6 ms·

UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. My argument against UBI is that it erodes the desire to work, and we still need nearly everybody

UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. My argument against UBI is that it erodes the desire to work, and we still need nearly everybody of working age to work... until the robots catch up (they still have a lot of catching up to do).

zozbot234 6y ago
The whole point of UBI is that it has lower disincentives against work than other kinds of social insurance. When you say that UBI discourages working, that's perhaps true compared w/ no social insurance at all but it's not a very meaningful comparison.
- mikedilger 6y ago
  I've not heard this. Can you explain how? And are you also suggesting that UBI proponents support abolition of other kinds of social insurance, replacing them with (not augmenting them with) UBI?
  - astura 6y ago
    Yeah, the whole idea of ubi is you replace the patchwork of various social programs (and the overhead of each program) with a basic ubi for everyone. It's supposed to be much more efficient and there's no disincentives to self improvement (because you never lose your benefits). I personally don't actually think it disincentives working very much because people who want to work for more than just the minimum always will and people who really, really don't wanna work find a way to get out of working within the current system. Since my family is full of degenerates, I've seen every trick in the book used. Out of my dad's family (8 kids) only one (1) has meaningfully participated in paid employment.
    - Supermancho 6y ago
      The majority of my wife's family also do not work. It has been this way for at least 3 generations and are raising another generation of the same.
      - astura 6y ago
        So what's your opinion on ubi given your observations with your wife's family finding ways to get out of employment, if you don't mind me asking. Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to get rid of those sorts of people, so someone ends up "paying for them" anyway.
        _curious_ 6y ago
        Who ends up paying for them and why?
        Supermancho 6y ago
        The public taxpayer ends up paying for their housing, their food stamps, their bus fare, healthcare, etc. As I indicated, it's multi-generational. However, this is because their behavior is degenerate. They spend all day being paranoid of people coming to take what little they have and lack any sort of trust in each other or themselves. Drugs are involved (including pot) across the board, excepting the little kids who are raised around it. As an aside, my best friend (prescribed adderall) has always been affected by "the curse of the gifted". When lower grade school is easy. After high school, real intellectual competition breaks that paradigm of "if it isn't easy for me, it's too hard" resulting in similar lazy adult behavior...although he does work. He's never been stable and still hovers just over minimum wage and cannot care for his kids. These problems that have similar outcome (like homelessness) which are often conflated.
        astura 6y ago
        Depends on the person, and how they avoid working. I can only speak to my personal observations. There's the people who never get a job as an adult and so they never move out of mom and dad's house. Mom and/or dad end up supporting them until their deaths. I asked a guy I know whose son is 37, living with him, and doesn't have a job and hasn't had one in decades (and never worked full time) why he allows that sort of arrangement. He said "because I know he's got a safe place to sleep and something to eat." There's people who have a kid or two and live off child support. In some states having a one night stand that produces a child with someone who has a salary of ~$120,000 is more lucrative than going to college and working the median salary for a college graduate. Even rape victims owe child support. There's two victims here, the person paying and the child(ren) who exist solely as a paycheck. There's the related "bait and switch spouse," that's when someone, upon marriage (or cohabitation), just quits their job (or gets fired) and unilaterally decides they don't want to get another. This, of course, was their plan from the start. They may make the motions of trying to get a job to make it look like they are trying to work to their spouse, but the goal is to not work. They will ride this out as long as the spouse will put up with it, which can be decades. This is what my dad did, he basically worked for a couple weeks of my parents marriage and my mom has been footing the bill for him in the 4 decades since (and, no, he never took care of the housework or childrearing or anything like that). Then, finally, we have the fake disability people. Claim you can't work due to pain, depression, anxiety, migraines, etc. Anything that's a subjective diagnosis. Establish a paper trail, then apply for disability. It really helps if you are in one of the above categories while doing this, because you have a history of "not being able to work" for the disability claim.
