11 ms·

Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-

Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. What happened?

jdc 6y ago
Yep and as a replacement, it was supposed to drastically cut administrative costs.
- frogpelt 6y ago
  It definitely should. But one real problem with bureaucracy is that it tends to go to great lengths to justify itself. It also self-replicates like a virus. So, in practice, I imagine there would be lots of offices and agencies, services and interdependent liaison offices and agencies along with the requisite inspector general offices and agencies and the necessary committees, subcommittees, and working groups that would have to be created. In the land of government bureaucracy, the rapidly increasing fixed-pie of current and (hopefully) future taxpayer revenue gets divided up into more and more slices every day.
- gota 6y ago
  I think that was a major point, too, because a significant portion of the money available for social assistance is spent on deciding who can get it and fighting 'fraud'. A blanket universal give is a lot easier. However - I've always been puzzled by how each person in the US doesn't have a public, singularly identifying number assigned. Doesn't that make even an 'universal' basic income hard to define? How do you guarantee that every person gets one, and only one, BI check every month? How do you find out who is dead and should stop getting one...? From what I know, SSN are used for stuff like that, but there's all this weird stuff about it (althoug I admit my knowledge of it comes from a half forgotten CGP Grey video, and that the impression that stuck)
  - HideousKojima 6y ago
    Social Security's admin costs are ~.7% of the program's budget, eliminating admin overhead, means-testing, and fraud fighting won't get you many gains: https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-top-ten-facts-about-social-security https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-...
    - jdc 6y ago
      I'm not in the US, so I know little about its social security programs. But isn't Social Security is one of many? Also this paragraph from the linked article suggests that the 0.7% figure does not include means testing: Indeed, universal participation and the absence of means-testing make Social Security very efficient to administer. Administrative costs amount to only 0.7 percent of annual benefits, far below the percentages for private retirement annuities. Means-testing Social Security would impose significant reporting and processing burdens on both recipients and administrators, undercutting many of those advantages while yielding little savings.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
Most proposals are temporary relief in response to the crisis, small scale trials, or campaign promises kept intentionally vague.
slg 6y ago
Because replacing all other forms of social welfare is completely impractical from a political standpoint in either the short or medium term. It would involve huge societal changes that would require most people to rethink how government works. That isn't something that would happen quickly. If you are a UBI proponent, you can either spend multiple decades fighting that fight before you see any progress or you compromise on a more feasible implementation.
- andrekandre 6y ago
  the other thing is, without proper price controls (rent, basic food stuffs, transportation etc) business will look at it as a chance to jack up prices because "free money" the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster
  - bhupy 6y ago
    > the other thing is, without proper price controls (rent, basic food stuffs, transportation etc) business will look at it as a chance to jack up prices because "free money" I don't buy this argument. Businesses that do this would be leaving money on the table: namely the poor people that were outside of their total addressable market. Whereas before those folks would never have been able to provide revenue, with more cash in their pockets, they are now potential consumers. Increasing prices just maintains the same TAM for no real reason — you can make more revenue by serving the newly minted consumers. The only good/service for which this breaks down is housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform (like Japan).
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    You can only keep the prices high with cartelization or true scarcity. Though removing subsidies (for things like public transport) can also raise prices. But our food supply is highly distributed. If one vendor charges higher-prices, others will take the opportunity to offer lower prices as long as they still can get the margin. We often debate various forms of market failure on this forum, but in the cases of functioning markets, supply and demand does indeed work.
HideousKojima 6y ago
>What happened? Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. That's what happened. There simply isn't enough tax revenue, even if you seized 100% of the wealth and future earnings of the wealthy, to provide a basic income sufficient for most people to live off of. Also a lot of proposals would have ended up giving the poor and elderly less than they get under current programs. And the claims of reduced overhead wouldn't have made much of a dent in things either, IIRC admin costs for Social Security are less than 1% of what the actual payouts are
- nawitus 6y ago
  > Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical. That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.
  - wincy 6y ago
