Using the U.S. As a baseline shows that Labor force participation rates are higher in countries with stronger social safety nets (Scandinavia of course, as always when you want to pick apart a conservative argument). So the numbers show that there is no risk in paying people "not to work". In fact there seem to be few better way to get them working. The U.S. way of work or starve certainly doesn't work as well
I'm on mobile so I can't post the links but both bls.gov and data.oecd.org showed the se thing. I'll post links when I get home
I firmly believe the root of America's social problems is our laser focus on whether our fellow citizens deserve what they're getting
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about welfare in this country, welfare was a penny out of each dollar of the paycheck before Clinton gutted it. We spend as much building piles of tanks for the Saudis as we did on the old welfare
but hey a hypothetical black woman somewhere got money she didn't deserve
lets ignore all the suffering that is a result of this mindset, and the fact that corporate welfare is several orders of magnitude larger
which kind of goes hand in hand with punishment, we judge other people and once judged they deserve horrible things. If you aren't fit you should starve or go homeless, if you aren't fit it doesn't matter they're locking you in solitary because you're an unperson
override367 on
+13
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Also I identify as a moderate, I am in no way a liberal.
Also, this. I'm a registered Republican and tend to vote such on my local elections as those candidates typically are the ones with the most pragmatic functional governance experience. On a state and federal level, I vote for whoever demonstrates the most rational and functional campaign promises.
I haven't seen a conservative at the federal level since Bob Dole actually offer functional policy as part of their platform, and constantly lowering taxes makes it so we constantly have budget shortfalls and weakening economic prospects. Siphoning all the money to the top 1% doesn't a health country make (even for the top 1%). Eventually that is what becomes unsustainable and you get another French Revolution once bread and circuses aren't sufficiently distracting of the wealth disparity. Stability, and thus profit and success for the upper classes, always comes when you have a motivated and empowered lower class with spending capital. The entire wealth pyramid since Reagan has been focused upon capital gains and stock market based wealth... which means nothing when each of those companies eventually can't find customers to boost their profits. Things like Basic Income stimulate the lower classes to have more purchasing power which directly translates into greater economic value (the oft cited $5 dollars of food stamps -> $9 local stimulus).
Again, while Basic Income is generally speaking a better low-overhead and high-impact entitlement program than a massive hodgepodge of confusing mini programs that are poorly articulated and poorly advertised, I still feel infrastructure spending is a better short term (now to 20 years) ideal than implementing something like this. The Bush stimulus checks back in 08 did greater immediate good to economies than any of the top percentage tax cuts Bush put into effect (there are loads of academic papers on this), because when you cut capital gains people do exactly what Nspb said he would do: keep it in a trust and live off the dividends. The bottom 60% of the income bracket immediately spends this money more often than not because they have something they ~need~ but can't afford, which translates into more commerce, more money for business owners, and more taxes for local, state, and federal government to use towards sustaining those programs. People get richer at all levels, society is generally better and more optimistic culturally, and you get a global boom like in the late 90s.
Would that boom be long term sustainable? It more depends on how willing legislators would be to maintaining it than a flaw in and of itself. The New Deal programs largely burned out not because they were unsustainable but because legistlators cut them to become unsustainable.
IMO GBI is the perfect marrying of conservative and liberal values, it's makes functional sense, and it benefits the majority of the citizenry (the poor because obviously, the middle class because of the growth of businesses that largely employ them, the rich because of the new business opportunities, it just doesn't benefit most of the very wealthy really much at all), it reduces the size of government, and it solves several serious economic issues the country will be faced with going forward
It is the free market approach to welfare
but then again I don't see conservatives ever supporting it, because one would think they'd support food stamps since they get us more back then they cost and they are a huge plus to local business
override367 on
+5
Options
That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
if GBI was a thing I'd probably go back to tutoring at the college for $8 an hour or whatever it is they're paying now since Walker cut the budget
I'd rather live on a low paying job + a GBI and do something I get fulfillment out of than what is actually going to happen
eg: graduating and getting a job in an office somewhere and hating my life forever
So why don't we just have a government program instead where people can apply for basic income to supplement their income if they are working one of these low-paying but still important jobs?
Why are you so concerned about someone who doesn't work getting money?
It's a dangerous precedent.
And "slippery slope" a pretty dangerous logical fallacy you are using there.
The overall issue for me, is can the program be made workable and sustainable. It is incredibly hard to estimate the impact of BI or NIT. Do yourself a favor, do a quick thought experiment can you come up with a list of issues that will need to be solved under BI? Can you come up with some potential traps we as a society have to avoid with BI? How do you adjust for some of these pitfalls?
Be honest with yourself here, don't just focus on "BI will be great because I can quit my soul crushing job and earn less money but still be OK financially!".
The largest issue I can think? There's going to be a glut of jobs that will find it very difficult to find employees for.
But the free market is great, there may just be enough money in the upper echelons to free up so you can have a janitor clean your hospital again.
And essential, perhaps government jobs can be subsidized federally by taking off some of your GBI tax
+5
Options
VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
If we're talking about dangerous precedents, I would say the lie that's being parroted in this thread and by many politicians that rich people worked for every penny to their name was a pretty dangerous precedent. It ignores that the tax code has more or less been written to cater to their needs, for a start.
Brainstorming list - not all these are negative things, just things that could be impacted:
Warning mind dump:
Cost of living - not the same in all areas - BI wont be enough for some people to continue to live in certain areas and would require them to move.
Cost of living - in some areas a BI would be enough to live comfortably with no job and not produce anything as an individual.
Abolishment of minimum wage
Abolishment of food stamps
Abolishment of school lunch programs
Worker shortages in certain job sectors
Cost of program too high, how is the program funded, what is cut, what new taxes are introduced?
Sustainability issues if too many people quit higher paying jobs for things they want to do. Money in < money out
A movement to abolish social security and backlash associated with that
Rich individuals living off of inheritance getting a BI and not working
Issues with fraud, individuals claiming to be multiple individuals - how do we defend against this?
How do you correctly track the homeless and make sure they get their BI?
Do incarcerated people currently in prison get a BI?
How do you effectively encourage the populous to seek the highest paying job the individual can get in the field the individual wants?
try to come up with a list of impacts not just the greatest. I generally support the idea of BI, but how do we implement it and remain fair to the populous? How can we make sure it is a sustainable program for the foreseeable future?
Cost of Living - Can be means tested. We don't need people to produce anything, that's not the point of the system.
Abolishment of minimum wage - Why? It needs to pay more than GBI or else no one will do it. I guess you could call that abolishment
Abolishment of food stamps - I don't have a problem with this, buy food with your income now.
Abolishment of school lung programs - Why? If it's really a stickler, just ramp down the GBI payout for dependencies to cover that
Worker shortages in certain job sectors - then pay more, free market doesn't give a fuck. If you don't supply, you won't have demand.
Cost of program too high - probably the biggest issue, let's look at converting capital gains to normal income tax and remove the SSI income restriction first. Then maybe set the upper limit on income tax in the 80's or 90s.
A movement to abolish SSI and backlash associated with that - GBI is basically a form of SSI. Yeah you didn't pay into it and that's how it's different, tough beans. Just make sure the minimum GBI payout is higher than the max SSI payout. I don't give a fuck about boomers, they created this situation, they can fucking suffer.
Rich individuals living off inheritance getting BI - falls under the capital gains, you can't just get wealth from your parents. $10k checks already set off a ton of warning bells, and there'd be no way to really get around this. Tax "gifts" to family over a certain amount a year at astronomical amounts. Maybe put a lifetime limit on this stuff. $1(adjust this with inflation) mill USD in cash or equity is all you get. After that it's 95% tax rate. I don't even give a shit.
