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Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here... It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living. It isn't that the va

Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here... It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living. It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job. And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing. It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that. I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment. https://thecorrespondent.com/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00 https://thecorrespondent.com/541/why-we-should-give-free-mon...

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living. That wouldn't feed an adult for half that long in the US, to say nothing of lawful living quarters or healthcare or transportation. And even if true, how does it help you? It would allow both the amount of the UBI and the wage of the basic job to be proportionally less, but the necessary amount of the UBI would still be smaller -- at that cost it could be negligible, given that the number of people who can't find a job in the US that would pay $0.18/hour would be nearly if not literally zero. > It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that. You can't use "building infrastructure" as a basic job because it's already a real job. The benefit of doing the work exceeds the cost of doing the work so it would/should be done regardless of a basic job program and can't be used to create jobs on top of that, unless the additional jobs couldn't otherwise be justified because they provide less public benefit than they cost. And how is "child care for working women" or "pre-K" better for those people than the equivalent amount of cash which they can use to buy those things or not as they choose? If anything it will make those things worse because a subsidized government option would bankrupt private alternatives that would otherwise provide better service or lower true cost. > I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment. Was the last paragraph of the previous post not satisfactory? "Labor disincentive effects" is just a pejorative way of saying that some people may choose to consume their own labor/time rather than selling it to a third party, which is not actually a problem. Your link points out that the "decline" was primarily young mothers and college students. People choosing to spend more time with their children and their studies. How is that bad? By comparison a basic job directly displaces private labor with less efficient government labor. That's why it costs more -- people will choose a basic job that pays $8 but only produces $2 in value over a private job that pays $6 and produces $7 in value, and now you have higher expenses, less productive value and lower tax revenue. Choosing to care for your own children over working for someone else doesn't do that because people only make that choice when they get more value from it than the wages they would receive from the other work. They're literally paying themselves (in opportunity cost) to do child care. The ability to do that isn't a cost, it's an efficiency gain. The only sense in which it's a cost at all is that self-labor is typically untaxed, which is a policy decision that we could make the other way in theory, but we're probably better off not because it implicitly subsidizes self-labor which is generally meritorious (e.g. no transportation costs, no principal-agent problems, no paperwork).

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living. That wouldn't feed an adult for half that long in the US, to say nothing of lawful living quarters or healthcare or transportation. And even if true, how does it help you? It would allow both the amount of the UBI and the wage of the basic job to be proportionally less, but the necessary amount of the UBI would still be smaller -- at that cost it could be negligible, given that the number of people who can't find a job in the US that would pay $0.18/hour would be nearly if not literally zero. > It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that. You can't use "building infrastructure" as a basic job because it's already a real job. The benefit of doing the work exceeds the cost of doing the work so it would/should be done regardless of a basic job program and can't be used to create jobs on top of that, unless the additional jobs couldn't otherwise be justified because they provide less public benefit than they cost. And how is "child care for working women" or "pre-K" better for those people than the equivalent amount of cash which they can use to buy those things or not as they choose? If anything it will make those things worse because a subsidized government option would bankrupt private alternatives that would otherwise provide better service or lower true cost. > I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment. Was the last paragraph of the previous post not satisfactory? "Labor disincentive effects" is just a pejorative way of saying that some people may choose to consume their own labor/time rather than selling it to a third party, which is not actually a problem. Your link points out that the "decline" was primarily young mothers and college students. People choosing to spend more time with their children and their studies. How is that bad? By comparison a basic job directly displaces private labor with less efficient government labor. That's why it costs more -- people will choose a basic job that pays $8 but only produces $2 in value over a private job that pays $6 and produces $7 in value, and now you have higher expenses, less productive value and lower tax revenue. Choosing to care for your own children over working for someone else doesn't do that because people only make that choice when they get more value from it than the wages they would receive from the other work. They're literally paying themselves (in opportunity cost) to do child care. The ability to do that isn't a cost, it's an efficiency gain. The only sense in which it's a cost at all is that self-labor is typically untaxed, which is a policy decision that we could make the other way in theory, but we're probably better off not because it implicitly subsidizes self-labor which is generally meritorious (e.g. no transportation costs, no principal-agent problems, no paperwork).