    But it wouldn’t be $2000 per worker, as you’d have to get enough tax money to pay the people who aren’t working that $2000. If I make $6000 a month and you make $0 a month, and then we both get $2000 a month from my taxes, how can my take home pay remain $6000?
    - bsanr2 6y ago
      Well, it would be you and several of your peers making $6000 a month, one or two people making an order of magnitude more per month, and a whole heckuva lot of people making $3k-$4k a month, contributing a progressively bigger portion to the one person making $0. So, no, you don't hang on to the full $6000... But then you may get it back from taxing the capital holdings of those people who own exceptionally large amounts of private property.
nnx 6y ago
Current proposals have not been written by long-time proponents of UBI afaik, it's been repurposed and repackaged, rather badly, by political opportunists who now see the need resonate well with electorate during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis?
uses 6y ago
I think there has been growing momentum behind the idea that some needs aren't met best by a market approach. One of the ideas behind UBI is that people can figure out what they need, and just spend the money. But that doesn't really solve the needs that may not be optimal for a 100% market approach - probably the big two being health and education.
- gowld 6y ago
  And housing.
  - Tade0 6y ago
    This is the elephant in the room here. It's a basic good, but its price is still very much driven by supply and demand.
    - fastball 6y ago
      America just needs zoning policy that isn't totally broken (i.e. geared towards the rich). Japan has been doing a pretty good job.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > America just needs zoning policy that isn't totally broken (i.e. geared towards the rich). Japan has been doing a pretty good job. Compounded by nearly 2-3 decades of astonishing population decline, and a 'freeter' type lifestyle for all but the most 'privileged' youth that also helps in reducing access to desirable housing, too. Personally speaking had Fukushima not occurred, I think I would be owner and chef of a Kaiseki kitchen at an Onsen Ryoukan in the Country-side by now given how affordable and plentiful those abandoned compounds are all over Japan. NIMBY is real and gets the nouveau riche up in arms and drives them out to the polls and releases purse strings for lobbyists like nothing else, but to be entirely honest as a multi-generational Californian: they can keep the Valley. Its atrociously managed, its old, over-crowded, needlessly expensive and stricken with horrible politically ambitious and greed driven shortsightedness, the homeless problem is a glaring symptom that has clearly proven that neither money nor legislation can solve its core problem. My family up there divested from their businesses and sold their homes in the area in mid 2000s to move to the South, and while its not perfect it shows that there are is no better way to show your opposition to a system then to just leave. If many former office jobs and school classes (K-12 as well as University) can be optimized to be done remotely, then I will reluctantly accept that the COVID situation was worth it. Having a population density like seen in New York is not just undesirable (for many reasons) but also a biological hazard. Disruption had to come the housing situation, and I think this could be just as good as anything else in trying to alleviate the damage caused from having remained in an archaic system created to benefit the Land-owning class for doing nothing but being born at a time when housing prices as well as overall Economic health and sound wages were accessible to most in the US. These land owners don't create wealth, they just consume it off the backs of people far more risk-prone than themselves that still have Utility in the Labor force, and we're thinking they'll ever allow for implementing something that is against there interests? That's a deluded panacea that won't ever be achieved using orthodox methods, like voting for fairer zoning laws.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable. That's there the means testing has come in to try to limit that. Something more like a "guaranteed minimum income" where you can't have less money than what is required to have a good standard of living is a cheaper and more effective idea that accomplishes the same goals of ending poverty.
- uoaei 6y ago
  If the rhetoric is solely around "government spending" then the perspective will always be that UBI is "too expensive". But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.
  - chris_va 6y ago
    A higher velocity of capital ~= larger economy, which is good. However, a higher velocity of capital without commensurate economic value being created ~= massive inflation. This is a potential risk for UBI, and one that small-scale studies do not cover. Ideally, the additional economic value would be greater than the face value of the capital transferred every year, but there is no guarantee that is correct (nor is there any reason they should even be on the same order of magnitude). Implementing UBI on a national scale would be a grand experiment. Most grand experiments tend to fail with massive upheaval. I think for UBI to be adopted, you would need a plausible incremental strategy with a lot of safety checks.