Issues with fraud - how do we deal with this now? Create a federal ID system similar to SSI. Drop ship them to everyone overnight.
Tracking the homeless - That one has me stumped, have shelters/food-banks set it up and get them set up with a basic bank account. Track all the SSIs in the US and create a federal banking system and give them an account and dump it there. I'm sure there's a better system though.
Do incarcerated people get it - No, it's covering their care in prison. They will continue getting it when/if they ever get out. Maybe give them a portion. If they have dependents, set up a system so that dependents can claim a portion of those numbers. I don't really have a problem with them getting it though.
How do you effectively encourage people to seek the highest paying jobs - This isn't even an issue. Why should it be? We still need garbage men and plumbers and teachers and scientists. People will search for shit for themselves. Keep in mind the "encouragement" is basically that you have not a whole lot of "spending money" left over. If they're super frugal, oh well. This comment is coming from the assumption that there's no value added by a youtuber entertaining millions, or, someone who volunteers at the food bank or animal shelter 8 hours a day. Or the comedian.
In terms of things I'd be worried about for implementing this system it'd be the worker shortages in certain areas because I know how stingy CEOs can get with a bottom line. You're probably going to see a vast shift from mega conglomerates to small businesses again.
Walmart will probably break up because it's just too expensive to cover the entire US. And then the return of local places will come back. Free market wins again.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
+2
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
I see no reason that minimum wage would be abolished by BI, if anything the opposite. It would become necessary to set a minimum wage ( likely higher) to make sure that BI would actually have set thresholds for throttling down.
School lunch programs and food stamps don't directly fit in here and serve a different, and complementary purpose to BI. I would say they would stay, but I could see politicians of the negative breed trying to cut them through it. Functionally BI would likely ensure more benefits than food stamps or school lunches alone and could be throttled in it's quantity to help leverage those costs out of school budgets and onto a centralized budget.
Rich individuals living off inheritance likely wouldn't get BI if they are getting capital gains, as that likely would be considered as income here.
Homeless and prisoner issues are interesting and I have no idea how you would address those. The other issues are also big deals, but some of them are more means of tweaking after implementation than immediate issues (like cost of living). Housing markets adjust based upon how much they can get away with. If prices rise to the point where service workers cant live or reliably get to work, the housing costs will fall as businesses scramble to attract employees.
Basic income is something I like very much like the idea of. From Wikipedia:
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.
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.
Does someone have a clearer rationale?
Yeah you bolded it. As much as they used to. That is not the same as never working at all.
Basic income is something I like very much like the idea of. From Wikipedia:
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.
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.
Does someone have a clearer rationale?
Yeah you bolded it. As much as they used to. That is not the same as never working at all.
OK. Why is that good and why would the be better achieved by a higher minimum wage?
We can get rid of the minimum wage with a GBI because nobody's going to work for $2 an hour with a GBI unless the job is something they find super fulfilling
in which case, why not?
I mean I guess Walmart could start paying half as much but they'd have a real hell of a time finding enough employees
One of the greatest benefits of GBI is that it will put negotiating power back in the hands of labor at the bottom. Which is one of the reasons I scoff at the idea we must force everyone on GBI to work or something, part of the benefit is that it will force employers to stop being such shit heads that work people to death for no pay! If employment is forced, that gives employers all the power they have now
How do you effectively encourage people to seek the highest paying jobs - This isn't even an issue. Why should it be? We still need garbage men and plumbers and teachers and scientists. People will search for shit for themselves. Keep in mind the "encouragement" is basically that you have not a whole lot of "spending money" left over. If they're super frugal, oh well. This comment is coming from the assumption that there's no value added by a youtuber entertaining millions, or, someone who volunteers at the food bank or animal shelter 8 hours a day. Or the comedian.
No it is not. And I would ask that you don't make these assumptions. I am perfectly able to tell you what I think about something, just ask. I think a youtuber is adding value, if a youtuber has millions of subscribers, they are adding a LOT of value. Someone volunteering at a food bank is adding value yes, the issue with doing pure volunteer work though is that if too many people do this it creates financial stress on the BI system.
How do you deal with people who are able to work but choose not to? People who are supported by others such as spouses that are living off of someone elses income, would they get a BI? Or would there be limits imposed based on spousal income? If someone's spouse is earning 100k+/year should they earn a BI if they are a stay at home father or mother? How much additional cost would that be if the BI system allowed that? How do we handle people living together forever instead of under a formal marriage contract so they could take the BI income for themselves?
The abolishment of assistance is going to come up under BI because of the cost issue. and with BI do we need that type of assistance anymore? Wouldn't BI be enough to cover basic necessities? Isn't part of the point of BI to reduce government overhead managing hundreds of different programs?
How do you effectively encourage people to seek the highest paying jobs - This isn't even an issue. Why should it be? We still need garbage men and plumbers and teachers and scientists. People will search for shit for themselves. Keep in mind the "encouragement" is basically that you have not a whole lot of "spending money" left over. If they're super frugal, oh well. This comment is coming from the assumption that there's no value added by a youtuber entertaining millions, or, someone who volunteers at the food bank or animal shelter 8 hours a day. Or the comedian.
No it is not. And I would ask that you don't make these assumptions. I am perfectly able to tell you what I think about something, just ask. I think a youtuber is adding value, if a youtuber has millions of subscribers, they are adding a LOT of value. Someone volunteering at a food bank is adding value yes, the issue with doing pure volunteer work though is that if too many people do this it creates financial stress on the BI system.
How do you deal with people who are able to work but choose not to? People who are supported by others such as spouses that are living off of someone elses income, would they get a BI? Or would there be limits imposed based on spousal income? If someone's spouse is earning 100k+/year should they earn a BI if they are a stay at home father or mother? How much additional cost would that be if the BI system allowed that? How do we handle people living together forever instead of under a formal marriage contract so they could take the BI income for themselves?
The abolishment of assistance is going to come up under BI because of the cost issue. and with BI do we need that type of assistance anymore? Wouldn't BI be enough to cover basic necessities? Isn't part of the point of BI to reduce government overhead managing hundreds of different programs?
I'll tackle these:
How do you deal with people who are able to work but choose not to? - You don't. Work isn't mandatory.
People who are supported by others such as spouses that are living off of someone elses income, would they get a BI? - No. Money and goods over a certain value gifted to others are treated as income. It's already this way in the tax law.
Or would there be limits imposed based on spousal income? - Yes, if married. You'd also keep stuff like the married tax break status.
If someone's spouse is earning 100k+/year should they earn a BI if they are a stay at home father or mother? - No, because you file as married just as you would for taxes.
How much additional cost would that be if the BI system allowed that? - No idea.
How do we handle people living together forever instead of under a formal marriage contract so they could take the BI income for themselves? - You offset it with the marriage tax break and other laws, just like we currently do with income taxes.
Why not just cut a check to everyone and tax it away from people who ended up picking up a job?
I'm sure this is not what you actually meant to say, but boy is it an unfortunate Freudian slip. Seeing as it goes right to the weakness of a large UBI.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Basic income is something I like very much like the idea of. From Wikipedia:
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.
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.
Does someone have a clearer rationale?
Yeah you bolded it. As much as they used to. That is not the same as never working at all.
OK. Why is that good and why would the be better achieved by a higher minimum wage?
