't think you'll find much to enjoy here, then. This discussion has gone with "dignified existence for workers is an intrinsically worthy goal" as a premise. If you'd like to start "A God Damned Separate Thread For Judging Those Without Successful Careers", by all means feel free.
So I'll agree there are some major implications, but I'd say those are going to be a mix of direct economic impacts and indirect economic effects, that are a result of non-economic implications of such a change. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of shitty places like Wal-Mart, that would go under, if people didn't have to work at them. I also think that would free up time for people to get better educated and to really start questioning some of the stupid stuff we do.
I'd rather have a basic income out in the open, then some of the current BS we have now. I want to gag anytime some rich CEO proclaims they are self made men, while downplaying all the perks they've managed to get, by playing the system.
I also laugh at the whole, "but people will stop working, if they don't have to work for the basic." The thing is most people won't be content with the basics. The other thing is employment gives people a means to achieve social interaction with individuals they would not otherwise interact with via hobby. Also if the job is one hat someone mostly enjoys, then it also gives that person some mental engagement. I've been unemployed and if the basics are equivalent to what I had during my period of unemployment, I can guarantee you that most will get bored of not working or doing volunteer work.
I may be wrong, but I thought that some of the current social welfare programs in place in the U.S. - SNAP comes first to mind - had set restrictions on how the money or assistance provided could be spent or used.
If someone was able to hold down a job and manage themselves before this hypothetical change takes place, I'm less worried about them post-mincome than someone who is on a number of assistance programs that provides guidelines and rules for how to manage their resources, which is suddenly replaced by a system that drops off a check and nothing else.
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
In what way? Are you describing a hypothetical involving ignorance or malice?
Not disgust. Frustration.
Frustration that because society didn't invest in these people a little more upfront we're now going to have to come up with shit like basic income and high minimum wages to support them for the rest of their lives.
the funny thing about a message board is it records what you wrote dude
But that's not the reason we are doing it at all.
I mean, this thread spawned from the automation replacing jobs thread. And even you admit those jobs are not the ones you are talking about here, so....
The service industry is America's new Factory jobs
do you think factory workers had a harder or more complex job in the 1960s than a wal-mart employee has today?
Because Wal-Mart, Mcdonalds etc are beating the shit out of those old factories for how profitable they are, and yet those jobs paid their workers enough money to live
It totally is a good goal!
We don't have to give everybody in the country a basic income to achieve it though.
I suspect the net cost will be lower than existing welfare programs once you factor in new revenues, and the benefits to the local economy and the educational system would be profound
maybe like, Philly or Baltimore or something, we'd have to do it for a few years though
edit: I don't think it would cost anywhere near $2 trillion a year. Taxes could go up substantially with the "neutral point" (new taxes equaling $10,000) being somewhere in the 6 figures, but someone who makes $50k say, might get $10k but have to pay $7.5k in more in taxes (spitballing)
It's just work.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I don't think that can be said across the board.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
That's neither universally true nor really relevant, employment as a whole is safer and less physically demanding than jobs of the past
what I meant was that service work has taken the place of factory work for unskilled labor in the US. A 30 year old guy with a HSED in 1960 could expect to make enough money to buy a car and support his kids working at a factory with no experience, today he couldn't even support himself without government assistance working for Target
They aren't "kids jobs" anymore, the data says as much, the average employee is not 17 years old
That's cause factory work and all its liability is disappearing, therefore adults are swarming into low income service jobs not designed to give them blue collar careers
There's a lot of other reasons and many are in this article I read
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
No job was ever designed for that. We didn't invent factory work so people would have a low skill decently paying job, people did the jobs available to them, and the people working those jobs and the government saw fit to make them livable and decent jobs to have. Old jobs are disappearing and new jobs are not appearing with the frequency required to make up for the loss, so it's becoming increasingly clear we're going to have to do something to make up the difference and help people live while they try to find something new to do. Hence, a BIG.
I'm sure factory work was regarded as a desperate dead (literally) end job like fast food way before it had this infrastructure. Now it sort of is again, but for a while the need was there for society to allow these people to live better, not out of the goodness of our hearts but because we needed cars and skyscrapers and we didn't wanna do it. Do we really need fast food so much? Why are fast food employees so primitively provided for then? The exploitative prices are kind of the point, otherwise just make an egg salad sandwich and leave service dining to the rich
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It doesn't matter if we desperately need fast food, what matters is people need to have livable wages doing the only work available to them. Workers are now, as in the past, so poorly provided for because companies can afford to get away with not providing for them and the government more often than not backs them up and allows them to get away with it. Now, as before, the government needs to take steps to ensure people are provided for and can earn a living wage or have a safety net to keep them from becoming homeless on the streets if, as is becoming more and more common, they can not find a job at all.
From that perspective, I think neither popular culture nor the employers themselves or the law has caught up with how low-level service jobs have changed. You used to expect, at least popularly, that these positions were for kids. Factory work was man's work, fast-food was a child's. Based on pay and prestige.