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Yes, taking things ad absurdum in either direction will lead to catastrophe. The perspective of MMT is that government can and should tax out money at a rate that keeps the economy from inflating beyond the scope of our control, and inject it at a rate that sustains the velocity of capital. Making this perspective the dominant one in discourse, however, would require a lot more public trust in government before people got comfortable with the idea of governments taxing us for our benefit.
WalterBright 6y ago
> What happened? Somebody did the math.
elicash 6y ago
Proponents of UBI were ALWAYS a coalition of different people who came from different ideological backgrounds and believed different things.
- AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  Well that's certainly true of every cause right?
  - elicash 6y ago
    The successful ones create coalitions, certainly! It's also a good argument against painting people who seemingly agree with too broad a brush. But in this case, I remember a coworker of mine who a while back created an advocacy org for UBI. He's a socialist. I specifically remember him reaching out to work with libertarians and getting them in leadership roles. (Not sure if this org still exists.)
timwaagh 6y ago
maybe they got a reality check insofar this is possible for BI proponents. someone with (say) a broken arm needs more than a healthy person who is just unemployed.
- fastball 6y ago
  Why does someone with a broken arm need more than someone without one if both are unemployed?
somethoughts 6y ago
Just happened to be reading about how the current stimulus checks are being used this morning. Perhaps its a bit of click bait, but interesting to ponder nonetheless. It does seem like using UBI to play in the stock market would not be the intent of UBI and be hard to prevent. "Many Americans used part of their coronavirus stimulus check to trade stocks" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-their-coronavirus-stimulus-check-to-trade-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-...
- fastball 6y ago
  Isn't buying stock a great way to help the economy recover?
  - somethoughts 6y ago
    I'm not making any morale or financial decision making judgements :) - I'm mostly pointing out that using your UBI to make stock market investments is not usually mentioned as a use case by UBI proponents.
- thekyle 6y ago
  I actually think people putting their stimulus checks into the stock market is better than the existing QE system. Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.
wturner 6y ago
Their are two main factions of UBI. On one side you have free market libertarians and conservatives that would cut social spending to pay for it. On the other hand you have a "progressive" version of UBI that is founded on Modern Monetary theory and would simply make UBI an addendum to social spending. Modern monetary theory holds that a government that issues it's own currency can never go insolvent. If you haven't heard of MMT I suggest you google the topic and listen or watch some material by Stephanie Kelton on the topic. Edit: With the corona virus "stimulus" people are getting a taste of modern monetary theory. They are starting to realize how little the nation debt matters and that what really matters is the result of the spending and the actions it invokes. Some people are wondering why the stimulus checks are so small. I believe that if they were any bigger people might get used to the idea of living decent lives without economic anxiety thus the cats out the bag for the corporate big wigs, corporate democrats and republicans. It might lead to a domino effect of a new standard of living and a new collection of cultural assumptions regarding money Also, generally Andrew Yangs version of UBI would cut social spending and is not founded on modern monetary theory axioms. Edit again, I should mention Stephanie Kelton does not support UBI perse', she supports a federal jobs program but the economic assumptions still hold true.
danans 6y ago
> What happened? > Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. "Universal" means not means-tested. That hasn't changed. What happened is that those who promoted UBI in order to achieve their objective of dismantling the social safety net and reducing overall taxation and government expenditure lost interest in it for many reasons. First, and most important, the UBI supporting right largely returned to the standard economic platform of the right, since the political changes in 2016 resulted in many of their goals being achieved, including the attacks on Obamacare and food stamp programs, and the massive tax cuts for the very wealthy. Second, they couldn't really explain UBI to others in the mainstream right. Simply cutting the safety net to punish "lazy" people who leech off the system is, and has always been, an easier line to sell politically vs "we consolidate all the existing safety net expenditures, cut them by x% by dismantling the bureaucracy, and distribute the cash as UBI, for a net reduction in total expenditure". UBI is economics nerd stuff on the right, a clever scheme and experiment whose costs would be ultimately paid by others who were less fortunate - in the form of reduced overall benefits. Those who were left supporting UBI (no pun intended) were those who see it as one tool among many needed to reduce inequality, not as a way to further reduce government assistance to struggling people. They believe the cost should be payed by greater taxation on the wealthy, and their support is rooted in their beliefs about what a more just society would look like. Their perspective was further bolstered by Andrew Yang's advocacy, and the measures being taken now due to covid19. Therefore their perspectives on UBI have become the dominantly heard perspectives on UBI.