The whole reason this thread got started is the realization that it's getting cheaper and easier to replace people with automation. Which means unless wages continue to drop means jobs for people are going to become fewer. So raising the minimum wage isn't going to cut it. In fact it'll just make automation all the more attractive when available. A higher minimum wage job is meaningless when those jobs aren't there. Meanwhile a guaranteed income ensures people can work what's currently considered part time and go through long bouts of unemployment much more easily.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
UBI absolutely is welfare. And as for your last question what exactly is your plan for when there are more people than jobs?
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
if GBI was a thing I'd probably go back to tutoring at the college for $8 an hour or whatever it is they're paying now since Walker cut the budget
I'd rather live on a low paying job + a GBI and do something I get fulfillment out of than what is actually going to happen
eg: graduating and getting a job in an office somewhere and hating my life forever
So why don't we just have a government program instead where people can apply for basic income to supplement their income if they are working one of these low-paying but still important jobs?
Why are you so concerned about someone who doesn't work getting money?
It's a dangerous precedent.
And this would be another example of the same.
In the end, it's always about this vague idea that someone is getting something they don't deserve.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
Look wouldnt it be better to just ignore the problems that come with automation and continue on as if it wont exist?
I am curious how much people will have to suffer and what the tipping point will be in the future to spur actual conversation on the national level.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
It goes beyond that. Because "enough jobs" is itself an assumption rooted in a particular conception of what society must look like.
The actual question would be more "Do we even need everyone to work a full-time job?".
I said I would post this when I got home, so here goes. Several posters opposing UBI have brought up the notion that this will somehow make people not work, or that proponents want less people to work etc. The basic idea behind these objections is that if people aren't forced to work, they will simply not work (also known as the American approach). So I compared labor participation rates between the US and Scandinavian countries since it is commonly agreed that the countries of tall, handsome blondes have very strong social safety nets (basically these countries allows people to not work and still live, meaning it is the very situation opponents to UBI say will make people not work).
According to the BLS, labor participation for 2012 (the latest date):
USA: 63.7 (Average LFPR 2009-2012: 64.48)
Sweden: 65.2 (Average LFPR 2009-2012: 64.95) (No other Scandinavian country was listed)
Also:
Wikipedia's (yes I know) Employment-to-population ratio have the following numbers for each country's employment population ratio in 2013 (definition from the article: "This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country's working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.")
So in short, not needing to work does not make people sit at home all day doing nothing. In fact it shows the opposite. And the explanation really is simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs. UBI takes care of the first step, pretty much takes care of the second, and strongly enables the third. So we are left with esteem and self-actualization, both which can be realized by working, creating, problem-solving etc.
There are several things to discuss and question about UBI, people not working is not one of them
I mean, I do want people working less. I don't have any data in front of me, but it would not surprise me in the least if average hours worked per week went up ever since they instituted the 40 hr/wk baseline, despite workplace automation, which should be directly opposed to raw man hours required to run an operation, follows a very similar slope.
if GBI was a thing I'd probably go back to tutoring at the college for $8 an hour or whatever it is they're paying now since Walker cut the budget
I'd rather live on a low paying job + a GBI and do something I get fulfillment out of than what is actually going to happen
eg: graduating and getting a job in an office somewhere and hating my life forever
So why don't we just have a government program instead where people can apply for basic income to supplement their income if they are working one of these low-paying but still important jobs?
Why are you so concerned about someone who doesn't work getting money?
It's a dangerous precedent.
And "slippery slope" a pretty dangerous logical fallacy you are using there.
I don't even know who it's a dangerous precedent for, since GBI is basically EVERYBODY getting money, so there's nobody to set a precedent FOR.
I find this is a very common thing about conservative social policies that makes me want to kill them: people are so concerned about the morality of the policy, whether there's any possible loophole, that they end up spending more money watching the money than the amount of money they're actually watching.
(Also, all these cracks about people staying at home and just playing video games are super-ironic, given the number of professional gamers and Twitch streamers there are now. Again, the precedents have been set already.)
Basically: in society 20% of people will work hard, 20% will barely work and the other 60% will do what they have to.
The thing is if you take the entire farm and cut it in half, the ants redistribute in a similar fashion. Once "lazy" ants becoming normal or hard working, etc.
This works for people as well. A good 80% of any given population will want to work in some capacity.
If people can shift around to form smaller working communities and such then the actual numbers will probably pan out to more people working on "something" though it may not be what you idealize as proper work all the time.
I don't really feel like anyone should decide what is right or wrong when it comes to work.
The gains at the community level of everyone having money to spend seems like a net positive, as long as predatory rent, utility and credit practices are dealt with.
Because humans are shitty to each other, especially when people can't fight back.
I said I would post this when I got home, so here goes. Several posters opposing UBI have brought up the notion that this will somehow make people not work, or that proponents want less people to work etc. The basic idea behind these objections is that if people aren't forced to work, they will simply not work (also known as the American approach). So I compared labor participation rates between the US and Scandinavian countries since it is commonly agreed that the countries of tall, handsome blondes have very strong social safety nets (basically these countries allows people to not work and still live, meaning it is the very situation opponents to UBI say will make people not work).
...
There are several things to discuss and question about UBI, people not working is not one of them
Let me be more precise, since what counts as working is a fuzzy and arbitrary concept. A UBI will result in drastic drop in the amount of human labor devoted to economically beneficial goods and services. In fact, many people will leave the workforce, observational evidence of Scandinavia notwithstanding, but let's assume they don't.
What happens then? Well, let's take whoever it was a page earlier who wants to go tutor college for $8 an hour. The reason why he's going to wind up in an office job instead is that the value he provides there is a whole lot higher than the value he provides helping brittle premeds do their homework. The difference in value is so stark that, from an economic perspective, an entire laborer's worth of work disappears even though he still counts in workforce participation rates. The same holds if he decides to stay home and do letsplays, which indeed many more people will do because you no longer have to attract enough followers to live on. Instead of people doing unpleasant stuff like mopping public restrooms and garbage collection, they'll be engaged in self-actualization, or simply hobbies with enough online followers to pretend that they're doing something worthwhile.
Perhaps you're thinking we can just raise the wages of garbage collectors (already pretty high, let me note) to solve the problem. But as you're imposing this UBI, you're collecting the income tax to pay for it. That's the very essence of a UBI: to redistribute returns from labor from the worker to society. This sharply limits your ability to incentivize work. How much of course depends on the size of the UBI.
Wages signal the value of the work to be performed and the difficulty of getting people who can do it to do it. A UBI muffles that signal. The result is people not doing the unfulfilling but necessary work that allows modern high standards of living.
This doesn't mean a UBI shouldn't ever exist. It means that when thinking about a UBI, the important question is (now phrased more precisely): how much economically productive labor do we need to keep growing? The current market answer is: most if not all of the labor we have now.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
So have the government spend more on infrastructure, research, space exploration, what have you. There is tons of useful work we could be doing but aren't.
I disagree that it "muffles" the signal. What it does is decouple at the low end demand (the value of the work) from supply (who can do it) and makes it more driven by demand.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
I said I would post this when I got home, so here goes. Several posters opposing UBI have brought up the notion that this will somehow make people not work, or that proponents want less people to work etc. The basic idea behind these objections is that if people aren't forced to work, they will simply not work (also known as the American approach). So I compared labor participation rates between the US and Scandinavian countries since it is commonly agreed that the countries of tall, handsome blondes have very strong social safety nets (basically these countries allows people to not work and still live, meaning it is the very situation opponents to UBI say will make people not work).
...