    - mikedilger 6y ago
      I get how losing a benefit if you start working could be an even greater disincentive than UBI. I wasn't catching that point previously, so thanks.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        I know a few people on disability. Since it's their lifeline they are generally stressed to terrified of losing it. So you have both an disincentive to look for work and risk losing benefits. And the stress also negatively effects their mental health as well. Which also makes it difficult to find productive work. It's also cruel way to make people live.
        _curious_ 6y ago
        Who is making people live this way and how are they forcing them?
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        It's the situation caused by the laws and policies in place and their physical and mental heath issues. I have some sympathy because I got sick in the early 2000's and couldn't work and was just about overwhelmed with just trying to figure out what was wrong medically. Fortunately I had enough savings to see me through without having to worry about being homeless. And enough professional contacts that I was able to land a light duty job once I started recovering. I only needed to work 3-4 hours a day at first.
  - rafd 6y ago
    Existing social insurance schemes typically are of the form: you get $1000/mth, but, if you do any work, it subtracts from your payment. So, if you work less than $1000/mth, you're working, say, 100 hours "for nothing". To make it worse, there is often an income point where the payment goes to zero (ex. if you make more than $800, you are no longer eligible, leaving a $200 gap). Or there are certain benefits that are lost (child credits, transit credits). With UBI, you get $1000, but then every hour worked puts more money in your pocket.
ineedasername 6y ago
I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work: Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it. The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more.
- mikedilger 6y ago
  Then I suppose I projecting (psychologically). I would stop working. I'm barely working now. But I shouldn't assume I'm typical. Thanks for the feedback.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  "I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work" Probably about to the amount of working time and thus income it replaces? That could be an hour a day, a day a week, or a week per month depending again on how much UBI we're talking? "Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it." That's because the job isn't keeping someone at the poverty level, they are keeping themselves at the poverty level by choice. Sometimes, some people choose to change that because they realize they are the only thing holding themselves back, not the other way around. "The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more." Agreed...although many in America are already choosing to reject the notion of a "career path" and have relinquished their desires for "upward trajectory" - and that's before UBI.
- marcusverus 6y ago
  It is a monumental assumption that people are career driven enough to keep working once there is a UBI in effect. Especially considering that people are career driven to provide for their families, and the UBI essentially makes that a non-issue. But let's hang on to that general assumption, and think about some specific examples where UBI will undeniably have an impact. Many people will work fewer hours or quit their second jobs. Currently 7 million workers have a second job.