7 ms·

I'm against UBI, but at this point, we should just pick a low-risk state and do it, just so we can all see how it realistically plays out. Maybe I'm wrong and i

by daenz 5y ago

I'm against UBI, but at this point, we should just pick a low-risk state and do it, just so we can all see how it realistically plays out. Maybe I'm wrong and it's amazing and solves many problems. Or maybe it is disastrous, but at least it will be isolated at the state level, and we'll have an example to point to.

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Would be nice to hear why are you against UBI. For starter, here are my main doubts: 0. The most important one. The true UBI - not the one-year-hundred-bucks-pilot-projects - but a true lifetime promise of some significant money will be extremely hard to roll back. Once the djinn is out of the bottle it will be close to impossible to squeeze it back in. We have to think twice before cutting. 1. There are a lot of talks about wealth inequality. What are we going to do if UBI actually increases it? Which actually has great chances of happening, because the money paid to poor will eventually be pumped into more wealthy pockets. Are we suddenly going to change the narrative and conclude that wealth inequality is okay as long as everyone is fed and has roof above their heads? 2. Are we going to get UBI ghettos? This is the question to which temporary pilots won't answer. In twenty years of UBI are we going to get neighborhoods where children don't go to schools, because - well, because why would they? Actually, the question is not even whether we gonna get these ghettos. In a country with 350 million of diverse population we will get a bit of every possible outcome. The questions are (a) how many and (b) what are we going to do with them? 3. Who gets the UBI? All the citizens, but not the aliens? Something seems wrong in a situation when some people - by the virtue of being born in a specific place - don't work and rely on foreign workforce for all their needs. It's not exactly slavery, but looks ethically wrong. 4. We have enough trouble funding retirement pensions. Funding UBI will be double that - at least. What's the plan here? What do we do if the country literally runs out of money? Any thoughts?
- mmmeff 5y ago
  Fire up the printers, lads!
- seibelj 5y ago
  We have had a sort of UBI with the pandemic and a sizable portion of people have chosen not to work. I think if you have healthcare, your rent paid for, and free food then there could be 15 to 30% of the population that will just watch Netflix and hang out all day. It’s enough to erode support for the entire program.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I think the number of people that would FIRE would grow exponentially. I know I would if I had healthcare and enough income for all the basics ($1000 per month).
    - seibelj 5y ago
      FIRE is financial independence. It implies you worked hard, scrimped, and lived frugally to earn an early retirement. Getting free everything is not FIRE. It’s reliance on the welfare to eliminate any requirement of productivity. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just stating what it is.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        But people who FIRE today do depend on things that are publically funded. If you read blogs about it, people talk of free library programs, subsidized public transit, tax credits where you get more back than you paid in - net profit, etc. I didn't include Social Security or Medicare since they are supposed to be single payer systems, yet the way they are funded today doesn't exactly jive with that. All I'm saying is that they would FIRE sooner with the extra income.
        seibelj 5y ago
        You are right but IMO the difference is that the government is enabling people to “retire” without ever working a day in their life. If you have enough money for food, shelter, and free healthcare from cradle to grave with zero requirement of ever working a single day in your life, I think society will change.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Your #1 is something I have thought about as well. Specifically, if the higher income people don't need the money, they will invest it while the lower income people are spending it. Although this might be offset by the increased tax burden (who knows how that will look). If everyone is getting this money, then I would also expect some inflation, which would likely hit the lower income people harder than the wealthy. For #4, they will never run out of money. It will be worth less from inflation. Or they will take it from the people that have it.
- trident5000 5y ago
  Agreed, I cant imagine people not just voting in the politician that promises them the most money once that train leaves the station.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  UBI has the fundamental problem of not addressing inequality, but further fueling greater inequality. It is essentially a free license for those economically abusing employees and anonymous others to continue unchecked, and, frankly, double down because now their economically captured serfs have their guards down and their employers can push more healthcare expenses their way, and there will be a huge jump in multi-level marketing within UBI communities, and several more eyeball rolling developments. The answer to all our woes is that unpopular Education Funding issue. No UBI would be needed with a nation of educated self-actualizers, rather than the nation of marginally educated workers with blinders on and kids that need far more attention they they can give. That's the society we have created thus far. If UBI were in a form such as "free room and board and spending money as long as one is in school, thru a PhD if one wants", I might think differently. As it is being formulated now, it is a recipe for Mr. Obvious to say "look, UBI does not work, it created this giant worse than before mess".