There are several things to discuss and question about UBI, people not working is not one of them
Let me be more precise, since what counts as working is a fuzzy and arbitrary concept. A UBI will result in drastic drop in the amount of human labor devoted to economically beneficial goods and services. In fact, many people will leave the workforce, observational evidence of Scandinavia notwithstanding, but let's assume they don't.
I think you're conflating labor (productivity) with employment. A UBI may cause a drop in employment levels, but probably won't cause a significant drop in labor produced. Why? Because many people will not work at the sufferance of corporations that are only willing to offer 29 hours a week at minimum wage as a way to dodge paying health insurance. People take that kind of job because there is not a better alternative, and a UBI would give them, if not a better, at least not a drastically worse alternative. This empowers the employee to negotiate.
What happens then? Well, let's take whoever it was a page earlier who wants to go tutor college for $8 an hour. The reason why he's going to wind up in an office job instead is that the value he provides there is a whole lot higher than the value he provides helping brittle premeds do their homework. The difference in value is so stark that, from an economic perspective, an entire laborer's worth of work disappears even though he still counts in workforce participation rates. The same holds if he decides to stay home and do letsplays, which indeed many more people will do because you no longer have to attract enough followers to live on. Instead of people doing unpleasant stuff like mopping public restrooms and garbage collection, they'll be engaged in self-actualization, or simply hobbies with enough online followers to pretend that they're doing something worthwhile.
That person who has the choice between teaching at $8 an hour or working in a better paying office job would generally already be working in the better paying office job in the current market. If someone is tutoring others for $8 an hour, they are doing it because they love teaching and want a token investment on the students side so that they don't waste too much of their time on those not dedicated to learning.
The productivity isn't disappearing in your scenario, it's just moving. You'd be moving that person's labor from teaching to office-work to entertainment.
I think one consideration that people seem to overlook is that if you argue against people making Let's Play or starting their own garage bands or whatever, you're eventually arguing against the entertainment industry as a whole. For ever Taylor Swift or Pewdiepie, there are thousands of entertainers who have not been able to turn their dream into a career.
I totally agree with your point on self-actualization. And I think that's a major goal that all humans should have, to self actualize.
Perhaps you're thinking we can just raise the wages of garbage collectors (already pretty high, let me note) to solve the problem. But as you're imposing this UBI, you're collecting the income tax to pay for it. That's the very essence of a UBI: to redistribute returns from labor from the worker to society. This sharply limits your ability to incentivize work. How much of course depends on the size of the UBI.
The UBI would create a free market condition with regards to employment. You would have to pay someone a reasonable wage above that of just barely enough to get by to get them to work for you. Working isn't disincentivized. Instead, the incentive is changed from "survival" to "ability to afford luxuries". As the Scandinavian countries show, people still want those luxuries, so they will work.
Understand, this issue hits very close to home to me. My wife is from Denmark, and her daughter cannot work due to severe pain from a back injury. She and her husband have 3 kids. When her husband lost his job a few years ago, in America they would have been destitute and unable to ever recover. With the Danish social system, they didn't do great (no luxuries), but they got by for a couple of years while he learned drafting, and was able to find a new job. I have first hand, and obviously very anecdotal, evidence that a good social security system works.
Wages signal the value of the work to be performed and the difficulty of getting people who can do it to do it. A UBI muffles that signal. The result is people not doing the unfulfilling but necessary work that allows modern high standards of living.
The UBI doesn't muffle it. There is a huge, artificial disparity between the supply/demand of jobs in the US. Corporations are focused on being leaner and squeezing more productivity out of individuals and keeping unemployment high so that employees have no room to negotiate. Look at wage stagnation in the US as an example.
Also, keep in mind that people are perfectly willing to take a job that is unfulfilling in order to find fulfillment in the rest of their life. It's extremely difficult to find that fulfillment, however, when your focus is solely on survival.
This doesn't mean a UBI shouldn't ever exist. It means that when thinking about a UBI, the important question is (now phrased more precisely): how much economically productive labor do we need to keep growing? The current market answer is: most if not all of the labor we have now.
I think it'd be more correct to say that the purpose of the thread is so that starvation and homelessness are optional.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
So have the government spend more on infrastructure, research, space exploration, what have you. There is tons of useful work we could be doing but aren't.
I disagree. We don't need "economically productive labor", we just need productivity. And I realize that this is a vague concept. But the idea is that each person X produces Y productivity. Automation is continually increasing the value of Y, and Y is in fact growing at a rate far exceeding our population growth. This means that we will need less labor in the future to achieve the required amount of productivity to be sustainable.
I understand the points about new infrastructure, but investing in new infrastructure is not about sustainability. It's about growing our economy. Economic growth is not required for a UBI to be valid, just economic sustainability. Growth is certainly good, as it will allow us to reach the point at which a UBI is feasible sooner, but it's not mandatory.
Note - Infrastructure maintenance is definitely required for sustainability.
Reminder: you don't owe anyone your attention. If someone is transparently, transparently an insane person, you can always just refuse to engage with them.
I firmly believe the root of America's social problems is our laser focus on whether our fellow citizens deserve what they're getting
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about welfare in this country, welfare was a penny out of each dollar of the paycheck before Clinton gutted it. We spend as much building piles of tanks for the Saudis as we did on the old welfare
but hey a hypothetical black woman somewhere got money she didn't deserve
lets ignore all the suffering that is a result of this mindset, and the fact that corporate welfare is several orders of magnitude larger
which kind of goes hand in hand with punishment, we judge other people and once judged they deserve horrible things. If you aren't fit you should starve or go homeless, if you aren't fit it doesn't matter they're locking you in solitary because you're an unperson
I just (finally) read Slaughterhouse 5 the other night and as I'm catching up this seemed pretty apt for why BI is going to be hard in America, spoilered for big ass quote.
"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."
I said I would post this when I got home, so here goes. Several posters opposing UBI have brought up the notion that this will somehow make people not work, or that proponents want less people to work etc. The basic idea behind these objections is that if people aren't forced to work, they will simply not work (also known as the American approach). So I compared labor participation rates between the US and Scandinavian countries since it is commonly agreed that the countries of tall, handsome blondes have very strong social safety nets (basically these countries allows people to not work and still live, meaning it is the very situation opponents to UBI say will make people not work).
...
There are several things to discuss and question about UBI, people not working is not one of them
Let me be more precise, since what counts as working is a fuzzy and arbitrary concept. A UBI will result in drastic drop in the amount of human labor devoted to economically beneficial goods and services. In fact, many people will leave the workforce, observational evidence of Scandinavia notwithstanding, but let's assume they don't.
I think you're conflating labor (productivity) with employment. A UBI may cause a drop in employment levels, but probably won't cause a significant drop in labor produced. Why? Because many people will not work at the sufferance of corporations that are only willing to offer 29 hours a week at minimum wage as a way to dodge paying health insurance. People take that kind of job because there is not a better alternative, and a UBI would give them, if not a better, at least not a drastically worse alternative. This empowers the employee to negotiate.
This makes no sense. Providing a viable alternative to work means people will use that alternative. The result of UBI will not be that everyone keeps working but with better stuff. The result will be that some people keep working with better stuff, of which some unspecified portion goes to funding the UBI, and others stop. This assumes that it's possible for the companies to provide better stuff without going under. And that depends on how many people keep working. If enough people stop working, then taxes rise on those who remain. And if taxes rise on those who remain, more people decide it's not worth it and drop out, taxes rise again, and you have GDP collapse.