[1] Young people graduating from high school and college would have a greatly diminished incentive to enter the workforce. Why get a job at all when you can shack up with your buds, pool your UBI, and have all the money you need for booze and video games? Many will fall into this trap temporarily, some permanently. Millions of creatives who want to work on their music or write the next great american novel are out on day one. How about the folks currently working to supplement Social Security? Currently, 10 million people over 65 are still working[0]. How many of them quit their jobs on day one of UBI? Millions of working moms are out on day one. The biggest issue will be the fact that UBI will make retirement instantly possible for many, and much easier for many more. Currently, to retire with an income of 40K, you would need a nest-egg of $1.3M (assuming a conservative withdrawal rate of 3% annually and no social security). But if you're guaranteed a UBI of 12K per year, a married couple receiving 24K per year in guaranteed income is able to retire with a nest-egg of only 533K. Tens of millions of the most productive workers in the economy will be ready for retirement decades ahead of schedule. None of these things are necessarily bad--I'd love to be able to retire a decade ahead of schedule! But when the workforce is significantly reduced in size while spending is dramatically increased, taxes will necessarily skyrocket, the incentive to work will plummet even further, and the resulting feedback loop will hollow-out the workforce and bring the economy to a screeching halt. [0] https://unitedincome.capitalone.com/library/older-americans-in-the-workforce https://unitedincome.capitalone.com/library/older-americans-... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-everyone-have-two-jobs-1532474015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-everyone-have-two-jobs-153...
zhoujianfu 6y ago
I feel like that’s the same argument the hunters gatherers had against farming: it erodes the desire to hunt and gather!
zanny 6y ago
> still need nearly everybody of working age to work Within my entire known family tree maybe 1 in 8 people work jobs essential to the creation of goods (including food, power, water), the construction or maintenance of shelter, or the providing of health or transportation. A huge swath of society is employed in doing things often equating to simply moving numbers around in databases or inside heads. Or more generally, they serve economics by operating to move money from one pocketbook to another. Its also worth mentioning that labor force participation rates trend downwards over the last 50 years in industrialized nations. Since the participation boom of womens emancipation there has been a general decline in participation not reflected in unemployment figures largely because the number of people required to produce the needs and wants of 99% of everyone else is so few, and because there are so few of means to create demand all on their own (ie, millionaire+ elites) for more extravagant goods markets that don't manifest in a widespread form.
lostlogin 6y ago
> UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. If you can make it work for a group that are working for money less that the population average, surely you can make it work for a larger population? Keep in mind that there are other parts to this like sick pay, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment leave etc. There are a collection of separate systems that could be combined, have vastly less administrative overhead and improve incentives (ie more work = more pay).
erpellan 6y ago
It can be structured as an income tax that starts out negative. Everyone of working age is paid the UBI, which is designed to act as the safety net. This frees up a ton of overhead as means-testing, benefit fraud, etc. all goes away. Then when you get a job, the UBI starts to reduce, at a rate LESS than the money you are earning. So if you're paid $1000 monthly UBI, and get a $1000 job, it might reduce UBI by $500. So you're always better off working. You'd probably want a sliding scale so maybe the first couple of hundred only reduces your UBI by 0.20 per dollar, or whatever. It can be structured so the net tax take for the government is the same. Yes this probably means people earning more than say $100,000 pay a bit more in tax. I'm okay with that.
- Kaiyou 6y ago
  Working 40h weeks for an extra $500 isn't a good deal. As long as I can sustain life without working, not working at all will always beat getting some scraps. If there aren't repercussions for not working, than why bother?
  - snovv_crash 6y ago
    The idea is that you'd be able to sustain if you lived _very_ frugally. Generally, people don't enjoy that. They like to eat the nice food, go to places, buy things, all of which wouldn't be covered by the UBI.
    - Kaiyou 6y ago
      I lived my entire live frugally. I enjoy that. Working 40h weeks on the other hand isn't all that fun, even though now I have thousands of dollars to blow every month. If I had the choice I'd live frugally and not work. I'm eating the same thing everyday, like to stay at home and hate to buy things. I'm working because I know it's necessary.