Years ago, proponents of UBI claimed that it was a replacement for all other forms of social welfare. Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. What happened?

jdc 6y ago

Yep and as a replacement, it was supposed to drastically cut administrative costs.

frogpelt 6y ago
It definitely should. But one real problem with bureaucracy is that it tends to go to great lengths to justify itself. It also self-replicates like a virus. So, in practice, I imagine there would be lots of offices and agencies, services and interdependent liaison offices and agencies along with the requisite inspector general offices and agencies and the necessary committees, subcommittees, and working groups that would have to be created. In the land of government bureaucracy, the rapidly increasing fixed-pie of current and (hopefully) future taxpayer revenue gets divided up into more and more slices every day.
gota 6y ago
I think that was a major point, too, because a significant portion of the money available for social assistance is spent on deciding who can get it and fighting 'fraud'. A blanket universal give is a lot easier. However - I've always been puzzled by how each person in the US doesn't have a public, singularly identifying number assigned. Doesn't that make even an 'universal' basic income hard to define? How do you guarantee that every person gets one, and only one, BI check every month? How do you find out who is dead and should stop getting one...? From what I know, SSN are used for stuff like that, but there's all this weird stuff about it (althoug I admit my knowledge of it comes from a half forgotten CGP Grey video, and that the impression that stuck)
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  Social Security's admin costs are ~.7% of the program's budget, eliminating admin overhead, means-testing, and fraud fighting won't get you many gains: https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-top-ten-facts-about-social-security https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/policy-basics-...
  - jdc 6y ago
    I'm not in the US, so I know little about its social security programs. But isn't Social Security is one of many? Also this paragraph from the linked article suggests that the 0.7% figure does not include means testing: Indeed, universal participation and the absence of means-testing make Social Security very efficient to administer. Administrative costs amount to only 0.7 percent of annual benefits, far below the percentages for private retirement annuities. Means-testing Social Security would impose significant reporting and processing burdens on both recipients and administrators, undercutting many of those advantages while yielding little savings.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

Most proposals are temporary relief in response to the crisis, small scale trials, or campaign promises kept intentionally vague.

slg 6y ago

Because replacing all other forms of social welfare is completely impractical from a political standpoint in either the short or medium term. It would involve huge societal changes that would require most people to rethink how government works. That isn't something that would happen quickly. If you are a UBI proponent, you can either spend multiple decades fighting that fight before you see any progress or you compromise on a more feasible implementation.

andrekandre 6y ago
the other thing is, without proper price controls (rent, basic food stuffs, transportation etc) business will look at it as a chance to jack up prices because "free money" the other aspect is, no amount of ubi is going to cover huge medical costs that the current u.s system incurs, as well as higher education for those thst really do want to improve themselves and contribute so (i think) ubi isnt a bad idea, but it needs to be coupled with other structural reforms and price controls to prevent being a huge potential diaster
- bhupy 6y ago
  > the other thing is, without proper price controls (rent, basic food stuffs, transportation etc) business will look at it as a chance to jack up prices because "free money" I don't buy this argument. Businesses that do this would be leaving money on the table: namely the poor people that were outside of their total addressable market. Whereas before those folks would never have been able to provide revenue, with more cash in their pockets, they are now potential consumers. Increasing prices just maintains the same TAM for no real reason — you can make more revenue by serving the newly minted consumers. The only good/service for which this breaks down is housing, for which there is a true supply scarcity — but even that ceases to be true in a regime with proper zoning reform (like Japan).
- jacobr1 6y ago
  You can only keep the prices high with cartelization or true scarcity. Though removing subsidies (for things like public transport) can also raise prices. But our food supply is highly distributed. If one vendor charges higher-prices, others will take the opportunity to offer lower prices as long as they still can get the margin. We often debate various forms of market failure on this forum, but in the cases of functioning markets, supply and demand does indeed work.

HideousKojima 6y ago

>What happened? Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. That's what happened. There simply isn't enough tax revenue, even if you seized 100% of the wealth and future earnings of the wealthy, to provide a basic income sufficient for most people to live off of. Also a lot of proposals would have ended up giving the poor and elderly less than they get under current programs. And the claims of reduced overhead wouldn't have made much of a dent in things either, IIRC admin costs for Social Security are less than 1% of what the actual payouts are

nawitus 6y ago
> Every single proposed UBI was either insufficient to cover people's basic needs, obscenely expensive, or both. I don't think that's true. In a really simple model imagine UBI of $2000/month given for everyone. Then imagine increasing income taxes by $2000 for all employed workers. Then the true cost would be difference between current unemployed benefits of the UBI, which shoudln't be obscenely expensive (in normal economic times). Employed workers shouldn't care about the increased taxes because their take home money would remain identical. That's of course a very simplistic model, but explains how you shouldn't just count the UBI amount times population as the cost.
- wincy 6y ago
  But it wouldn’t be $2000 per worker, as you’d have to get enough tax money to pay the people who aren’t working that $2000. If I make $6000 a month and you make $0 a month, and then we both get $2000 a month from my taxes, how can my take home pay remain $6000?
  - bsanr2 6y ago
    Well, it would be you and several of your peers making $6000 a month, one or two people making an order of magnitude more per month, and a whole heckuva lot of people making $3k-$4k a month, contributing a progressively bigger portion to the one person making $0. So, no, you don't hang on to the full $6000... But then you may get it back from taxing the capital holdings of those people who own exceptionally large amounts of private property.