What happens then? Well, let's take whoever it was a page earlier who wants to go tutor college for $8 an hour. The reason why he's going to wind up in an office job instead is that the value he provides there is a whole lot higher than the value he provides helping brittle premeds do their homework. The difference in value is so stark that, from an economic perspective, an entire laborer's worth of work disappears even though he still counts in workforce participation rates. The same holds if he decides to stay home and do letsplays, which indeed many more people will do because you no longer have to attract enough followers to live on. Instead of people doing unpleasant stuff like mopping public restrooms and garbage collection, they'll be engaged in self-actualization, or simply hobbies with enough online followers to pretend that they're doing something worthwhile.
That person who has the choice between teaching at $8 an hour or working in a better paying office job would generally already be working in the better paying office job in the current market. If someone is tutoring others for $8 an hour, they are doing it because they love teaching and want a token investment on the students side so that they don't waste too much of their time on those not dedicated to learning.
The productivity isn't disappearing in your scenario, it's just moving. You'd be moving that person's labor from teaching to office-work to entertainment.
You're missing the point. Here's the post I was referring to:
if GBI was a thing I'd probably go back to tutoring at the college for $8 an hour or whatever it is they're paying now since Walker cut the budget
I'd rather live on a low paying job + a GBI and do something I get fulfillment out of than what is actually going to happen
eg: graduating and getting a job in an office somewhere and hating my life forever
All labor is not equal. The person who decides to collect stamps and the person who invents an HIV vaccine are not producing equally, even if they spend the same hours at their respective tasks. How do we know how productive work is? By how much the market pays. If tutoring pays you 5k a year and an office job pays you 80k, it's because you provide way more value to everyone else by working in that office, so everyone else gives you more value in return. The person in the 5k tutoring job may technically be employed, but they are not producing nearly as much.
I think one consideration that people seem to overlook is that if you argue against people making Let's Play or starting their own garage bands or whatever, you're eventually arguing against the entertainment industry as a whole. For ever Taylor Swift or Pewdiepie, there are thousands of entertainers who have not been able to turn their dream into a career.
I totally agree with your point on self-actualization. And I think that's a major goal that all humans should have, to self actualize.
And those people go on to do something else that actually is valuable. A UBI means you can continue your useless vanity projects forever, rather than realizing that you should do something else. Also, I think self-actualization is one of the worst monstrosities ever coined in the English language. But I digress.
The UBI would create a free market condition with regards to employment. You would have to pay someone a reasonable wage above that of just barely enough to get by to get them to work for you. Working isn't disincentivized. Instead, the incentive is changed from "survival" to "ability to afford luxuries". As the Scandinavian countries show, people still want those luxuries, so they will work.
Understand, this issue hits very close to home to me. My wife is from Denmark, and her daughter cannot work due to severe pain from a back injury. She and her husband have 3 kids. When her husband lost his job a few years ago, in America they would have been destitute and unable to ever recover. With the Danish social system, they didn't do great (no luxuries), but they got by for a couple of years while he learned drafting, and was able to find a new job. I have first hand, and obviously very anecdotal, evidence that a good social security system works.
Scandinavia is a cherry-picked example. France and Belgium also have extensive welfare states and have workforce participations of 56% and 53% respectively. What none of these countries have is a UBI, which makes them useless for evaluating the effect of introducing same. More to the point: if a UBI doesn't reduce workforce participation, how exactly does it help with automation-driven unemployment?
Your wife's daughter would have disability in the US, and her husband would have unemployment. These things would not help as much as they would in Denmark - but then, that's a pretty good argument for funding them more, no?
In general, it's going to be impossible to have a conversation in this thread if the proponents of UBI can't decide what it's supposed to do. Is it a safety net? A means to extract concessions from employers (which will then presumably be taxed away)? A way for the chunks of the population made unemployable by automation to have a decent life with a permanent absence of employment?
Wages signal the value of the work to be performed and the difficulty of getting people who can do it to do it. A UBI muffles that signal. The result is people not doing the unfulfilling but necessary work that allows modern high standards of living.
The UBI doesn't muffle it. There is a huge, artificial disparity between the supply/demand of jobs in the US. Corporations are focused on being leaner and squeezing more productivity out of individuals and keeping unemployment high so that employees have no room to negotiate. Look at wage stagnation in the US as an example.
Also, keep in mind that people are perfectly willing to take a job that is unfulfilling in order to find fulfillment in the rest of their life. It's extremely difficult to find that fulfillment, however, when your focus is solely on survival.
There is no "artificial disparity." Corporations are not engaged in a plot to maintain high unemployment. This is conspiracy goosery.
I disagree. We don't need "economically productive labor", we just need productivity. And I realize that this is a vague concept. But the idea is that each person X produces Y productivity. Automation is continually increasing the value of Y, and Y is in fact growing at a rate far exceeding our population growth. This means that we will need less labor in the future to achieve the required amount of productivity to be sustainable.
I understand the points about new infrastructure, but investing in new infrastructure is not about sustainability. It's about growing our economy. Economic growth is not required for a UBI to be valid, just economic sustainability. Growth is certainly good, as it will allow us to reach the point at which a UBI is feasible sooner, but it's not mandatory.
Note - Infrastructure maintenance is definitely required for sustainability.
This is very confusing. If you have rising productivity but the economy is not growing, you either have a rapidly falling population or you are looking at a depression.
Do you want UBI now, or UBI in the future of mass robot-created unemployment?
And that depends on how many people keep working. If enough people stop working, then taxes rise on those who remain. And if taxes rise on those who remain, more people decide it's not worth it and drop out, taxes rise again, and you have GDP collapse.
Taxes used to be around 90% and loads of people were working so I don't find this to be much of a concern at all.
How do we know how productive work is? By how much the market pays.
This is blatantly untrue. We do not know how productive work is by how much the market pays for it. We only know how much money it makes.
You are confusing "makes money" with "value" which vary all over the place in their relation to each other.
And that depends on how many people keep working. If enough people stop working, then taxes rise on those who remain. And if taxes rise on those who remain, more people decide it's not worth it and drop out, taxes rise again, and you have GDP collapse.
Taxes used to be around 90% and loads of people were working so I don't find this to be much of a concern at all.
How do we know how productive work is? By how much the market pays.
This is blatantly untrue. We do not know how productive work is by how much the market pays for it. We only know how much money it makes.
You are confusing "makes money" with "value" which vary all over the place in their relation to each other.
Taxes did not used to be 90%. The top tax bracket used to be 90%. It brought in almost nothing, because of course hardly anyone bothered getting a salary high enough to warrant it after deductions. Taxes this high are called "confiscatory," and their purpose is not to collect revenue, because they don't.
Wage is the worst means of determining the economic value of work except for all the others that have been tried. But if you feel you have better methods of figuring that out, you can always apply to your local politburo. The market is often irrational - but it's famously tough to beat in the long run.
And that depends on how many people keep working. If enough people stop working, then taxes rise on those who remain. And if taxes rise on those who remain, more people decide it's not worth it and drop out, taxes rise again, and you have GDP collapse.
Taxes used to be around 90% and loads of people were working so I don't find this to be much of a concern at all.
How do we know how productive work is? By how much the market pays.
This is blatantly untrue. We do not know how productive work is by how much the market pays for it. We only know how much money it makes.
You are confusing "makes money" with "value" which vary all over the place in their relation to each other.
Taxes did not used to be 90%. The top tax bracket used to be 90%. It brought in almost nothing, because of course hardly anyone bothered getting a salary high enough to warrant it after deductions. Taxes this high are called "confiscatory," and their purpose is not to collect revenue, because they don't.