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    > Education Funding issue I understand you're talking about college education. But I can't avoid mentioning my beloved Baltimore School District. Awesome funding. Shitty results. [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-drops-to-six-year-low https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal... [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I had a friend who worked at the Baltimore Aquarium. The workers there had college degrees in stuff like biology and were only paid about $30k per year. Yet they had about a dozen executives making salaries that were 10x higher. Your link with salaries made me think about that.
      - 5y ago
trident5000 5y ago
We just witnessed what happens with UBI (covid relief). Everyone sits on their ass and stops working. We heard the testimonies from small business owners that couldnt compete with the govt paychecks and hire people.
opportune 5y ago
I think part of the problem is that any localized UBI that doesn’t include everybody within an actual immigration border (ie the whole US, whole Schengen area, etc) will either 1. have adverse selection as people who want the UBI will move to go get it 2. need to means test somehow (eg live in the state for at least two years) and thus not be universal.
- giantg2 5y ago
  And you think this won't be an issue on the national level? If it's truly universal, then I would expect substantial illegal immigration to occur. Seems like a valid/realistic experiment in that case.
  - daenz 5y ago
    What's more is that there appears to be a huge overlap of UBI proponents and anti-border proponents. So it is 100% a realistic scenario that any experiment should take into consideration.
b9a2cab5 5y ago
I think a big problem with current UBI proponents (and in general in the last ~2-3 years, Democrats) is that they don't understand how supply and demand work. When you see Biden touting the Child Tax Credit as a response to decreased purchasing power from inflation you know something is wrong [1] (increased income at constant supply will only increase prices). Same thing with minimum wage increases - the real purchasing power of minimum wage workers stays the same no matter how much you raise it; you can see this effect played out over the last 5-8 years in the SFBA. I strongly believe if you institute a UBI it will have the same effect and just dilute everyone's purchasing power. UBI experiments that are localized to a few thousand people don't encounter this effect because they aren't big enough to impact the economy. I am all for UBI once we know that 1) it won't just get sucked up by landlords, since housing is highly inelastic and a de facto local government-granted cartel 2) people won't just fuck off and play video games/watch TV all day. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-25/white-house-shifts-messaging-on-inflation-as-republicans-attack?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-25/white-hou...
- lumost 5y ago
  Raising real income for workers by taxing capital holders and high income individuals does not necessarily cause inflation. One could argue that many ailments of the US economy are due to the skewed income distribution. UBI schemes are a blunt method of altering the distribution.
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Sure it does. By redistributing it from people that don't use it to people that do, you increase the velocity of money. Inflation is a function of velocity * supply, ergo redistribution causes inflation. But I'm not talking about that kind of generalized inflation, I'm talking about inflation specific to rent prices. If landlords hold an oligopoly, any increases in real purchasing power will be absorbed by rents. That is what has happened in the SFBA and what will happen if UBI gets implemented.
blamestross 5y ago
A common thing both sides of the UBI debate don't consider is "Should UBI normalized to a local cost-of-living" I think the default assumption a lot of people make is "yes" but having an unadjusted UBI can have a LOT of benefits. There will be inflation, but it won't 1-1 undo the benefits. It will be distorted by demand. It would basically let us re-colonize low cost of living areas that are currently getting abandoned because the only hope of income without capital is in urban areas. "UBI ghettos" won't happen simply because they will be too expensive, if you want to survive on UBI you will have to move to a low cost of living areas in order to escape the inflation of urban cost of living and the US if FULL of low cost of living options, they just lack demand because they don't provide hope of financial advancement like high-demand urban areas. UBI would first allow us to utilize all that space better and then the presence and distribution of those colonists would provide the potential for economic advancement that rural areas currently lack. Would people decide just to "live off the system"? Sure they will, let them! The reality is they probably were not producing much more than a narrative of power for their employers anyways. This way we don't even waste the effort of that lie and they get to have better lives. The only loser is the person who needs to command others for their source of life-satisfaction. At the end of the day, all the benefits of UBI are secondary to the one reason we MUST have it. Automation increases efficiency, but when the automation is not owned by workers, it just lowers their negotiating power. The result, is that as the value of labor lowers below the costs of living, nobody with power has inventive to fix it until the starving proletariat shows up with guillotines. UBI or a system like it will be the only way to avoid the inevitable self-destruction of our capitalism due to short-term incentives being followed to a dead-end. People talk about the pandemic financial support (payments or unemployment ect) causing labor shortages, the problem isn't that we don't have labor, normally we have a labor surplus! The problem is that our economy is predicated on labor costs so low that they only interest a desperate and starving worker class. This is what happens when workers get negotiating power like UBI would give them!

