6 ms·

As Andrew Yang Rises, Silicon Valley Questions Universal Basic Income

24 points by lawrenceyan 7y ago

lr4444lr 7y ago
I am against UBI, but credit where it's due: it's not easy these days to break into the national political conversation with a single issue platform so far outside the Overton Window as Yang has. This is like the old parties of yore that campaigned on things like a bimetallism or Prohibition.
- forgot-my-pw 7y ago
  It's definitely something that we should research more. It worked for Alaska, in a smaller scope.
kryogen1c 7y ago
As someone who disagrees on most things with yang and sanders, I didnt see the most attractive thing about yangs proposal: this UBI replaces other social safety net programs and aims to gain efficiency by eliminating the overhead from multiple government offices.
- tyre 7y ago
  This isn’t a big selling point on the left. It would be in the general, but the make-up of the primary voters is further to the left. Dismantling government programs isn’t their jam.
  - r00fus 7y ago
    There's also a hippocratic argument to be made that you shouldn't throw out what's not broken.
  - slowmovintarget 7y ago
    It's also an awfully big "if" that it would actually replace them. "I promise" isn't enough to risk ending up with both the UBI and all the current programs. Therefore the qualifications aimed at those who disagree on fiscal grounds simply evaporate when the policy meets the real world. Bait and switch is older than politics.
- r00fus 7y ago
  You can probably guess why that wasn't raised by Yang - people who have said programs or think that poor people benefiting from said programs would see it as a bad trade. Personally, without cost containment on the supplier side (ie, inflation), or pegging this benefit to inflation, it sounds like a bad idea. Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent.
  - jhanschoo 7y ago
    > Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent. That looks interesting; can I have a source for those numbers?
- sornaensis 7y ago
  This is not his proposal. His 'Freedom Dividend' is a minimum guarantee of income. A person receiving $1,000/mo or more in benefits will not see any change at all.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  I would encourage you to consider the overhead of multiple private insurance companies handling healthcare in a similar light.
tyre 7y ago
UBI is interesting politically. It combines the social welfare and income inequality that some like on the left and the libertarianism (people choosing what to do with their money rather than heavier government services) that’s popular on the non-batshit right. I doubt that the American electorate would go for it in the next fifty years. Given that it’s gaining support first on the left combined with the impressive propensity of the Democratic Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, navigating such a successfully nuanced political proposal seems to require one of the once-in-a-generation leader. High hopes, no expectations of success.
jmpman 7y ago
UBI plus removing the minimum wage seems like an interesting option.
tehjoker 7y ago
I am against UBI because the soon as you give people $1000 dollars, their rent, transport, and other associated costs will go up by exactly $1000 over a relatively quick time frame. It will initially look good, but it will be extremely transient. You'll then have all the same problems you had before and a huge financial engine sucking in and spitting out tremendous amounts of money that needs to be managed to no practical effect. These effects might not be visible with a "mincome" type RCT experiment because they rely on there being enough extra income lying around for it to be worth it to industry to design programs and policies around it. Instead, we should nationalize certain industries and make them free of charge to end users (e.g. healthcare, public transit, housing, education, etc).
- aeternum 7y ago
  The whole point of a market based economy is allocation of resources. Yes, rent, transport, and other costs may go up in the short-term with a UBI. However that creates strong opportunities for companies to come in and compete to drive those costs down. In contrast, when you nationalize those industries, there is no incentive to drive costs down. In fact, costs will likely go up because the more a nationalized industry spends, the more it gets from next year's budget.
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    A market economy distributes scarce resources to those with the most money. It is fundamentally irrational. To reuse an example from Richard Wolfe, if there are ten people that need milk, and there are 5 units of milk, we should distribute them according to need (e.g. medical, children, vs someone baking a cake). Instead, under a market, the rich get to buy it for their cat while the poor are priced out of the market.
    - aeternum 7y ago
      It may not seem moral, but allowing the rich to buy the milk for the cat often makes everyone better off. The high price for milk and inflow of dollars from the high demand lead to more dairy farms, or research into milk alternatives. That does not happen if you seize the milk and distribute it according to need.
clairity 7y ago
libertarians seem to embrace universal basic income, which is puzzling. instead, UBI should be viewed as an absolute affront to liberty and freedom, as it's designed to shackle everyone, rich and poor, to government largess (libertarian plank issue, not a personal opinion). further, it's an insidious wealth concentration mechanism aimed at removing both the motivation and means for upward mobility. the better policy is to equalize capital and labor power in the economy. we've had 50 years of granting capital great favor, and those experiments have only led to corruption, unfairness, and growing poverty and homelessness.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  Perhaps this makes it less puzzling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism Basically the idea is that UBI follows naturally from the fundamental right to the commons. To make the commons private property it’s only fair that the owner compensate the excluded commoners for the privilege.
  - clairity 7y ago
    that there is a strain of libertarianism that isn't 100% pro private property rights is interesting. but i'm not sure UBI serves the purpose of redistributing the common interest in property, even in part, because that seems to depend on how the money is taxed.
    - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
      That wikipedia page makes a passing reference to Henry George who argued for a single tax. That is, the only tax should be the land value tax and no income taxes would be needed, or justified. I guess an other framing would be that property owners rent property from the commons, at market value. So it’s not really a tax either, more or a rent.
- lawrenceyan 7y ago
  > it's an insidious wealth concentration mechanism aimed at removing both the motivation and means for upward mobility. Wealth concentration mechanism? This seems like the exact opposite of wealth concentration to me. You're distributing money here. The removal of upward mobility? Again, I fail to see how providing a basic income removes upward mobility. It's quite literally the exact opposite. One of the most difficult parts of getting yourself out of poverty and moving upward in class socioeconomically, is the seed level funding required to bootstrap yourself through your non-earning period to earning period. Usually in most cases, that's the time required to get an education when you're hemorrhaging money on both sides (i.e. having to pay tuition on one end while simultaneously having less time to work in favor of being able to have time to study/take the classes you're paying for on the other).
IXxXI 7y ago
America already has Universal Basic Income. Its called Social Security and it sucks.

