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Your questions aren't hard. 1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up

Your questions aren't hard. 1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up a small income disparity and will gladly quit their part-time jobs. Labor might get more expensive, but given how long minimum wage has been depressed, I wouldn't count on it. 2) No, UBI is as expensive to administer as the existing tax code. Also, the fuck are you talking about? Social Security has gotten cheaper to administer over time [0]. 3) Who cares? Literally, it doesn't matter how many people "couch potato" or otherwise decide not to work when they already weren't in the labor market. Think about it for a bit. 4) Hopefully less wage slavery, less food insecurity, less homelessness, less wealth inequality. That is, UBI is hoped to do what it is marketed as doing. 5) In e.g. Sweden, the constant availability of funds from the government has enabled people to be more fully actualized, as they choose whether they want to go into secondary education, start a small business, buy a farm, or open an art studio. All of these are also subsidized in the USA, but poorly. UBI acts as an ideal prototype system for this sort of funding, without having to commit to a particular usage of funds. 6) Uh, we've had a global economy for centuries. All that has happened is that places with UBI and similar social programs have become well-known and globally visible. But UBI in Alaska exists [1] and does not draw people to move to Alaska, so I can easily conclude that it doesn't matter that much to the global economy. More generally, I think that you are afraid of nothing. [0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanent_Fund_Dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

spyckie2 6y ago
most of your answers don't even address the questions. 1) impact on businesses? 2) not about administration, about the cost of UBI itself. cost of social security is ballooning, not administration of it 3) it's important to judge UBI's costs and impacts relative to other social programs 4) "Hopefully" it will end world hunger too and also discover the cure for cancer. 5) Sweden doesn't implement UBI though? How does looking at Sweden allow you to say how UBI will affect people growing up? 6) comparing Alaska, the 46th on the list when looking at the size of US state economies, with the US (#1 economy in the world) is not a good comparison. It's not fear that are motivating these questions. The larger the investment, the more robust the plan needs to be and it's common sense for anyone to want to know more detail about a LTV ~100s of trillions of dollar investment.
- lidHanteyk 6y ago
  Okay, I think I see the root of the misunderstanding. UBI can be fully paid for by taxes [0], and the resulting system is administered using existing tax authorities. In the USA, this would mean that the IRS, which already administers taxes, would incur a one-time cost of setup but no additional ongoing costs. This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
  - spyckie2 6y ago
    > The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Again, 2nd order effects. Businesses will rely on employees less too. It might make businesses more capital reliant, lowering the entrepreneurship rate further. It might not, but the point is that saying it will be good because of labor mobility is like looking 1 move deep in a chess game. > Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. UBI is 3 times as much as our current social programs. It doesn't matter how cheap it is to administer if the actual allocation amount is so different. It's 15% of GDP, and yearly, not a one time cost. I strongly disagree that increasing the budget for social programs from 800b to 2.3t is not worth thinking about the potential 2nd order effects, which was my original point. > Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. I don't think Sweden avails government money the same way UBI does. If you could buy weed, alcohol, video games, vacations, travel, pets, furniture, sports equipment, or any other recreational activity in Sweden with their social programs then I would take this point more seriously. > Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. Alaska's UBI is literally a dividend from an investment fund. 25% of oil's profits would be put into the fund and payed out as a dividend, and the fund was well managed, leading to around $1000 a year in peak years. This is a very different structure, both in quantity of money payed out as a dividend as well as how the money is being taken from, to what is proposed in many UBI policy implementations. Alaska's money doesn't come as a re-distribution of tax, it's literally an investment fund. Alaska's amount is also 10x lower than most UBI proposals. When we have a $60 trillion dollar fund that we can draw 5.25% every year to pay for UBI, then I'll agree that Alaska is an example that UBI doesn't disrupt the economic fabric of our society.

spyckie2 6y ago

most of your answers don't even address the questions. 1) impact on businesses? 2) not about administration, about the cost of UBI itself. cost of social security is ballooning, not administration of it 3) it's important to judge UBI's costs and impacts relative to other social programs 4) "Hopefully" it will end world hunger too and also discover the cure for cancer. 5) Sweden doesn't implement UBI though? How does looking at Sweden allow you to say how UBI will affect people growing up? 6) comparing Alaska, the 46th on the list when looking at the size of US state economies, with the US (#1 economy in the world) is not a good comparison. It's not fear that are motivating these questions. The larger the investment, the more robust the plan needs to be and it's common sense for anyone to want to know more detail about a LTV ~100s of trillions of dollar investment.

lidHanteyk 6y ago
Okay, I think I see the root of the misunderstanding. UBI can be fully paid for by taxes [0], and the resulting system is administered using existing tax authorities. In the USA, this would mean that the IRS, which already administers taxes, would incur a one-time cost of setup but no additional ongoing costs. This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
- spyckie2 6y ago
  > The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing. Again, 2nd order effects. Businesses will rely on employees less too. It might make businesses more capital reliant, lowering the entrepreneurship rate further. It might not, but the point is that saying it will be good because of labor mobility is like looking 1 move deep in a chess game. > Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar. UBI is 3 times as much as our current social programs. It doesn't matter how cheap it is to administer if the actual allocation amount is so different. It's 15% of GDP, and yearly, not a one time cost. I strongly disagree that increasing the budget for social programs from 800b to 2.3t is not worth thinking about the potential 2nd order effects, which was my original point. > Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. I don't think Sweden avails government money the same way UBI does. If you could buy weed, alcohol, video games, vacations, travel, pets, furniture, sports equipment, or any other recreational activity in Sweden with their social programs then I would take this point more seriously. > Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society. Alaska's UBI is literally a dividend from an investment fund. 25% of oil's profits would be put into the fund and payed out as a dividend, and the fund was well managed, leading to around $1000 a year in peak years. This is a very different structure, both in quantity of money payed out as a dividend as well as how the money is being taken from, to what is proposed in many UBI policy implementations. Alaska's money doesn't come as a re-distribution of tax, it's literally an investment fund. Alaska's amount is also 10x lower than most UBI proposals. When we have a $60 trillion dollar fund that we can draw 5.25% every year to pay for UBI, then I'll agree that Alaska is an example that UBI doesn't disrupt the economic fabric of our society.