But that's completely changed now, even if our perception of it hasn't. The jobs many, especially the older generations, think of as existing for low-skill low-education people just aren't there anymore. It's all service jobs. And right now they pay shit and are culturally valued as shit too.
That article Paladin links above it pretty good at talking about this sort of thing. It's a tangential point to what I'm saying above, but men most of all have not adapted well to the change in the type of work no-education low-skills can get you. And it's linked to those expectations and cultural valuations.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Screw that. Someone needs to make burgers if we want to have burgers. Don't shit on people providing a service.
It's not even the money really.
If there were a guaranteed income I would still be going back into my career field after college. I would do it for free if we were to find ourselves in the situation that a standard of living is guaranteed.
Edited for clarity.
It did work for other forms of basic employment, truck driving, construction, dock workers etc can still offer decent lifestyles (at least, in places that haven't been thoroughly gutted by the republican anti labor agenda)
The country doesn't have like 15 million of those jobs sitting around waiting to be given to fast food workers, the construction industry still hasn't rebounded from the housing crisis. Factory work being shipped overseas left a massive void in middle class America that a huge portion of the country doesn't want to see filled because of their inherent disdain for minimum wage workers.
the attitude of the country toward fast food workers is not so different from its attitude toward factory workers before that was turned from shit tier slave wages to an honest profession that was the backbone of a blue collar american dream
or retail/grocery store employees
still waiting on this simulation tbh
It's needed for food, housing, electricity, internet, small luxuries, etc. I don't know why you keep ignoring large parts of the idea and what it's supposed to accomplish.
or right around the time we hit 95% unemployment as the rotting cities have been abandoned and the citizenry struggles to forage off the land, the economy being all robots buying things made by other robots with a small group of trillionares
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/beta-universal-basic-income-calculator
direct link: https://91990d906718a1b66896d27b38cf3179775d4c68.googledrive.com/host/0B68HCFLtgK_QTHRGWGZBTkRNQjQ/UBI_calculator.html
is it just the guarantee that it's yours forever no matter what you do with it? making it unlike the dole in that you can openly declare your intention to never work again and the money will still roll in
this is pretty neat
Really though, fast food jobs are problematic. Without some kind of engineering, it's really hard to imagine an economy where a large number of people are fast food workers. What are we doing as a nation to get the goods and services we even need for those fast food chains to be fast food chains? People can't take these jobs seriously, because we don't want people doing them. To admit that they make up a significant enough portion of our jobs that we need to talk about them, is to more or less admit that our economy is vastly different from anything we like, and from something most of us can understand. To even be discussing better conditions for fast food workers is to open up an entire line of discussion about what we are doing as a nation for our economy, and it's a whole bunch of stuff that makes sense to few people and makes a lot of us angry. People want jobs that produce something, the idea that each adult can't work in some profession where they produce something we as a society recognize as valuable is some heavy stuff a lot of people are not ready to deal with and probably never will be.
People understand farming, they understand factories, they look at those things and see their necessity. Same with doctors, lawyers, and engineers. But they look at fast food workers, and retail workers and they see a bunch of social lepers. Having a real conversation about the welfare of people who perform the functions of these social lepers, is something people don't want to do because they might end up admitting at some point that they aren't really any better, and that's really important to a lot of peoples thinking. They need to be better than someone, and in the realm of jobs that someone is a fast food or retail workers.
More or less. It allows for far more people to do what they want and forces businesses to pay what menial jobs are actually worth rather than relying on the threat of starvation.
More the ignorance part. From what I've read in the thread so far, this kind of program would supersede or replace a chunk of social welfare programs already in place to assist people with few resources for food and income. I was just thinking that, if we replace programs that offer money/food along with guidance on how to best utilize those things, and replace it with a bigger share of money but no guidance, we could see a rise in the number of people that weren't even scraping by before - homeless, mentally ill - taking the money that is supposed to keep their heads just above water, make maybe one or two mistakes with it, and then they don't even have enough to do that.
As an admittedly-anecdotal example, my current apartment in my area(suburban Chicago) is widely held by both myself and my friends/family as a good deal. It's a modest size one-bedroom. Currently the rent is $9000 a year. If we assume that we are sticking with the $10K per year figure given earlier, that's really not leaving people much. And if someone receives this amount of money, and in a moment of weakness splurges on a small luxury, then they have almost nothing left for their time period.
And at some point, I argue that people should be held responsible for their decisions and to live with the consequences. A basic income just changes so much about our cultural landscape that I think it needs to change where we paint that line. (Also re-reading what I've said so far, since it's early and I'm probably not being very clear, I can see an argument that depending on where a person is, a basic income could get less for a person than in other places which is also something to consider)
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
So you're saying, if instead of giving people $5 a day for food, we give them ~$450 cash every two weeks
they might starve to death