16 ms·

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints mone

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

dymk 5y ago
You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. We don't need to print more. And each doesn't need the spare $20B anyways.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. Asset valuation is a bit tricky when you're an outlier. It's not terribly liquid.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it. And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.
    - optimiz3 5y ago
      > And yet I have 37% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS You need a better accountant / portfolio manager.
      - dymk 5y ago
        Updated ;) ETR != highest bracket, ofc
- optimiz3 5y ago
  > You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. The federal deficit is 2.8T for 1 year. If we confiscated the 100% assets of the top 10 US billionaires we don't even get close to half of 1 year of federal spending. It's not plausible that a massive increase in taxes would pay for UBI. https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-people-in-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl... As is, people not participating in the workforce right now is implicated in large parts of the various shortages. It's not clear how UBI improves things.
  - dymk 5y ago
    The public holds over $22 trillion of the national debt. Bonds. Somehow we still get away with funding other welfare programs, even though we have a rising debt ceiling. Anyways, this is why you increase taxes on the ultra-wealthy, in order to pay for UBI. It doesn't mean more debt.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The "ultra-wealthy" are not where the money is. Besides, what many leftists actually end up saying by focusing on those is that Gates and Buffett should not be allowed to put their money towards eradicating malaria, giving every African safe drinking water, and countless such high-value causes. Instead that hard-won wealth should be taxed from them and frittered away to fund a one-time super binge of mindless political activism and foolish "green" boondoggles in the highly developed West. Needless to say, I think this is a very bad idea. You want to tax Larry Ellison's yacht and other ludicrous spending, fine by me. But that's the ultra-wealthy's consumption - it's not even their income, much less their wealth. If you can't tell the difference, you're not getting the point of this debate.
      - cherrycherry98 5y ago
        I agree with you, taxation does nothing but enable the government to work on projects it deems important in the name of helping the public. It's inefficient and obviously open to corruption. If we really think that it is unjust for money to be concentrated in the hands of the rich and should go to the public instead of their heirs or private interests, there should be an option of zeroing out one's bank account. That is, literally destroying money (not to be confused with wealth). This should have roughly the same effect as dividing up one's fortune and distributing it evenly to all holders of that currency.
- asow92 5y ago
  Even if we zero out every US billionaire (imagine that for a second; take 100% of their wealth and leave them with exactly $0) it would not even cover 1/5 of the US national debt. We can't see taking their money as a viable long term solution to UBI. Our debt is out of control and our day of reckoning will come eventually. Nothing is free; markets will correct for UBI and people will become just as poor as they were over time. Existing UBI studies cannot take into account for the _universal_ aspect of UBI because they are controlled studies — there will be unintended consequences. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-image/confiscating-us-billionaires-wealth-would-run-us-g/#:~:text=Estimates%20put%20the%20total%20wealth,30 https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-imag.... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/politics/national-debt-30-trillion.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/politics/national-debt...
  - optimiz3 5y ago
    The COVID stimulus programs were a sort of UBI program. We're now starting to see mass inflation in part due to lower labor participation and excess liquidity. Obviously only part of the picture as quantitative easing and low rates are also driving excess liquidity, and omicron is also driving lower short-term labor participation.