Wage is the worst means of determining the economic value of work except for all the others that have been tried. But if you feel you have better methods of figuring that out, you can always apply to your local politburo. The market is often irrational - but it's famously tough to beat in the long run.
And yet despite that high tax rate America's economy soared, the wealth gap was far lower, and even the lower class could easily afford to buy a house.
Your second part isn't the point. You claimed work is productive because it makes money. That is a falsehood. Productivity and making money are not somehow intrinsically tied.
Posts
I'm on mobile so I can't post the links but both bls.gov and data.oecd.org showed the se thing. I'll post links when I get home
There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about welfare in this country, welfare was a penny out of each dollar of the paycheck before Clinton gutted it. We spend as much building piles of tanks for the Saudis as we did on the old welfare
but hey a hypothetical black woman somewhere got money she didn't deserve
lets ignore all the suffering that is a result of this mindset, and the fact that corporate welfare is several orders of magnitude larger
which kind of goes hand in hand with punishment, we judge other people and once judged they deserve horrible things. If you aren't fit you should starve or go homeless, if you aren't fit it doesn't matter they're locking you in solitary because you're an unperson
Also, this. I'm a registered Republican and tend to vote such on my local elections as those candidates typically are the ones with the most pragmatic functional governance experience. On a state and federal level, I vote for whoever demonstrates the most rational and functional campaign promises.
I haven't seen a conservative at the federal level since Bob Dole actually offer functional policy as part of their platform, and constantly lowering taxes makes it so we constantly have budget shortfalls and weakening economic prospects. Siphoning all the money to the top 1% doesn't a health country make (even for the top 1%). Eventually that is what becomes unsustainable and you get another French Revolution once bread and circuses aren't sufficiently distracting of the wealth disparity. Stability, and thus profit and success for the upper classes, always comes when you have a motivated and empowered lower class with spending capital. The entire wealth pyramid since Reagan has been focused upon capital gains and stock market based wealth... which means nothing when each of those companies eventually can't find customers to boost their profits. Things like Basic Income stimulate the lower classes to have more purchasing power which directly translates into greater economic value (the oft cited $5 dollars of food stamps -> $9 local stimulus).
Again, while Basic Income is generally speaking a better low-overhead and high-impact entitlement program than a massive hodgepodge of confusing mini programs that are poorly articulated and poorly advertised, I still feel infrastructure spending is a better short term (now to 20 years) ideal than implementing something like this. The Bush stimulus checks back in 08 did greater immediate good to economies than any of the top percentage tax cuts Bush put into effect (there are loads of academic papers on this), because when you cut capital gains people do exactly what Nspb said he would do: keep it in a trust and live off the dividends. The bottom 60% of the income bracket immediately spends this money more often than not because they have something they ~need~ but can't afford, which translates into more commerce, more money for business owners, and more taxes for local, state, and federal government to use towards sustaining those programs. People get richer at all levels, society is generally better and more optimistic culturally, and you get a global boom like in the late 90s.
Would that boom be long term sustainable? It more depends on how willing legislators would be to maintaining it than a flaw in and of itself. The New Deal programs largely burned out not because they were unsustainable but because legistlators cut them to become unsustainable.
It is the free market approach to welfare
but then again I don't see conservatives ever supporting it, because one would think they'd support food stamps since they get us more back then they cost and they are a huge plus to local business
And "slippery slope" a pretty dangerous logical fallacy you are using there.
The overall issue for me, is can the program be made workable and sustainable. It is incredibly hard to estimate the impact of BI or NIT. Do yourself a favor, do a quick thought experiment can you come up with a list of issues that will need to be solved under BI? Can you come up with some potential traps we as a society have to avoid with BI? How do you adjust for some of these pitfalls?
Be honest with yourself here, don't just focus on "BI will be great because I can quit my soul crushing job and earn less money but still be OK financially!".
But the free market is great, there may just be enough money in the upper echelons to free up so you can have a janitor clean your hospital again.
And essential, perhaps government jobs can be subsidized federally by taking off some of your GBI tax
Warning mind dump:
Cost of living - not the same in all areas - BI wont be enough for some people to continue to live in certain areas and would require them to move.
Cost of living - in some areas a BI would be enough to live comfortably with no job and not produce anything as an individual.
Abolishment of minimum wage
Abolishment of food stamps
Abolishment of school lunch programs
Worker shortages in certain job sectors
Cost of program too high, how is the program funded, what is cut, what new taxes are introduced?
Sustainability issues if too many people quit higher paying jobs for things they want to do. Money in < money out
A movement to abolish social security and backlash associated with that
Rich individuals living off of inheritance getting a BI and not working
Issues with fraud, individuals claiming to be multiple individuals - how do we defend against this?
How do you correctly track the homeless and make sure they get their BI?
Do incarcerated people currently in prison get a BI?
How do you effectively encourage the populous to seek the highest paying job the individual can get in the field the individual wants?
try to come up with a list of impacts not just the greatest. I generally support the idea of BI, but how do we implement it and remain fair to the populous? How can we make sure it is a sustainable program for the foreseeable future?
Abolishment of minimum wage - Why? It needs to pay more than GBI or else no one will do it. I guess you could call that abolishment
Abolishment of food stamps - I don't have a problem with this, buy food with your income now.
Abolishment of school lung programs - Why? If it's really a stickler, just ramp down the GBI payout for dependencies to cover that
Worker shortages in certain job sectors - then pay more, free market doesn't give a fuck. If you don't supply, you won't have demand.
Cost of program too high - probably the biggest issue, let's look at converting capital gains to normal income tax and remove the SSI income restriction first. Then maybe set the upper limit on income tax in the 80's or 90s.
A movement to abolish SSI and backlash associated with that - GBI is basically a form of SSI. Yeah you didn't pay into it and that's how it's different, tough beans. Just make sure the minimum GBI payout is higher than the max SSI payout. I don't give a fuck about boomers, they created this situation, they can fucking suffer.
Rich individuals living off inheritance getting BI - falls under the capital gains, you can't just get wealth from your parents. $10k checks already set off a ton of warning bells, and there'd be no way to really get around this. Tax "gifts" to family over a certain amount a year at astronomical amounts. Maybe put a lifetime limit on this stuff. $1(adjust this with inflation) mill USD in cash or equity is all you get. After that it's 95% tax rate. I don't even give a shit.
Issues with fraud - how do we deal with this now? Create a federal ID system similar to SSI. Drop ship them to everyone overnight.
Tracking the homeless - That one has me stumped, have shelters/food-banks set it up and get them set up with a basic bank account. Track all the SSIs in the US and create a federal banking system and give them an account and dump it there. I'm sure there's a better system though.
Do incarcerated people get it - No, it's covering their care in prison. They will continue getting it when/if they ever get out. Maybe give them a portion. If they have dependents, set up a system so that dependents can claim a portion of those numbers. I don't really have a problem with them getting it though.
How do you effectively encourage people to seek the highest paying jobs - This isn't even an issue. Why should it be? We still need garbage men and plumbers and teachers and scientists. People will search for shit for themselves. Keep in mind the "encouragement" is basically that you have not a whole lot of "spending money" left over. If they're super frugal, oh well. This comment is coming from the assumption that there's no value added by a youtuber entertaining millions, or, someone who volunteers at the food bank or animal shelter 8 hours a day. Or the comedian.
In terms of things I'd be worried about for implementing this system it'd be the worker shortages in certain areas because I know how stingy CEOs can get with a bottom line. You're probably going to see a vast shift from mega conglomerates to small businesses again.