24 points by lawrenceyan 7y ago

I am against UBI, but credit where it's due: it's not easy these days to break into the national political conversation with a single issue platform so far outside the Overton Window as Yang has. This is like the old parties of yore that campaigned on things like a bimetallism or Prohibition.

forgot-my-pw 7y ago
It's definitely something that we should research more. It worked for Alaska, in a smaller scope.

kryogen1c 7y ago

As someone who disagrees on most things with yang and sanders, I didnt see the most attractive thing about yangs proposal: this UBI replaces other social safety net programs and aims to gain efficiency by eliminating the overhead from multiple government offices.

tyre 7y ago
This isn’t a big selling point on the left. It would be in the general, but the make-up of the primary voters is further to the left. Dismantling government programs isn’t their jam.
- r00fus 7y ago
  There's also a hippocratic argument to be made that you shouldn't throw out what's not broken.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  It's also an awfully big "if" that it would actually replace them. "I promise" isn't enough to risk ending up with both the UBI and all the current programs. Therefore the qualifications aimed at those who disagree on fiscal grounds simply evaporate when the policy meets the real world. Bait and switch is older than politics.
r00fus 7y ago
You can probably guess why that wasn't raised by Yang - people who have said programs or think that poor people benefiting from said programs would see it as a bad trade. Personally, without cost containment on the supplier side (ie, inflation), or pegging this benefit to inflation, it sounds like a bad idea. Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent.
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  > Cash handouts are some of the most cost-effective things a government can do (up to a point), as dollars given to people living on a shoestring often recycle in the economy up to 5x, and result in about $1.73 returning to government via taxes for every $1 spent. That looks interesting; can I have a source for those numbers?
sornaensis 7y ago
This is not his proposal. His 'Freedom Dividend' is a minimum guarantee of income. A person receiving $1,000/mo or more in benefits will not see any change at all.
tehjoker 7y ago
I would encourage you to consider the overhead of multiple private insurance companies handling healthcare in a similar light.

