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How is giving people $100 to give to a politician - who will have their own solutions - and say $50 to a journalist - who will have their own interests targeted

• rglullis 5y ago
  > How is giving people $100 to give to a politician / $50 to a journalist a blanket solution? Why would people even want to give this money to politicians? ANY of them? Could I simply get the money and pocket it? Why not? More seriously though: why do you think is more likely to happen with such "journalist" money? Do you think people will suddenly promote rational discourse or they will just give this money to whoever confirms their biases? Imagine Alex Jones getting millions of dollars of government money to fund his lunacy. What will be the reaction on the liberal side? Will they just say "it's all fair" and try to compensate by over-funding NPR and PBS, or will they try to find ways to rig the game in their favor? > You need an organization to do things like collect taxes. That organization does not need to be centralized. As an example: You could have tax collection at the city/municipality level, and then have these municipalities paying to theirs state according to their pre-agreed budget and commitments, and having that bubbling up. > Maybe my responses could be more useful if you spoke specifically to why you dislike different policies of Yang It is not about the policy, it is about its scope and the idea that you can apply the same kind of thinking on a country as large, diverse and uneven as the US. UBI in itself is not a bad idea. Thinking that the way to implement it is by pushing it at the federal level is a catastrophically bad idea. I would give Yang a lot more credit if he went to run for mayor of a small town in the Rust Belt, tried his ideas there first and then went on to promote them. But when he goes on to think that he can run a country in the same way that people run a SV startup, big red lights should be flashing in our heads. > Don't you think washing out $4 billion of lobbyist money with $32 billion of eligible voter money would shift politics to getting more citizen-wants oriented politicians elected into power? If you say no, then why? "Because populism" is the short answer. The long answer is "if voters were rational, people would be able to filter out politicians who are not aligned with their interests and lobby groups wouldn't exist. Adding more money to the system will not solve the issue." If we want to get politicians that do what the citizens want, we need to reduce the distance between the citizens and their representatives. How about we get rid of the $4 billion lobbyists AND the $32 billion "voter money"? How about we got rid of all forms of Federal taxes and started favoring again a state-centered union? How about people started to be more interested in discussing their own town budget plans (where they can actually SEE the results of their choices) instead of giving them money to only pretend they have any say in these multi-trillion sausage factories?
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > UBI in itself is not a bad idea. Thinking that the way to implement it is by pushing it at the federal level is a catastrophically bad idea. No, thinking that the way to implement it is by pushing it at any lower level is a catastrophically bad idea, because the 14th Amendment, the Commerce Clause, and other federal Constitutional and legal constraints prevent any lower level from establishing any viable definition of the covered population universe. > How about we got rid of all forms of Federal taxes and started favoring again a state-centered union? Absent any proposal for solving the problems that occurred the last time we tried that, which is why we have the Constitution (the second federal structure of the USA), that's a decidedly no serious proposal. > How about people started to be more interested in discussing their own town budget plans Proposals about what people should decide to be interested in are non-actionable.
    • rglullis 5y ago
      The last quote you pulled is just a misinterpretation of what I meant, and the rest is just "the bureaucracy needs grow to satisfy the needs of the growing bureaucracy" circular logic. You can make a better argument than that, can't you? As for "the problems that occurred the last time we tried that": one of the links on the front page from HN is exactly about how the US is closer to a civil war now than people think. If stability is the main function of the Federal Government, it looks like they are not doing a good job.
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        > the rest is just "the bureaucracy needs grow to satisfy the needs of the growing bureaucracy" circular logic" No, pointing out that we tried the extremely loose federation of states without federal taxes model, it produced real problems, and the model under the Constitution was an attempt to solve that, so if you want to argue for a return to that older model you need to acknowledge that, propose a fix within that model to the problems, or make an actual argument as to why those things that were seen as problems are actually desirable is not "the bureaucracy needs grow to satisfy the needs of the growing bureaucracy" circular logic. History exists, your breezy offhand suggestions need to acknowledge and address it if you want then to be taken seriously. Neither is pointing out that UBI by a entity structurally not empowered to exercise boundary controlon the population to which it is universally applicable, and therefore non-federal government in the present US Constitutional system, is problematic "the bureaucracy needs grow to satisfy the needs of the growing bureaucracy" circular logic. > If stability is the main function of the Federal Government, it looks like they are not doing a good job. Not that anyone has argued “stability is the main function of the Federal Government”, so that’s kind of a non-sequitur, but based on, and compared to, what exactly?