zozbot234 6y ago

The whole point of UBI is that it has lower disincentives against work than other kinds of social insurance. When you say that UBI discourages working, that's perhaps true compared w/ no social insurance at all but it's not a very meaningful comparison.

mikedilger 6y ago
I've not heard this. Can you explain how? And are you also suggesting that UBI proponents support abolition of other kinds of social insurance, replacing them with (not augmenting them with) UBI?
- astura 6y ago
  Yeah, the whole idea of ubi is you replace the patchwork of various social programs (and the overhead of each program) with a basic ubi for everyone. It's supposed to be much more efficient and there's no disincentives to self improvement (because you never lose your benefits). I personally don't actually think it disincentives working very much because people who want to work for more than just the minimum always will and people who really, really don't wanna work find a way to get out of working within the current system. Since my family is full of degenerates, I've seen every trick in the book used. Out of my dad's family (8 kids) only one (1) has meaningfully participated in paid employment.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    The majority of my wife's family also do not work. It has been this way for at least 3 generations and are raising another generation of the same.
    - astura 6y ago
      So what's your opinion on ubi given your observations with your wife's family finding ways to get out of employment, if you don't mind me asking. Personally, I don't think that you're ever going to get rid of those sorts of people, so someone ends up "paying for them" anyway.
      - _curious_ 6y ago
        Who ends up paying for them and why?
        Supermancho 6y ago
        The public taxpayer ends up paying for their housing, their food stamps, their bus fare, healthcare, etc. As I indicated, it's multi-generational. However, this is because their behavior is degenerate. They spend all day being paranoid of people coming to take what little they have and lack any sort of trust in each other or themselves. Drugs are involved (including pot) across the board, excepting the little kids who are raised around it. As an aside, my best friend (prescribed adderall) has always been affected by "the curse of the gifted". When lower grade school is easy. After high school, real intellectual competition breaks that paradigm of "if it isn't easy for me, it's too hard" resulting in similar lazy adult behavior...although he does work. He's never been stable and still hovers just over minimum wage and cannot care for his kids. These problems that have similar outcome (like homelessness) which are often conflated.
        astura 6y ago
        Depends on the person, and how they avoid working. I can only speak to my personal observations. There's the people who never get a job as an adult and so they never move out of mom and dad's house. Mom and/or dad end up supporting them until their deaths. I asked a guy I know whose son is 37, living with him, and doesn't have a job and hasn't had one in decades (and never worked full time) why he allows that sort of arrangement. He said "because I know he's got a safe place to sleep and something to eat." There's people who have a kid or two and live off child support. In some states having a one night stand that produces a child with someone who has a salary of ~$120,000 is more lucrative than going to college and working the median salary for a college graduate. Even rape victims owe child support. There's two victims here, the person paying and the child(ren) who exist solely as a paycheck. There's the related "bait and switch spouse," that's when someone, upon marriage (or cohabitation), just quits their job (or gets fired) and unilaterally decides they don't want to get another. This, of course, was their plan from the start. They may make the motions of trying to get a job to make it look like they are trying to work to their spouse, but the goal is to not work. They will ride this out as long as the spouse will put up with it, which can be decades. This is what my dad did, he basically worked for a couple weeks of my parents marriage and my mom has been footing the bill for him in the 4 decades since (and, no, he never took care of the housework or childrearing or anything like that). Then, finally, we have the fake disability people. Claim you can't work due to pain, depression, anxiety, migraines, etc. Anything that's a subjective diagnosis. Establish a paper trail, then apply for disability. It really helps if you are in one of the above categories while doing this, because you have a history of "not being able to work" for the disability claim.
  - mikedilger 6y ago
    I get how losing a benefit if you start working could be an even greater disincentive than UBI. I wasn't catching that point previously, so thanks.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      I know a few people on disability. Since it's their lifeline they are generally stressed to terrified of losing it. So you have both an disincentive to look for work and risk losing benefits. And the stress also negatively effects their mental health as well. Which also makes it difficult to find productive work. It's also cruel way to make people live.
      - _curious_ 6y ago
        Who is making people live this way and how are they forcing them?
        Gibbon1 6y ago
        It's the situation caused by the laws and policies in place and their physical and mental heath issues. I have some sympathy because I got sick in the early 2000's and couldn't work and was just about overwhelmed with just trying to figure out what was wrong medically. Fortunately I had enough savings to see me through without having to worry about being homeless. And enough professional contacts that I was able to land a light duty job once I started recovering. I only needed to work 3-4 hours a day at first.
- rafd 6y ago
  Existing social insurance schemes typically are of the form: you get $1000/mth, but, if you do any work, it subtracts from your payment. So, if you work less than $1000/mth, you're working, say, 100 hours "for nothing". To make it worse, there is often an income point where the payment goes to zero (ex. if you make more than $800, you are no longer eligible, leaving a $200 gap). Or there are certain benefits that are lost (child credits, transit credits). With UBI, you get $1000, but then every hour worked puts more money in your pocket.

ineedasername 6y ago

I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work: Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it. The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more.