by daenz 5y ago

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago

Would be nice to hear why are you against UBI. For starter, here are my main doubts: 0. The most important one. The true UBI - not the one-year-hundred-bucks-pilot-projects - but a true lifetime promise of some significant money will be extremely hard to roll back. Once the djinn is out of the bottle it will be close to impossible to squeeze it back in. We have to think twice before cutting. 1. There are a lot of talks about wealth inequality. What are we going to do if UBI actually increases it? Which actually has great chances of happening, because the money paid to poor will eventually be pumped into more wealthy pockets. Are we suddenly going to change the narrative and conclude that wealth inequality is okay as long as everyone is fed and has roof above their heads? 2. Are we going to get UBI ghettos? This is the question to which temporary pilots won't answer. In twenty years of UBI are we going to get neighborhoods where children don't go to schools, because - well, because why would they? Actually, the question is not even whether we gonna get these ghettos. In a country with 350 million of diverse population we will get a bit of every possible outcome. The questions are (a) how many and (b) what are we going to do with them? 3. Who gets the UBI? All the citizens, but not the aliens? Something seems wrong in a situation when some people - by the virtue of being born in a specific place - don't work and rely on foreign workforce for all their needs. It's not exactly slavery, but looks ethically wrong. 4. We have enough trouble funding retirement pensions. Funding UBI will be double that - at least. What's the plan here? What do we do if the country literally runs out of money? Any thoughts?

mmmeff 5y ago
Fire up the printers, lads!
seibelj 5y ago
We have had a sort of UBI with the pandemic and a sizable portion of people have chosen not to work. I think if you have healthcare, your rent paid for, and free food then there could be 15 to 30% of the population that will just watch Netflix and hang out all day. It’s enough to erode support for the entire program.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I think the number of people that would FIRE would grow exponentially. I know I would if I had healthcare and enough income for all the basics ($1000 per month).
  - seibelj 5y ago
    FIRE is financial independence. It implies you worked hard, scrimped, and lived frugally to earn an early retirement. Getting free everything is not FIRE. It’s reliance on the welfare to eliminate any requirement of productivity. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing, I’m just stating what it is.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      But people who FIRE today do depend on things that are publically funded. If you read blogs about it, people talk of free library programs, subsidized public transit, tax credits where you get more back than you paid in - net profit, etc. I didn't include Social Security or Medicare since they are supposed to be single payer systems, yet the way they are funded today doesn't exactly jive with that. All I'm saying is that they would FIRE sooner with the extra income.
      - seibelj 5y ago
        You are right but IMO the difference is that the government is enabling people to “retire” without ever working a day in their life. If you have enough money for food, shelter, and free healthcare from cradle to grave with zero requirement of ever working a single day in your life, I think society will change.
giantg2 5y ago
Your #1 is something I have thought about as well. Specifically, if the higher income people don't need the money, they will invest it while the lower income people are spending it. Although this might be offset by the increased tax burden (who knows how that will look). If everyone is getting this money, then I would also expect some inflation, which would likely hit the lower income people harder than the wealthy. For #4, they will never run out of money. It will be worth less from inflation. Or they will take it from the people that have it.
trident5000 5y ago
Agreed, I cant imagine people not just voting in the politician that promises them the most money once that train leaves the station.
bsenftner 5y ago
UBI has the fundamental problem of not addressing inequality, but further fueling greater inequality. It is essentially a free license for those economically abusing employees and anonymous others to continue unchecked, and, frankly, double down because now their economically captured serfs have their guards down and their employers can push more healthcare expenses their way, and there will be a huge jump in multi-level marketing within UBI communities, and several more eyeball rolling developments. The answer to all our woes is that unpopular Education Funding issue. No UBI would be needed with a nation of educated self-actualizers, rather than the nation of marginally educated workers with blinders on and kids that need far more attention they they can give. That's the society we have created thus far. If UBI were in a form such as "free room and board and spending money as long as one is in school, thru a PhD if one wants", I might think differently. As it is being formulated now, it is a recipe for Mr. Obvious to say "look, UBI does not work, it created this giant worse than before mess".
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  > Education Funding issue I understand you're talking about college education. But I can't avoid mentioning my beloved Baltimore School District. Awesome funding. Shitty results. [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-graduation-rate-drops-to-six-year-low https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/baltimore-city-public-schools-promoted-student-with-013-gpa-while-spending-a-14-billion-budget https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal... [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I had a friend who worked at the Baltimore Aquarium. The workers there had college degrees in stuff like biology and were only paid about $30k per year. Yet they had about a dozen executives making salaries that were 10x higher. Your link with salaries made me think about that.
    - 5y ago

trident5000 5y ago

We just witnessed what happens with UBI (covid relief). Everyone sits on their ass and stops working. We heard the testimonies from small business owners that couldnt compete with the govt paychecks and hire people.

