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Can anyone explain to me how UBI is actually paid for, and who will do the work that nobody wants to do if we no longer need to work?

newbie789 6y ago
I believe it’s funded by taxation. As for the second part, that’s a good question. I haven’t personally seen any UBI/direct payment studies that led to a significant reduction in people working so that question hasn’t yet been studied as far as I’m aware. If there’s a study that you’ve seen where cash payments to individuals led to a situation where everyone “no longer need to work” and the consequence was a labor shortage, I’d love to read it! That sounds like it’d have to have a pretty large sample size, decently long duration and some top notch analysis to posit a 1:1 “Providing basic housing and quality of life to individuals that may or may not need it” and “No labor is available” ratio.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > I believe it’s funded by taxation. You can’t tax people who don’t earn anything beside what you’re already giving them. It needs to be bootstrapped and then be sustainable. > if there’s a study... You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. Let’s assume that UBI payments will match minimum wage laws. Now then... the people who have to get up and travel around 2+ hours to get to their job just to warn minimum wage - if they can stay home with their families and get paid the same instead, you’ve just incentivised them to quit. The companies where they had employees who are now at home getting UBI are forced to shut because they can’t find workers. I’m blanking on it, but I’m sure Das Kapital brings up these examples when going through testimony to the Factory Act.
  - newbie789 6y ago
    > You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but I’m more inclined to take seriously things like results of studies rather than things like thought experiments. In this post in a roundabout way you’re making the case that things like homelessness (for example) need to exist in the real world because otherwise society breaks down in a simulation you’ve run in your head. Personally the way my thought experiment goes it’s possible that the workforce stays the same or even expands due to things like childcare being less strenuous or the inclusion of people that previously couldn’t participate due to lack of access to housing/transportation. That’s just a thought experiment in my head though. I’d love to see a study.
    - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
      Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but where am I advocating for homelessness? Childcare is another example, at least in Australia - child care workers are on minimum wages, and some have to work in multiple places to make a decent living. If UBI guaranteed on par living expenses, why work and deal with the stresses of having multiple jobs? The onflow of having nobody work in the childcare sector means that people who needed to put their own kids in child care so that they could earn a wage, can’t, because they would instead need to stay home and look after their own kids. And this example is actually a fact of life in Australia for people with low pay because paying for actual child care is damn expensive and new mothers end up putting their kids in child care for only a few weeks before pulling them out and staying home because of the costs. This is a common theme in Australia and not just a small sample size.
      - newbie789 6y ago
        > Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but where am I advocating for homelessness? Your suggestion that everyone would simply stop working if people were able to survive on an equivalent to a minimum wage stipend relies heavily on the assumption that people only work in order to provide food and shelter for themselves. In this model people never do labor for reasons such as passion, interest, curiosity, a sense of civic duty, or simply to have more money to spend on recreation. By your reasoning the only reason why anyone would ever work, ever, is to avoid starvation or being homeless. For that motivation to exist, there would need to be a constant real threat of starvation or loss of housing tied to your ability to find and perform work (which is the current system in the US.) That motivation couldn’t be real if homelessness didn’t exist. For your model to work it quite literally relies on homeless people existing as a sort of reminder that you have to continue working.
Jochim 6y ago
> Can anyone explain to me how UBI is actually paid for. The great thing about UBI money is that most of it would go straight back into the economy. That mom who has been putting off getting the AC fixed might pay a repairman to sort it out, a daughter is given money to buy her dad a birthday present, maybe the guy that's been putting off getting that weird lump checked out because he has no insurance goes to the doctor. Much of the value is therefore immediately recaptured through tax, and contributes towards the wages of the people they're interacting with. > who will do the work that nobody wants to do if we no longer need to work? Generally the wages for some of those kinds of jobs will rise to counter how undesirable they are. Some types of work may end up disappearing, office workers might be forced to dust their own desks. I think this is a much more moral and desirable outcome than the current situation where we rely on putting people in a position where they are forced into degrading, disgusting, or dangerous work. All too often that work is then used to belittle and degrade those people further.
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > The great thing about UBI money is that most of it would go straight back into the economy. Your first part of the comment sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy and doesn’t answer the question. > I think this is a much more moral and desirable outcome than the current situation where we rely on putting people in a position where they are forced into degrading, disgusting, or dangerous work. All too often that work is then used to belittle and degrade those people further. Nice in theory, until you need a plumber for a broken toilet 3am on a Tuesday but nobody is a plumber anymore (That’s speaking from experience working in the harsher conditions in the plumbing industry)
  - Jochim 6y ago
    > Your first part of the comment sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy and doesn’t answer the question. Then you only read half of it. The question is how would it be paid for, and the answer I gave is that most of it would be paid for through increased tax revenue from increased economic activity. This is topped up by removing spending on the beauraucracy involved in means testing. > Nice in theory, until you need a plumber for a broken toilet 3am on a Tuesday but nobody is a plumber anymore UBI doesn't prevent anyone from being an emergency plumber, you just have to pay them enough that the task is actually worth doing rather than what they've been forced into accepting.