tyre 7y ago

UBI is interesting politically. It combines the social welfare and income inequality that some like on the left and the libertarianism (people choosing what to do with their money rather than heavier government services) that’s popular on the non-batshit right. I doubt that the American electorate would go for it in the next fifty years. Given that it’s gaining support first on the left combined with the impressive propensity of the Democratic Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, navigating such a successfully nuanced political proposal seems to require one of the once-in-a-generation leader. High hopes, no expectations of success.

jmpman 7y ago

UBI plus removing the minimum wage seems like an interesting option.

tehjoker 7y ago

I am against UBI because the soon as you give people $1000 dollars, their rent, transport, and other associated costs will go up by exactly $1000 over a relatively quick time frame. It will initially look good, but it will be extremely transient. You'll then have all the same problems you had before and a huge financial engine sucking in and spitting out tremendous amounts of money that needs to be managed to no practical effect. These effects might not be visible with a "mincome" type RCT experiment because they rely on there being enough extra income lying around for it to be worth it to industry to design programs and policies around it. Instead, we should nationalize certain industries and make them free of charge to end users (e.g. healthcare, public transit, housing, education, etc).

aeternum 7y ago
The whole point of a market based economy is allocation of resources. Yes, rent, transport, and other costs may go up in the short-term with a UBI. However that creates strong opportunities for companies to come in and compete to drive those costs down. In contrast, when you nationalize those industries, there is no incentive to drive costs down. In fact, costs will likely go up because the more a nationalized industry spends, the more it gets from next year's budget.
- tehjoker 7y ago
  A market economy distributes scarce resources to those with the most money. It is fundamentally irrational. To reuse an example from Richard Wolfe, if there are ten people that need milk, and there are 5 units of milk, we should distribute them according to need (e.g. medical, children, vs someone baking a cake). Instead, under a market, the rich get to buy it for their cat while the poor are priced out of the market.
  - aeternum 7y ago
    It may not seem moral, but allowing the rich to buy the milk for the cat often makes everyone better off. The high price for milk and inflow of dollars from the high demand lead to more dairy farms, or research into milk alternatives. That does not happen if you seize the milk and distribute it according to need.

clairity 7y ago

libertarians seem to embrace universal basic income, which is puzzling. instead, UBI should be viewed as an absolute affront to liberty and freedom, as it's designed to shackle everyone, rich and poor, to government largess (libertarian plank issue, not a personal opinion). further, it's an insidious wealth concentration mechanism aimed at removing both the motivation and means for upward mobility. the better policy is to equalize capital and labor power in the economy. we've had 50 years of granting capital great favor, and those experiments have only led to corruption, unfairness, and growing poverty and homelessness.

CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
Perhaps this makes it less puzzling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism Basically the idea is that UBI follows naturally from the fundamental right to the commons. To make the commons private property it’s only fair that the owner compensate the excluded commoners for the privilege.
- clairity 7y ago
  that there is a strain of libertarianism that isn't 100% pro private property rights is interesting. but i'm not sure UBI serves the purpose of redistributing the common interest in property, even in part, because that seems to depend on how the money is taxed.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    That wikipedia page makes a passing reference to Henry George who argued for a single tax. That is, the only tax should be the land value tax and no income taxes would be needed, or justified. I guess an other framing would be that property owners rent property from the commons, at market value. So it’s not really a tax either, more or a rent.
lawrenceyan 7y ago
> it's an insidious wealth concentration mechanism aimed at removing both the motivation and means for upward mobility. Wealth concentration mechanism? This seems like the exact opposite of wealth concentration to me. You're distributing money here. The removal of upward mobility? Again, I fail to see how providing a basic income removes upward mobility. It's quite literally the exact opposite. One of the most difficult parts of getting yourself out of poverty and moving upward in class socioeconomically, is the seed level funding required to bootstrap yourself through your non-earning period to earning period. Usually in most cases, that's the time required to get an education when you're hemorrhaging money on both sides (i.e. having to pay tuition on one end while simultaneously having less time to work in favor of being able to have time to study/take the classes you're paying for on the other).

IXxXI 7y ago

America already has Universal Basic Income. Its called Social Security and it sucks.