    - asow92 5y ago
      Emphasis on the sort of part; universal means universal—everyone gets it. It's not Universal Guaranteed Income, it's Universal Basic Income. My wife and I worked the whole time and we made too much to ever get any stimulus. So we worked while we saw many people our age goofing off and seeing just how long they could ride the unemployment wave—yes, they really were proud of this. Meanwhile another half our peers want their college debt forgiven because they can't cut it in the real world with their liberal arts degree. Mark my words: if they ever do get around to slashing college debt, those who did what they were supposed to will be left there with their bill in hand while everyone else who made every ill-advised decision gets off for free.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  False. You'd need 4 trillion dollars a year to give 12k to everyone in the US. That would mean doubling US federal expenditures. And some people would stop working, hence stop paying income tax. Some businesses would leave the country. I do expect someday it will be feasible though. Maybe in my lifetime.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Maybe we lower the US military spending budget to "only" be 10% higher than the next highest spender. That should free up some cash. Gotta start somewhere :)
    - cuteboy19 5y ago
      Emphasis on the 'some' in some cash. As bloated as the US military is, it 'only' has a budget of $700B and a good portion of this is veterns welfare programs. This should put into perspective how ludicrously expensive UBI truly is
DoktorDelta 5y ago
This Stanford article provides some explanation and also references several studies for more in-depth reading: https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/ https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/
tomrod 5y ago
At face value, and with traditional neoclassical economics, it does appear to be an infeasible facade. Ex nilho creation of Robison Crusoe style goods. From a practical reality, we already have a UBI of $0 guaranteed, and with time cost that increases if people want to seek welfare benefits. A UBI could be implemented, potentially, solely on streamlining of processes to decrease the costs of welfare benefit search. Likely a realistic funding would be a mix of improving services delivery (lowering costs) and taxation of capital holders (offset some of the gains that put labor out of work). Under neoclassical theory, there are major differences in the two workhorse models of overlapping generations versus infinitely lived agents. An OLG model better approximates groups of people and their lifecycles. In my view, this is a slow-burn fight w/in the optimal taxation literature, based solely on the papers themselves and having not participated in the conferences! [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24335 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24335 [2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/258.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/258.html
alangibson 5y ago
> government prints money and gives it away for free In some circumstances this is actually a good idea. One core idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that printing money is only inflationary when the economy is at capacity. So giving money to people that can't or won't work actually drives growth because they can spend. If you moralize about economics or think MMT is wrong, this sounds like a horrible idea. If you only care about results, then it's a great idea.
rootusrootus 5y ago
> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I'm not a committed supporter of UBI, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt (or more) but I assume the whole point is to promote wealth redistribution. Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes. It sounds infeasible with the current budget, because of course it is. But modeling the final result isn't that simple I'd guess. More money into the circle, so the circle gets bigger, etc. So while it'd be easy to shoot it down using a single iteration of the circle, I'd like to see someone do a longer term simulation. I'm sure they have, I just haven't seen it.
- prepend 5y ago
  > Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes. I’m trying to say this with utmost respect. But $12k x 330M is $4T/year. In 2021, the US collected about $4T [0]. The US spent about $7T [1]. So it would take lots of iterations to figure this out. I think there are some efficiencies so you can reduce some of this budget but introducing a UBI like this would up the spent to $10T and require an extra $6T in taxes every year. It just seems so non-sensible. As the only way to reach this level would be to inflate money so it bought nothing much. Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something. Or free housing for everyone is more feasible since that seems more achievable than increasing tax revenue by 150%. Even if you seize every penny of US billionaires assets that’s only $4.2T [2]. At least that covers the first year but then those assets are gone. [0] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/revenue/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/reven... [1] https://apnews.com/article/business-economy-government-spending-financial-crisis-14dab966ccfab3e22c5f4095f84542fa https://apnews.com/article/business-economy-government-spend... [2] https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/
  - kemitche 5y ago
    > Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something. The problem with that is, without UBI, replicators don't solve the problem. The corporation that invents such a thing would get rich and charge the poorest to use it. We currently HAVE enough food, shelter, and health care as a society to cover everyone, but the efficiency/productivity gains haven't sufficiently sufficiently benefited everyone. UBI is one proposed option for correcting that situation. As for the actual cost - just as an exercise for trimming, without going into excessive detail: * About 80 million of the 330 million in the US are under 18[1]. Let's assume 4 year olds don't need UBI. Maybe there's a childcare credit, maybe not, but for the sake of NOT encouraging parents to have kids just for the paycheck, let's start UBI at 18+ years old * About half of US households make over $75k right now[2]. 33% make over 100k. I'm handwaving a bit here, but let's say the tax changes to support UBI result in increased taxes, and the "breakeven" point is somewhere around the 75k mark (i.e., above 75k household income - which would be 87k for a 1 person home, or 99k for a 2 person home, with the UBI - there's enough taxed off that the household is paying as much or more in taxes than they get from UBI). With those two tweaks, you're down to 125 million people or less that are getting more than they put in. And that comes to about 1.25T USD. And... if you look at our spending trends[3], that 7T USD number for 2021 you quoted already includes 1.6T in "income security". So it might actually be possible to hit UBI with the current budget/deficit by rearranging how the money is distributed. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri... [3] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/trends/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...
bhandziuk 5y ago
> nobody has to work That's generally not the expectation. The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. You want to buy a house, buy a car, travel, eat at fancy restaurants, buy expensive things, you still have to work. But if you want to quit your job and find another one you don't need to fear starvation or eviction because you are without income for a few months. It's the same logic as preventative medicine. Instead of dishing out money for surgery you can catch problems earlier when they are cheaper to fix.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. Yes, that's what they said: nobody has to work. They can if they want the additional perks you've described, but they don't have to.