newbie789 6y ago

I believe it’s funded by taxation. As for the second part, that’s a good question. I haven’t personally seen any UBI/direct payment studies that led to a significant reduction in people working so that question hasn’t yet been studied as far as I’m aware. If there’s a study that you’ve seen where cash payments to individuals led to a situation where everyone “no longer need to work” and the consequence was a labor shortage, I’d love to read it! That sounds like it’d have to have a pretty large sample size, decently long duration and some top notch analysis to posit a 1:1 “Providing basic housing and quality of life to individuals that may or may not need it” and “No labor is available” ratio.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
> I believe it’s funded by taxation. You can’t tax people who don’t earn anything beside what you’re already giving them. It needs to be bootstrapped and then be sustainable. > if there’s a study... You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. Let’s assume that UBI payments will match minimum wage laws. Now then... the people who have to get up and travel around 2+ hours to get to their job just to warn minimum wage - if they can stay home with their families and get paid the same instead, you’ve just incentivised them to quit. The companies where they had employees who are now at home getting UBI are forced to shut because they can’t find workers. I’m blanking on it, but I’m sure Das Kapital brings up these examples when going through testimony to the Factory Act.
- newbie789 6y ago
  > You don’t even need a study. Let’s look at the following thought experiment. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but I’m more inclined to take seriously things like results of studies rather than things like thought experiments. In this post in a roundabout way you’re making the case that things like homelessness (for example) need to exist in the real world because otherwise society breaks down in a simulation you’ve run in your head. Personally the way my thought experiment goes it’s possible that the workforce stays the same or even expands due to things like childcare being less strenuous or the inclusion of people that previously couldn’t participate due to lack of access to housing/transportation. That’s just a thought experiment in my head though. I’d love to see a study.
  - alfiedotwtf 6y ago
    Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but where am I advocating for homelessness? Childcare is another example, at least in Australia - child care workers are on minimum wages, and some have to work in multiple places to make a decent living. If UBI guaranteed on par living expenses, why work and deal with the stresses of having multiple jobs? The onflow of having nobody work in the childcare sector means that people who needed to put their own kids in child care so that they could earn a wage, can’t, because they would instead need to stay home and look after their own kids. And this example is actually a fact of life in Australia for people with low pay because paying for actual child care is damn expensive and new mothers end up putting their kids in child care for only a few weeks before pulling them out and staying home because of the costs. This is a common theme in Australia and not just a small sample size.
    - newbie789 6y ago
      > Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but where am I advocating for homelessness? Your suggestion that everyone would simply stop working if people were able to survive on an equivalent to a minimum wage stipend relies heavily on the assumption that people only work in order to provide food and shelter for themselves. In this model people never do labor for reasons such as passion, interest, curiosity, a sense of civic duty, or simply to have more money to spend on recreation. By your reasoning the only reason why anyone would ever work, ever, is to avoid starvation or being homeless. For that motivation to exist, there would need to be a constant real threat of starvation or loss of housing tied to your ability to find and perform work (which is the current system in the US.) That motivation couldn’t be real if homelessness didn’t exist. For your model to work it quite literally relies on homeless people existing as a sort of reminder that you have to continue working.

Jochim 6y ago

> Can anyone explain to me how UBI is actually paid for. The great thing about UBI money is that most of it would go straight back into the economy. That mom who has been putting off getting the AC fixed might pay a repairman to sort it out, a daughter is given money to buy her dad a birthday present, maybe the guy that's been putting off getting that weird lump checked out because he has no insurance goes to the doctor. Much of the value is therefore immediately recaptured through tax, and contributes towards the wages of the people they're interacting with. > who will do the work that nobody wants to do if we no longer need to work? Generally the wages for some of those kinds of jobs will rise to counter how undesirable they are. Some types of work may end up disappearing, office workers might be forced to dust their own desks. I think this is a much more moral and desirable outcome than the current situation where we rely on putting people in a position where they are forced into degrading, disgusting, or dangerous work. All too often that work is then used to belittle and degrade those people further.

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
> The great thing about UBI money is that most of it would go straight back into the economy. Your first part of the comment sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy and doesn’t answer the question. > I think this is a much more moral and desirable outcome than the current situation where we rely on putting people in a position where they are forced into degrading, disgusting, or dangerous work. All too often that work is then used to belittle and degrade those people further. Nice in theory, until you need a plumber for a broken toilet 3am on a Tuesday but nobody is a plumber anymore (That’s speaking from experience working in the harsher conditions in the plumbing industry)
- Jochim 6y ago
  > Your first part of the comment sounds like the Broken Window Fallacy and doesn’t answer the question. Then you only read half of it. The question is how would it be paid for, and the answer I gave is that most of it would be paid for through increased tax revenue from increased economic activity. This is topped up by removing spending on the beauraucracy involved in means testing. > Nice in theory, until you need a plumber for a broken toilet 3am on a Tuesday but nobody is a plumber anymore UBI doesn't prevent anyone from being an emergency plumber, you just have to pay them enough that the task is actually worth doing rather than what they've been forced into accepting.