5 ms·

The problem isn't a highway it's that we have more labor than we need for society to exist while we simultaneously offer nearly no social safety net for those o

• wozniacki 11y ago
  This country needs to offer a minimal viable income to all citizens. I'm sure nearly everyone will blast me for how bad this will be and for the inflation that'll surely happen but every study I've seen shows that giving people relatively small amounts of money improves every aspect of their lives. I have followed some of the Universal/Unconditional Basic Income discussions here on HN. After all is said and done, I think proponents of UBI will find a lot less opposition if this is framed in the context of the progressive taxation debate. In the context of how the ancestrally wealthy pay so little. In the context of how even the most innovative upstarts & the least innovative & moribund mega corporations alike, dodge taxes using shelters abroad. The point is this: middle income families - the few that are left in this country - will not be persuaded so easily to give yet more of their hard earned monies away to those who they see as perennially living on the dole - the welfare dependent & the societal deadbeats. Yes, they will blame the already under-privileged & chronically poor. Not their tax-evading ( even negative tax billing ) corporate overlords. That's the way it has been for decades. It won't change unless the thought makers find fresh ways to help the middle and low income families see the disparity in taxation. Middle income & low income families have to be weaned away from voting against their own self-interests.
  • dvanduzer 11y ago
    UBI is sometimes framed as a negative income tax. This would also benefit middle income families, by automatically lowering their taxable income. Perhaps along the lines of what you meant by progressive taxation. (I have not personally seen much meaningful opposition to UBI. It would be good to hear more meaningful criticism of the ideas.)
• omnomrent 11y ago
  UBI will just be a yet another huge transfer of wealth to rentiers. Rents will eat up every last dollar of UBI, and we'll be back where we started. Capital controls, rent controls, and punitive vacancy taxes are needed well in advance of establishing UBI. The chances of this happening on a broad scale in the US are, unfortunately, zero. Too bad.
  • FussyZeus 11y ago
    What would you suggest? I mean we're dealing with the section of our population that either won't (or can't) do anything above the bare minimum. I don't want them to starve or freeze, I'm not a total asshole, but how much should we really be imparting onto people who effectively aren't contributing?
  • jayess 11y ago
    The Soviet Union gave this a shot. Didn't really work out.
    • _delirium 11y ago
      The Soviet Union had more of the opposite idea: you must work to earn a living. From the 1936 Soviet constitution, > In the USSR work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." If you want to analogize it to a left-wing movement, an unconditional UBI is closer to a the Scandinavian social democrats' ideas of a universalist welfare system.
  • pstuart 11y ago
    Renting should be replaced with some sort of fractional ownership.
    • munin 11y ago
      like communism?
    • FussyZeus 11y ago
• FussyZeus 11y ago
  I wouldn't blast you, this has been our running office conversation for several months, usually brought up by a new article on automation. We're all doing whatever the terrified version of munching popcorn is at the prospect of what will happen when the last accessible, no-education-required job that can earn a livable income, i.e. truck driving, can be done by robots. Unlike most jobs done by people with few skills, like burger flipping, the vast majority of people don't want humans actually doing them anymore, so the costs will be absorbed quicker by the shipping companies. Plus the cost of human drivers is high, things like insurance, benefits, 401k, etc. all could be used to replace them all with autonomous trucks. Then you have an entire infrastructure that grew up around trucks, the truck stop (possibly the most American thing that can fit inside one building), all the highway side motels, on and on. All of these things we expect will fold within a decade or so of autonomous trucks becoming viable. With the trucks being automated a lot of what would be needed at a truck stop could then also be automated with little issue. Then we have all the truck drivers, and all the people who served truck drivers, out of work with no decent career path. If I've ever heard of a plausible apocalypse scenario, that's it.
  • jacques_chester 11y ago
    In many US states, truck driver is the leading occupation. Admittedly the numbers are skewed by the way various professions are broken up, but as far as semi-skilled labour goes, driving is enormous.
    • FussyZeus 11y ago
      And the center of a ton of small town economies.
  • seibelj 11y ago
    Throughout the history of innovation, eliminating jobs did not eliminate work. New jobs sprang up. This has happened over and over. If you think that the deprecation of hundreds of thousands of jobs will mean that hundreds of thousands of people can't work anymore, you are sorely mistaken. This is a fallacy intelligent people have fallen into throughout the centuries. Automation and computers have been doing their jobs for decades now, and America is still at 5% unemployment. I'll keep betting on capitalism while others continue to think, "this time is different".
• tosseraccount 11y ago
  "This country needs to offer a minimal viable income to all citizens" It's called "welfare": Various government programs (SNAP, edicaid, EITC, SSI, CHIP, TANS CSFP, Obamacare, etc.) do provide minimal viable income to US citizens. Social Justice types may bemoan the situation; but throwing middle class tax money at the problem is not a guaranteed solution.