opportune 5y ago

I think part of the problem is that any localized UBI that doesn’t include everybody within an actual immigration border (ie the whole US, whole Schengen area, etc) will either 1. have adverse selection as people who want the UBI will move to go get it 2. need to means test somehow (eg live in the state for at least two years) and thus not be universal.

giantg2 5y ago
And you think this won't be an issue on the national level? If it's truly universal, then I would expect substantial illegal immigration to occur. Seems like a valid/realistic experiment in that case.
- daenz 5y ago
  What's more is that there appears to be a huge overlap of UBI proponents and anti-border proponents. So it is 100% a realistic scenario that any experiment should take into consideration.

b9a2cab5 5y ago

I think a big problem with current UBI proponents (and in general in the last ~2-3 years, Democrats) is that they don't understand how supply and demand work. When you see Biden touting the Child Tax Credit as a response to decreased purchasing power from inflation you know something is wrong [1] (increased income at constant supply will only increase prices). Same thing with minimum wage increases - the real purchasing power of minimum wage workers stays the same no matter how much you raise it; you can see this effect played out over the last 5-8 years in the SFBA. I strongly believe if you institute a UBI it will have the same effect and just dilute everyone's purchasing power. UBI experiments that are localized to a few thousand people don't encounter this effect because they aren't big enough to impact the economy. I am all for UBI once we know that 1) it won't just get sucked up by landlords, since housing is highly inelastic and a de facto local government-granted cartel 2) people won't just fuck off and play video games/watch TV all day. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-25/white-house-shifts-messaging-on-inflation-as-republicans-attack?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-25/white-hou...

lumost 5y ago
Raising real income for workers by taxing capital holders and high income individuals does not necessarily cause inflation. One could argue that many ailments of the US economy are due to the skewed income distribution. UBI schemes are a blunt method of altering the distribution.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Sure it does. By redistributing it from people that don't use it to people that do, you increase the velocity of money. Inflation is a function of velocity * supply, ergo redistribution causes inflation. But I'm not talking about that kind of generalized inflation, I'm talking about inflation specific to rent prices. If landlords hold an oligopoly, any increases in real purchasing power will be absorbed by rents. That is what has happened in the SFBA and what will happen if UBI gets implemented.

blamestross 5y ago

A common thing both sides of the UBI debate don't consider is "Should UBI normalized to a local cost-of-living" I think the default assumption a lot of people make is "yes" but having an unadjusted UBI can have a LOT of benefits. There will be inflation, but it won't 1-1 undo the benefits. It will be distorted by demand. It would basically let us re-colonize low cost of living areas that are currently getting abandoned because the only hope of income without capital is in urban areas. "UBI ghettos" won't happen simply because they will be too expensive, if you want to survive on UBI you will have to move to a low cost of living areas in order to escape the inflation of urban cost of living and the US if FULL of low cost of living options, they just lack demand because they don't provide hope of financial advancement like high-demand urban areas. UBI would first allow us to utilize all that space better and then the presence and distribution of those colonists would provide the potential for economic advancement that rural areas currently lack. Would people decide just to "live off the system"? Sure they will, let them! The reality is they probably were not producing much more than a narrative of power for their employers anyways. This way we don't even waste the effort of that lie and they get to have better lives. The only loser is the person who needs to command others for their source of life-satisfaction. At the end of the day, all the benefits of UBI are secondary to the one reason we MUST have it. Automation increases efficiency, but when the automation is not owned by workers, it just lowers their negotiating power. The result, is that as the value of labor lowers below the costs of living, nobody with power has inventive to fix it until the starving proletariat shows up with guillotines. UBI or a system like it will be the only way to avoid the inevitable self-destruction of our capitalism due to short-term incentives being followed to a dead-end. People talk about the pandemic financial support (payments or unemployment ect) causing labor shortages, the problem isn't that we don't have labor, normally we have a labor surplus! The problem is that our economy is predicated on labor costs so low that they only interest a desperate and starving worker class. This is what happens when workers get negotiating power like UBI would give them!