nnx 6y ago

Current proposals have not been written by long-time proponents of UBI afaik, it's been repurposed and repackaged, rather badly, by political opportunists who now see the need resonate well with electorate during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis?

uses 6y ago

I think there has been growing momentum behind the idea that some needs aren't met best by a market approach. One of the ideas behind UBI is that people can figure out what they need, and just spend the money. But that doesn't really solve the needs that may not be optimal for a 100% market approach - probably the big two being health and education.

gowld 6y ago
And housing.
- Tade0 6y ago
  This is the elephant in the room here. It's a basic good, but its price is still very much driven by supply and demand.
  - fastball 6y ago
    America just needs zoning policy that isn't totally broken (i.e. geared towards the rich). Japan has been doing a pretty good job.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > America just needs zoning policy that isn't totally broken (i.e. geared towards the rich). Japan has been doing a pretty good job. Compounded by nearly 2-3 decades of astonishing population decline, and a 'freeter' type lifestyle for all but the most 'privileged' youth that also helps in reducing access to desirable housing, too. Personally speaking had Fukushima not occurred, I think I would be owner and chef of a Kaiseki kitchen at an Onsen Ryoukan in the Country-side by now given how affordable and plentiful those abandoned compounds are all over Japan. NIMBY is real and gets the nouveau riche up in arms and drives them out to the polls and releases purse strings for lobbyists like nothing else, but to be entirely honest as a multi-generational Californian: they can keep the Valley. Its atrociously managed, its old, over-crowded, needlessly expensive and stricken with horrible politically ambitious and greed driven shortsightedness, the homeless problem is a glaring symptom that has clearly proven that neither money nor legislation can solve its core problem. My family up there divested from their businesses and sold their homes in the area in mid 2000s to move to the South, and while its not perfect it shows that there are is no better way to show your opposition to a system then to just leave. If many former office jobs and school classes (K-12 as well as University) can be optimized to be done remotely, then I will reluctantly accept that the COVID situation was worth it. Having a population density like seen in New York is not just undesirable (for many reasons) but also a biological hazard. Disruption had to come the housing situation, and I think this could be just as good as anything else in trying to alleviate the damage caused from having remained in an archaic system created to benefit the Land-owning class for doing nothing but being born at a time when housing prices as well as overall Economic health and sound wages were accessible to most in the US. These land owners don't create wealth, they just consume it off the backs of people far more risk-prone than themselves that still have Utility in the Labor force, and we're thinking they'll ever allow for implementing something that is against there interests? That's a deluded panacea that won't ever be achieved using orthodox methods, like voting for fairer zoning laws.

Tiktaalik 6y ago

People studied the UBI idea and recognized the costs of giving money to everyone are so enormous that it's unworkable. That's there the means testing has come in to try to limit that. Something more like a "guaranteed minimum income" where you can't have less money than what is required to have a good standard of living is a cheaper and more effective idea that accomplishes the same goals of ending poverty.

uoaei 6y ago
If the rhetoric is solely around "government spending" then the perspective will always be that UBI is "too expensive". But the money doesn't just vanish when it enters people's bank accounts. All of a sudden, banks have a lot more collateral against which to borrow and invest, by virtue of the fact that the bank accounts which store the UBI have money in them. People spend that money and it enters and moves through the economy. The government taxes it back out via sales taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. I think, in general, it's worth having an economy that keeps moving. If you let too few people have too much proportion of available wealth, the consumers won't have any to work with and your economy will be entirely dependent on luxury goods for a tiny proportion of the population.
- chris_va 6y ago
  A higher velocity of capital ~= larger economy, which is good. However, a higher velocity of capital without commensurate economic value being created ~= massive inflation. This is a potential risk for UBI, and one that small-scale studies do not cover. Ideally, the additional economic value would be greater than the face value of the capital transferred every year, but there is no guarantee that is correct (nor is there any reason they should even be on the same order of magnitude). Implementing UBI on a national scale would be a grand experiment. Most grand experiments tend to fail with massive upheaval. I think for UBI to be adopted, you would need a plausible incremental strategy with a lot of safety checks.
  - uoaei 6y ago
    Yes, taking things ad absurdum in either direction will lead to catastrophe. The perspective of MMT is that government can and should tax out money at a rate that keeps the economy from inflating beyond the scope of our control, and inject it at a rate that sustains the velocity of capital. Making this perspective the dominant one in discourse, however, would require a lot more public trust in government before people got comfortable with the idea of governments taxing us for our benefit.