Walmart will probably break up because it's just too expensive to cover the entire US. And then the return of local places will come back. Free market wins again.
School lunch programs and food stamps don't directly fit in here and serve a different, and complementary purpose to BI. I would say they would stay, but I could see politicians of the negative breed trying to cut them through it. Functionally BI would likely ensure more benefits than food stamps or school lunches alone and could be throttled in it's quantity to help leverage those costs out of school budgets and onto a centralized budget.
Rich individuals living off inheritance likely wouldn't get BI if they are getting capital gains, as that likely would be considered as income here.
Homeless and prisoner issues are interesting and I have no idea how you would address those. The other issues are also big deals, but some of them are more means of tweaking after implementation than immediate issues (like cost of living). Housing markets adjust based upon how much they can get away with. If prices rise to the point where service workers cant live or reliably get to work, the housing costs will fall as businesses scramble to attract employees.
Yeah you bolded it. As much as they used to. That is not the same as never working at all.
OK. Why is that good and why would the be better achieved by a higher minimum wage?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
in which case, why not?
I mean I guess Walmart could start paying half as much but they'd have a real hell of a time finding enough employees
One of the greatest benefits of GBI is that it will put negotiating power back in the hands of labor at the bottom. Which is one of the reasons I scoff at the idea we must force everyone on GBI to work or something, part of the benefit is that it will force employers to stop being such shit heads that work people to death for no pay! If employment is forced, that gives employers all the power they have now
How do you deal with people who are able to work but choose not to? People who are supported by others such as spouses that are living off of someone elses income, would they get a BI? Or would there be limits imposed based on spousal income? If someone's spouse is earning 100k+/year should they earn a BI if they are a stay at home father or mother? How much additional cost would that be if the BI system allowed that? How do we handle people living together forever instead of under a formal marriage contract so they could take the BI income for themselves?
The abolishment of assistance is going to come up under BI because of the cost issue. and with BI do we need that type of assistance anymore? Wouldn't BI be enough to cover basic necessities? Isn't part of the point of BI to reduce government overhead managing hundreds of different programs?
I'll tackle these:
How do you deal with people who are able to work but choose not to? - You don't. Work isn't mandatory.
People who are supported by others such as spouses that are living off of someone elses income, would they get a BI? - No. Money and goods over a certain value gifted to others are treated as income. It's already this way in the tax law.
Or would there be limits imposed based on spousal income? - Yes, if married. You'd also keep stuff like the married tax break status.
If someone's spouse is earning 100k+/year should they earn a BI if they are a stay at home father or mother? - No, because you file as married just as you would for taxes.
How much additional cost would that be if the BI system allowed that? - No idea.
How do we handle people living together forever instead of under a formal marriage contract so they could take the BI income for themselves? - You offset it with the marriage tax break and other laws, just like we currently do with income taxes.
I'm sure this is not what you actually meant to say, but boy is it an unfortunate Freudian slip. Seeing as it goes right to the weakness of a large UBI.
You know what's really good for preventing that? Food and housing. We call this kind of assistance "welfare." It is explicitly NOT what this thread is about. PantsB is perfectly correct: the point of a UBI, at least at the levels everyone in this thread seems to want, is to enable a decent if not luxurious livelihood without working. The only reason to advocate it is if you want a society in which many fewer people work. That's why the question that matters for this thread, the one and only question that matters, is how many people do we need working to continue growing? Everything else is just people slinging noble slogans at each other.
It really highlights the actual objection to the idea, for which the other complaints are a mere smokescreen.
As always with this issue, the actual problems are all in how people perceive what is required of others to be considered worthy in society's eyes.
The whole reason this thread got started is the realization that it's getting cheaper and easier to replace people with automation. Which means unless wages continue to drop means jobs for people are going to become fewer. So raising the minimum wage isn't going to cut it. In fact it'll just make automation all the more attractive when available. A higher minimum wage job is meaningless when those jobs aren't there. Meanwhile a guaranteed income ensures people can work what's currently considered part time and go through long bouts of unemployment much more easily.
UBI absolutely is welfare. And as for your last question what exactly is your plan for when there are more people than jobs?
Well a cornerstone of this discussion was to take into account the ever increasing industrial automation. So it is a lot less wanting "a society in which many fewer people work" and a lot more finding a solution for a society that doesn't have enough jobs.
And this would be another example of the same.
In the end, it's always about this vague idea that someone is getting something they don't deserve.
As if deserve has anything to do with it.
Look wouldnt it be better to just ignore the problems that come with automation and continue on as if it wont exist?
I am curious how much people will have to suffer and what the tipping point will be in the future to spur actual conversation on the national level.
It goes beyond that. Because "enough jobs" is itself an assumption rooted in a particular conception of what society must look like.
The actual question would be more "Do we even need everyone to work a full-time job?".
According to the BLS, labor participation for 2012 (the latest date):
USA: 63.7 (Average LFPR 2009-2012: 64.48)
Sweden: 65.2 (Average LFPR 2009-2012: 64.95) (No other Scandinavian country was listed)
Source: http://www.bls.gov/fls/flscomparelf.htm#chart04 (LFPR by sex)
The OECD have these numbers for 2013:
Denmark: 62.4
Finland: 65.5
Sweden: 71.5
Norway: 71.2
Iceland: 81.4
USA: 63.2
Source: https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm
Also:
Wikipedia's (yes I know) Employment-to-population ratio have the following numbers for each country's employment population ratio in 2013 (definition from the article: "This is a statistical ratio that measures the proportion of the country's working-age population (ages 15 to 64 in most OECD countries) that is employed. This includes people that have stopped looking for work.")
Iceland: 81.8
Norway: 75.5
Sweden: 74.4
Denmark: 72.5
Finland: 68.5
USA: 67.4
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio (Wikipedia's source for figures refers to OECD)
So in short, not needing to work does not make people sit at home all day doing nothing. In fact it shows the opposite. And the explanation really is simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs. UBI takes care of the first step, pretty much takes care of the second, and strongly enables the third. So we are left with esteem and self-actualization, both which can be realized by working, creating, problem-solving etc.
There are several things to discuss and question about UBI, people not working is not one of them
I don't even know who it's a dangerous precedent for, since GBI is basically EVERYBODY getting money, so there's nobody to set a precedent FOR.
I find this is a very common thing about conservative social policies that makes me want to kill them: people are so concerned about the morality of the policy, whether there's any possible loophole, that they end up spending more money watching the money than the amount of money they're actually watching.
(Also, all these cracks about people staying at home and just playing video games are super-ironic, given the number of professional gamers and Twitch streamers there are now. Again, the precedents have been set already.)
Humans follow this same general principle.
Basically: in society 20% of people will work hard, 20% will barely work and the other 60% will do what they have to.
The thing is if you take the entire farm and cut it in half, the ants redistribute in a similar fashion. Once "lazy" ants becoming normal or hard working, etc.
This works for people as well. A good 80% of any given population will want to work in some capacity.
If people can shift around to form smaller working communities and such then the actual numbers will probably pan out to more people working on "something" though it may not be what you idealize as proper work all the time.
I don't really feel like anyone should decide what is right or wrong when it comes to work.
The gains at the community level of everyone having money to spend seems like a net positive, as long as predatory rent, utility and credit practices are dealt with.
Because humans are shitty to each other, especially when people can't fight back.