  • ci5er 11y ago
    Well, in the US, sure. And I don't see anyone here proposing doing a UBI program globally... There are a number of problems with the current system. One is the "welfare cliff" that severely demotivates someone who can take (or not take) the option of signing up for a marginal wage job. We all know that ladders start at the bottom, but we keep removing rungs. If someone is getting benefits, I'd also like him to get a job or training to slowly work up to not needing those benefits - not go backwards. Not many people will choose to go backwards. Another one (to me, because I tend minarchy), is the obscene bureaucratic overhead. Of course this is because of our complex array of rules and means-testing. But, if we could eliminate the disincentives to work that come from the way that welfare programs are constructed today, do we really need to means test? I'd rather Bill Gates gets a free two thousand dollar check than hire someone to make sure he doesn't. At some point, I suspect this can only be resolved by some sort of limited behavioral experiment. While I like to think that most Americans, given a choice, wouldn't choose to sit around and watch Jerry Springer - our current system's construction has given me little confidence that this is necessarily true.
• tptacek 11y ago
  If we have a labor surplus, how does a basic income solve the problem? The money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, the population will age, and as demography and technological advancement increases the (stipulated) surplus, there will be fewer and fewer sources of revenue to fund the basic income. It seems like magical thinking. I often find myself thinking that invocations of "basic income" are really just excuse-making: if we could just re-engineer the entire economy, we wouldn't need to confront this tangle of systematic racism and 1950s-era civil and social engineering. But in fact, we do need to confront it, or resign ourselves to networks of large US cities that serve primarily as a poverty trap for African Americans. It's also a way to avoid engaging with the actual article, which is what happened here.
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    What do you take labor surplus to mean? If it means that the economy is sufficiently productive without everyone working, a basic income solves the problem that some people have no access to the economy (by dictating some basic level of access). (Of course the economy isn't sufficiently productive today, there are huge swaths of Americans that would like to increase their consumption, never mind less wealthy areas of the world. The reality is probably that we do have surplus labor at some levels of per job productivity though.)
  • cgriswald 11y ago
    > If we have a labor surplus, how does a basic income solve the problem? The money has to come from somewhere. Moreover, the population will age, and as demography and technological advancement increases the (stipulated) surplus, there will be fewer and fewer sources of revenue to fund the basic income. It seems like magical thinking. If we have a labor surplus (due to robotics) it is because we have a more efficient and wealthy economy and we can afford to pay people not to work. It's not a question of money, but of the distribution of wealth. I'd rather see the development of an employer of last resort, though; not a basic income. FDR put people to work so: 1. They could eat. 2. They would be too busy to revolt over the fact they couldn't eat. But we still reap the benefits of his programs today. And while some of those were unconstitutional as hell, the lessons learned could be incorporated into programs that are constitutional.
• panarky 11y ago
  > we have more labor than we need It's a common misperception that that there is a fixed quantity of labor demanded, and that if more than that quantity is supplied, the result is unemployment. People are not commodities, and the economy is not a zero-sum game. More people willing to work equals more people willing to consume, so the economy expands. This "lump of labor fallacy[1]" was used when women joined the workforce. The worry was that with only so much work to go around, the additional workers would cause mass unemployment. But we didn't get unemployment, we got a larger economy with a higher standard of living. The fallacy is also used to argue against immigration, with the fear that immigrants will "steal jobs". It doesn't work that way. Instead of stealing jobs, immigration expands the economy and most people are better off. [1] http://www.economist.com/node/21547263 http://www.economist.com/node/21547263
  • rwmj 11y ago
    You can both be right. It's possible for automation to replace employment, or for people to have the wrong set of skills for what is required by employers.
  • lsc 11y ago
    Certainly, that is the theory, but capitalism does not always optimize for worker salaries. You can find examples of what you describe happening, but you can also find examples of the opposite: For the last few decades, the perception is that the economy is not expanding at a rate required to "float all boats." as it were. In fact, I think your example is a very good one: >This "lump of labor fallacy[1]" was used when women joined the workforce. The worry was that with only so much work to go around, the additional workers would cause mass unemployment. But we didn't get unemployment, we got a larger economy with a higher standard of living. I think that most men who are not in our industry would disagree. If you look at the inflation-adjusted income for a man from the '70s and now... and it hasn't grown a whole hell of a lot. One can make a strong argument (supported by the meteoric rise in woman's salaries during the same period) that this is largely the effect of effectively doubling the number of workers available for most jobs over the same period. I mean, obviously, from a justice point of view, this is righting a very old wrong. It's great that women are on a more equal footing; it's fair. I'm not saying that this is bad overall... I'm just giving an example, that can be tracked with publicly available statistics, of how the average wages of a group that is employed can be pushed down by adding more laborers to that group.
• sigzero 11y ago
  > I say we take it one step further and just pay our citizens for simply existing. No, just no. I find that line of thinking ridiculous.