mikedilger 6y ago
Then I suppose I projecting (psychologically). I would stop working. I'm barely working now. But I shouldn't assume I'm typical. Thanks for the feedback.
_curious_ 6y ago
"I'm not sure how much it erodes the desire to work" Probably about to the amount of working time and thus income it replaces? That could be an hour a day, a day a week, or a week per month depending again on how much UBI we're talking? "Having a minimum wage job that that keeps you at the the poverty level doesn't really dissuade people from wanting more and trying to get it." That's because the job isn't keeping someone at the poverty level, they are keeping themselves at the poverty level by choice. Sometimes, some people choose to change that because they realize they are the only thing holding themselves back, not the other way around. "The entire culture of having a "career path" with an upward trajectory runs counter to the idea that people, given something like UBI, will suddenly stop wanting & being willing to work for more." Agreed...although many in America are already choosing to reject the notion of a "career path" and have relinquished their desires for "upward trajectory" - and that's before UBI.
marcusverus 6y ago
It is a monumental assumption that people are career driven enough to keep working once there is a UBI in effect. Especially considering that people are career driven to provide for their families, and the UBI essentially makes that a non-issue. But let's hang on to that general assumption, and think about some specific examples where UBI will undeniably have an impact. Many people will work fewer hours or quit their second jobs. Currently 7 million workers have a second job.[1] Young people graduating from high school and college would have a greatly diminished incentive to enter the workforce. Why get a job at all when you can shack up with your buds, pool your UBI, and have all the money you need for booze and video games? Many will fall into this trap temporarily, some permanently. Millions of creatives who want to work on their music or write the next great american novel are out on day one. How about the folks currently working to supplement Social Security? Currently, 10 million people over 65 are still working[0]. How many of them quit their jobs on day one of UBI? Millions of working moms are out on day one. The biggest issue will be the fact that UBI will make retirement instantly possible for many, and much easier for many more. Currently, to retire with an income of 40K, you would need a nest-egg of $1.3M (assuming a conservative withdrawal rate of 3% annually and no social security). But if you're guaranteed a UBI of 12K per year, a married couple receiving 24K per year in guaranteed income is able to retire with a nest-egg of only 533K. Tens of millions of the most productive workers in the economy will be ready for retirement decades ahead of schedule. None of these things are necessarily bad--I'd love to be able to retire a decade ahead of schedule! But when the workforce is significantly reduced in size while spending is dramatically increased, taxes will necessarily skyrocket, the incentive to work will plummet even further, and the resulting feedback loop will hollow-out the workforce and bring the economy to a screeching halt. [0] https://unitedincome.capitalone.com/library/older-americans-in-the-workforce https://unitedincome.capitalone.com/library/older-americans-... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-everyone-have-two-jobs-1532474015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-everyone-have-two-jobs-153...

zhoujianfu 6y ago

I feel like that’s the same argument the hunters gatherers had against farming: it erodes the desire to hunt and gather!

zanny 6y ago

> still need nearly everybody of working age to work Within my entire known family tree maybe 1 in 8 people work jobs essential to the creation of goods (including food, power, water), the construction or maintenance of shelter, or the providing of health or transportation. A huge swath of society is employed in doing things often equating to simply moving numbers around in databases or inside heads. Or more generally, they serve economics by operating to move money from one pocketbook to another. Its also worth mentioning that labor force participation rates trend downwards over the last 50 years in industrialized nations. Since the participation boom of womens emancipation there has been a general decline in participation not reflected in unemployment figures largely because the number of people required to produce the needs and wants of 99% of everyone else is so few, and because there are so few of means to create demand all on their own (ie, millionaire+ elites) for more extravagant goods markets that don't manifest in a widespread form.

lostlogin 6y ago

> UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. If you can make it work for a group that are working for money less that the population average, surely you can make it work for a larger population? Keep in mind that there are other parts to this like sick pay, maternity/paternity leave, unemployment leave etc. There are a collection of separate systems that could be combined, have vastly less administrative overhead and improve incentives (ie more work = more pay).

erpellan 6y ago

It can be structured as an income tax that starts out negative. Everyone of working age is paid the UBI, which is designed to act as the safety net. This frees up a ton of overhead as means-testing, benefit fraud, etc. all goes away. Then when you get a job, the UBI starts to reduce, at a rate LESS than the money you are earning. So if you're paid $1000 monthly UBI, and get a $1000 job, it might reduce UBI by $500. So you're always better off working. You'd probably want a sliding scale so maybe the first couple of hundred only reduces your UBI by 0.20 per dollar, or whatever. It can be structured so the net tax take for the government is the same. Yes this probably means people earning more than say $100,000 pay a bit more in tax. I'm okay with that.

Kaiyou 6y ago
Working 40h weeks for an extra $500 isn't a good deal. As long as I can sustain life without working, not working at all will always beat getting some scraps. If there aren't repercussions for not working, than why bother?
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  The idea is that you'd be able to sustain if you lived _very_ frugally. Generally, people don't enjoy that. They like to eat the nice food, go to places, buy things, all of which wouldn't be covered by the UBI.
  - Kaiyou 6y ago
    I lived my entire live frugally. I enjoy that. Working 40h weeks on the other hand isn't all that fun, even though now I have thousands of dollars to blow every month. If I had the choice I'd live frugally and not work. I'm eating the same thing everyday, like to stay at home and hate to buy things. I'm working because I know it's necessary.