What happens then? Well, let's take whoever it was a page earlier who wants to go tutor college for $8 an hour. The reason why he's going to wind up in an office job instead is that the value he provides there is a whole lot higher than the value he provides helping brittle premeds do their homework. The difference in value is so stark that, from an economic perspective, an entire laborer's worth of work disappears even though he still counts in workforce participation rates. The same holds if he decides to stay home and do letsplays, which indeed many more people will do because you no longer have to attract enough followers to live on. Instead of people doing unpleasant stuff like mopping public restrooms and garbage collection, they'll be engaged in self-actualization, or simply hobbies with enough online followers to pretend that they're doing something worthwhile.
Perhaps you're thinking we can just raise the wages of garbage collectors (already pretty high, let me note) to solve the problem. But as you're imposing this UBI, you're collecting the income tax to pay for it. That's the very essence of a UBI: to redistribute returns from labor from the worker to society. This sharply limits your ability to incentivize work. How much of course depends on the size of the UBI.
Wages signal the value of the work to be performed and the difficulty of getting people who can do it to do it. A UBI muffles that signal. The result is people not doing the unfulfilling but necessary work that allows modern high standards of living.
This doesn't mean a UBI shouldn't ever exist. It means that when thinking about a UBI, the important question is (now phrased more precisely): how much economically productive labor do we need to keep growing? The current market answer is: most if not all of the labor we have now.
So have the government spend more on infrastructure, research, space exploration, what have you. There is tons of useful work we could be doing but aren't.
I think you're conflating labor (productivity) with employment. A UBI may cause a drop in employment levels, but probably won't cause a significant drop in labor produced. Why? Because many people will not work at the sufferance of corporations that are only willing to offer 29 hours a week at minimum wage as a way to dodge paying health insurance. People take that kind of job because there is not a better alternative, and a UBI would give them, if not a better, at least not a drastically worse alternative. This empowers the employee to negotiate.
That person who has the choice between teaching at $8 an hour or working in a better paying office job would generally already be working in the better paying office job in the current market. If someone is tutoring others for $8 an hour, they are doing it because they love teaching and want a token investment on the students side so that they don't waste too much of their time on those not dedicated to learning.
The productivity isn't disappearing in your scenario, it's just moving. You'd be moving that person's labor from teaching to office-work to entertainment.
I think one consideration that people seem to overlook is that if you argue against people making Let's Play or starting their own garage bands or whatever, you're eventually arguing against the entertainment industry as a whole. For ever Taylor Swift or Pewdiepie, there are thousands of entertainers who have not been able to turn their dream into a career.
I totally agree with your point on self-actualization. And I think that's a major goal that all humans should have, to self actualize.
The UBI would create a free market condition with regards to employment. You would have to pay someone a reasonable wage above that of just barely enough to get by to get them to work for you. Working isn't disincentivized. Instead, the incentive is changed from "survival" to "ability to afford luxuries". As the Scandinavian countries show, people still want those luxuries, so they will work.
Understand, this issue hits very close to home to me. My wife is from Denmark, and her daughter cannot work due to severe pain from a back injury. She and her husband have 3 kids. When her husband lost his job a few years ago, in America they would have been destitute and unable to ever recover. With the Danish social system, they didn't do great (no luxuries), but they got by for a couple of years while he learned drafting, and was able to find a new job. I have first hand, and obviously very anecdotal, evidence that a good social security system works.
The UBI doesn't muffle it. There is a huge, artificial disparity between the supply/demand of jobs in the US. Corporations are focused on being leaner and squeezing more productivity out of individuals and keeping unemployment high so that employees have no room to negotiate. Look at wage stagnation in the US as an example.
Also, keep in mind that people are perfectly willing to take a job that is unfulfilling in order to find fulfillment in the rest of their life. It's extremely difficult to find that fulfillment, however, when your focus is solely on survival.
I disagree. We don't need "economically productive labor", we just need productivity. And I realize that this is a vague concept. But the idea is that each person X produces Y productivity. Automation is continually increasing the value of Y, and Y is in fact growing at a rate far exceeding our population growth. This means that we will need less labor in the future to achieve the required amount of productivity to be sustainable.
I understand the points about new infrastructure, but investing in new infrastructure is not about sustainability. It's about growing our economy. Economic growth is not required for a UBI to be valid, just economic sustainability. Growth is certainly good, as it will allow us to reach the point at which a UBI is feasible sooner, but it's not mandatory.
Note - Infrastructure maintenance is definitely required for sustainability.
I just (finally) read Slaughterhouse 5 the other night and as I'm catching up this seemed pretty apt for why BI is going to be hard in America, spoilered for big ass quote.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves."
This makes no sense. Providing a viable alternative to work means people will use that alternative. The result of UBI will not be that everyone keeps working but with better stuff. The result will be that some people keep working with better stuff, of which some unspecified portion goes to funding the UBI, and others stop. This assumes that it's possible for the companies to provide better stuff without going under. And that depends on how many people keep working. If enough people stop working, then taxes rise on those who remain. And if taxes rise on those who remain, more people decide it's not worth it and drop out, taxes rise again, and you have GDP collapse.
You're missing the point. Here's the post I was referring to:
All labor is not equal. The person who decides to collect stamps and the person who invents an HIV vaccine are not producing equally, even if they spend the same hours at their respective tasks. How do we know how productive work is? By how much the market pays. If tutoring pays you 5k a year and an office job pays you 80k, it's because you provide way more value to everyone else by working in that office, so everyone else gives you more value in return. The person in the 5k tutoring job may technically be employed, but they are not producing nearly as much.
And those people go on to do something else that actually is valuable. A UBI means you can continue your useless vanity projects forever, rather than realizing that you should do something else. Also, I think self-actualization is one of the worst monstrosities ever coined in the English language. But I digress.
Scandinavia is a cherry-picked example. France and Belgium also have extensive welfare states and have workforce participations of 56% and 53% respectively. What none of these countries have is a UBI, which makes them useless for evaluating the effect of introducing same. More to the point: if a UBI doesn't reduce workforce participation, how exactly does it help with automation-driven unemployment?
Your wife's daughter would have disability in the US, and her husband would have unemployment. These things would not help as much as they would in Denmark - but then, that's a pretty good argument for funding them more, no?
In general, it's going to be impossible to have a conversation in this thread if the proponents of UBI can't decide what it's supposed to do. Is it a safety net? A means to extract concessions from employers (which will then presumably be taxed away)? A way for the chunks of the population made unemployable by automation to have a decent life with a permanent absence of employment?
There is no "artificial disparity." Corporations are not engaged in a plot to maintain high unemployment. This is conspiracy goosery.
This is very confusing. If you have rising productivity but the economy is not growing, you either have a rapidly falling population or you are looking at a depression.
Do you want UBI now, or UBI in the future of mass robot-created unemployment?
Taxes used to be around 90% and loads of people were working so I don't find this to be much of a concern at all.
This is blatantly untrue. We do not know how productive work is by how much the market pays for it. We only know how much money it makes.
You are confusing "makes money" with "value" which vary all over the place in their relation to each other.
Taxes did not used to be 90%. The top tax bracket used to be 90%. It brought in almost nothing, because of course hardly anyone bothered getting a salary high enough to warrant it after deductions. Taxes this high are called "confiscatory," and their purpose is not to collect revenue, because they don't.
Wage is the worst means of determining the economic value of work except for all the others that have been tried. But if you feel you have better methods of figuring that out, you can always apply to your local politburo. The market is often irrational - but it's famously tough to beat in the long run.
And yet despite that high tax rate America's economy soared, the wealth gap was far lower, and even the lower class could easily afford to buy a house.
Your second part isn't the point. You claimed work is productive because it makes money. That is a falsehood. Productivity and making money are not somehow intrinsically tied.