  - bhandziuk 5y ago
    I guess you're right. I interpreted that as "no body works" which...is not what they said.
throwawayboise 5y ago
It is unfeasible. The reason money works is because it is an abstraction for someone's production of value that is way easier than bartering for everything. physical labor, skilled labor, educated thinking, management, knowledge transfer... anything that is valuable to someone else. If you just pay people to sit on their asses, many of them are just going to sit on their asses, creating nothing, simply consuming resources. The host (civilized society) cannot survive when everyone is a leech.
- browningstreet 5y ago
  Most people don't actually want to live at the UBI subsistence level so they'll work to live at a higher level. Some people need help for a while, and the infrastructure needed to dole out services to those in need creates waste and neglect.
- frickinLasers 5y ago
  People who work bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) are already unintentional leeches. UBI would disincentivize that inefficiency. Then those who want to sit on their asses with their $1200 could do so guilt-free, and, in my rosy vision for the world, the fraction who want to do something more fulfilling than making money for "the host" (e.g., FAMAG, Wall Street, I dunno) would be empowered to focus on things that are important to them, and probably to humanity as well.
izzydata 5y ago
When more work is automated the same amount of work is completed with less humans doing it. Currently that means that normal people make less money, but it doesn't have to be that way. Wealth distribution could remain the same as more things are automated. A lot of people believe we passed the point where the country makes enough money from a small enough number of people that they could re-distribute it as it used to be. A lot of people also believe that a huge percentage of society is engaging in "bullshit" jobs because there isn't enough real work that needs to be done.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
You cut most of our bureaucratic social safety net (food stamps, disability, social security, etc) and replace it with a system where everyone gets enough for the bare basics. If you were smart, you'd fund it with a carbon tax. In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. People say this would increase inflation. Maybe. Let's trial it with 1% of the population and find out.
- tomrod 5y ago
  > In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. From a political stability perspective, I expect this would be wise to get in front of.
  - kaibee 5y ago
    From a political perspective, it is easier to profit (in terms of political capital or actual capital) from a crisis than it is to prevent it. If you prevent it, then you've spent a lot of capital all for most people to say "well, nothing even happened!". It is a sad state of affairs.
- zeepzeep 5y ago
  > until we start automating ourselves into unemployment Still waiting for steam engines to replace human labour...
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    John Henry would have a word.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  That's a tad bit insane - disabled people won't be able to find jobs, whether you want it or not. You are pushing them deeper in poverty by giving them the same amount of money as you give to someone who chooses not to work.
arrosenberg 5y ago
The ideal way would be to pass a national Land Value Tax, and use the proceeds to fund UBI. The country has plenty of money, but it's all accumulating to landlords. An LVT is the most effective way to both moderate the excesses of the wealthy and continuously fund a social safety net. It would also let you eliminate most other forms of social safety and taxation, since Land/Natural Resources are the greatest stores of value.
- rcpt 5y ago
  This really is the only way to make it work. Only problem is that once you eliminate poverty the no-longer-impoverished have a tendency to pull the ladder up behind them
- spiderice 5y ago
  So if landlords now have to pay for everyone's UBI, why aren't the Landlords just going to raise rent to get that money right back?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Tying UBI to CPI/rental index would quash that dynamic's profit seeking reasonably, I think.
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    The Land Value Tax is tied to the assessment of the value of the land. If the landlord raised the rent 20%, sans improvements (which are not taxed), the assessed value of the land itself would go up 20% as a reflection and nullify the incentive to raise rent in the first place. The only way you can raise rents (in a way that nets a profit) under a LVT is to improve the property or provide services. If you own a 4 unit complex and you want a higher return, you need to build more units, a gym or provide on-site dry cleaning. This also means more efficient land-use in areas of high land value (i.e. densely built town/city centers). Since no more land can be produced, and speculation cannot produce profit, the incentivized usage is a productive one (building more housing where it's in high demand). Philosophically, a person who supports this concept wouldn't view it as the landlords paying everyone's UBI. We can respect every American's right to enjoy private property, while also holding the value of that property as a public trust. The LVT payments represent the capture of that value, and the UBI is the mechanism by which the public share is distributed.