WalterBright 6y ago

> What happened? Somebody did the math.

elicash 6y ago

Proponents of UBI were ALWAYS a coalition of different people who came from different ideological backgrounds and believed different things.

AndrewKemendo 6y ago
Well that's certainly true of every cause right?
- elicash 6y ago
  The successful ones create coalitions, certainly! It's also a good argument against painting people who seemingly agree with too broad a brush. But in this case, I remember a coworker of mine who a while back created an advocacy org for UBI. He's a socialist. I specifically remember him reaching out to work with libertarians and getting them in leadership roles. (Not sure if this org still exists.)

timwaagh 6y ago

maybe they got a reality check insofar this is possible for BI proponents. someone with (say) a broken arm needs more than a healthy person who is just unemployed.

fastball 6y ago
Why does someone with a broken arm need more than someone without one if both are unemployed?

somethoughts 6y ago

Just happened to be reading about how the current stimulus checks are being used this morning. Perhaps its a bit of click bait, but interesting to ponder nonetheless. It does seem like using UBI to play in the stock market would not be the intent of UBI and be hard to prevent. "Many Americans used part of their coronavirus stimulus check to trade stocks" https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-their-coronavirus-stimulus-check-to-trade-stocks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/21/many-americans-used-part-of-...

fastball 6y ago
Isn't buying stock a great way to help the economy recover?
- somethoughts 6y ago
  I'm not making any morale or financial decision making judgements :) - I'm mostly pointing out that using your UBI to make stock market investments is not usually mentioned as a use case by UBI proponents.
thekyle 6y ago
I actually think people putting their stimulus checks into the stock market is better than the existing QE system. Why have the government choose which companies to bailout when they can instead bailout the people. Then the people can decide which companies are worth saving and which are economic glut.

wturner 6y ago

Their are two main factions of UBI. On one side you have free market libertarians and conservatives that would cut social spending to pay for it. On the other hand you have a "progressive" version of UBI that is founded on Modern Monetary theory and would simply make UBI an addendum to social spending. Modern monetary theory holds that a government that issues it's own currency can never go insolvent. If you haven't heard of MMT I suggest you google the topic and listen or watch some material by Stephanie Kelton on the topic. Edit: With the corona virus "stimulus" people are getting a taste of modern monetary theory. They are starting to realize how little the nation debt matters and that what really matters is the result of the spending and the actions it invokes. Some people are wondering why the stimulus checks are so small. I believe that if they were any bigger people might get used to the idea of living decent lives without economic anxiety thus the cats out the bag for the corporate big wigs, corporate democrats and republicans. It might lead to a domino effect of a new standard of living and a new collection of cultural assumptions regarding money Also, generally Andrew Yangs version of UBI would cut social spending and is not founded on modern monetary theory axioms. Edit again, I should mention Stephanie Kelton does not support UBI perse', she supports a federal jobs program but the economic assumptions still hold true.

danans 6y ago

> What happened? > Now it appears by most proposals to be yet another means-tested add-on. "Universal" means not means-tested. That hasn't changed. What happened is that those who promoted UBI in order to achieve their objective of dismantling the social safety net and reducing overall taxation and government expenditure lost interest in it for many reasons. First, and most important, the UBI supporting right largely returned to the standard economic platform of the right, since the political changes in 2016 resulted in many of their goals being achieved, including the attacks on Obamacare and food stamp programs, and the massive tax cuts for the very wealthy. Second, they couldn't really explain UBI to others in the mainstream right. Simply cutting the safety net to punish "lazy" people who leech off the system is, and has always been, an easier line to sell politically vs "we consolidate all the existing safety net expenditures, cut them by x% by dismantling the bureaucracy, and distribute the cash as UBI, for a net reduction in total expenditure". UBI is economics nerd stuff on the right, a clever scheme and experiment whose costs would be ultimately paid by others who were less fortunate - in the form of reduced overall benefits. Those who were left supporting UBI (no pun intended) were those who see it as one tool among many needed to reduce inequality, not as a way to further reduce government assistance to struggling people. They believe the cost should be payed by greater taxation on the wealthy, and their support is rooted in their beliefs about what a more just society would look like. Their perspective was further bolstered by Andrew Yang's advocacy, and the measures being taken now due to covid19. Therefore their perspectives on UBI have become the dominantly heard perspectives on UBI.