zozbot234 5y ago
Universal basic income is not "anti-work", it's pro-work. The GP seems a bit confused. The simplest way of putting it is that everyone gets a "baseline" subsidy that's at best just enough to live a minimally dignified life. But working to earn a supplemental income can never leave you worse off. And even when this can be described as "anti-forced" work, that's because having such a safe baseline gives you the flexibility of trying for a better fit. It's something everyone would want for themselves.
agravier 5y ago
I think that many yearn for an idealized life in a small, relatively isolated community, low tech and free of fiat currency. They try to imagine workarounds for the fact that it's not actually currently possible in reality. UBI, anarchism, antiwork and other radical ideas are proposed patches to the cold and lonely reality of modern metropolitan life. They would probably not work, but they are not really the point. The point is to imagine some escape from the current crushing system.
danenania 5y ago
One way to think about it: we already have a basic income in the US. Nobody starves to death in the US. Nobody is denied medical care in the emergency room. In many places (though not everywhere), there are shelters where a person can sleep inside. There are food stamps and a patchwork of welfare programs. However meager they may seem, things like this amount to a form of universal basic income. Does it prevent people from working? In some cases, you could say it does--there are populations in every city that survive off this safety net, though they don't live well. But in most cases, it doesn't prevent people from working. The vast majority of people are willing to work for a better life than what the US "basic income" can provide. What makes you think this would be any less true if the basic income was, say, $30k per year instead of whatever the equivalent is now to provide the meager safety net we have? It's certainly possible to survive on a $30k basic income in many places in the US, but for most, it won't be an easy or especially pleasant life. Most people will want better. With a basic income that's a bit more substantial (and has no strings or stigma attached), people will have more freedom to make choices that can truly improve their circumstances, rather than being stuck on a treadmill of barely making ends meet with no space to come up for air and consider education or career changes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Nicely written. I like to think of UBI as a tool to get out of a local minimum which isn't easily possible if you're a slave to your minimum wage job.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  I am not trying to disagree at all, in fact I think we very much need to do more for the poorest among us, especially the kids. Where does that 30k come from though? For 300 million people, that's 9 trillion dollars a year, ~half of GDP. Inflation would be out of control, essentially Venezuela / Zimbabwe levels.
  - loceng 5y ago
TuringNYC 5y ago
>> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income. The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps. Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs. Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.
- dustymcp 5y ago
  It Works like this in Denmark
zeepzeep 5y ago
> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Nobody HAS to work, correct. If they only want to survive, they don't need to work. Everyone gets money for food, water, shelter and education; no questions asked. If you want an iPhone or eat something nice, you should probably get some money though. Universal basic income isn't much usually, it's enough to survive, enough for a livable life. That's paid by taxes of the majority of people that will still work, because people usually want more than just to survive, so they'll work. They'll just not work at Starbucks for 10 years to pay their student loan, they'll find a job that they like, a job with meaning.
bloaf 5y ago
If you give someone a fish, they starve after a day. Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish. But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve? UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.
- themaninthedark 5y ago
  I am against UBI because I think we aren't there just yet with technology but I do agree that we need a way to ensure that "everyone can eat" when the time comes. Right now we also need to look at how we can provide job for those who are affected by automation and not just say that the coal miners need "learn to code" and move. Edit to add: We have some industries that are highly automated, ie. semiconductor manufacturing. Yet they still have raw inputs that take non-automated work. If we were able to develop a complete automated line, I would support gov/private group "socializing" the output.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Can you nail down what it will look like once we are there?
    - themaninthedark 5y ago
      Technology wise, there are a lot of diffrent visions of how it might look like. I liked the description of the Universal Constructors in Diamond Age, toothed gears that captured atoms and placed them into buckets, sorting the elements out of the ocean water. That is probably more fantasy though, more likely to like like how it does now with modular rock crushers, moving belts, etc. Food supply is going to be interesting(read difficult), we can automate harvesting grains(rice, wheat, corn) easily. But things like tomatoes, lettuce, spinach rely heavily on human labor to tend and harvest. One of the things that is noticeable is that as we select foods that ship and store better(which we will be doing more of as we automate more) they are less tasty. Maybe we can engineer foods that are easy to harvest, tasty and transport well but that will necessitate us to get over our fear of GMO. On the societal front, I would not want the government to have control of the manufacturing systems because the temptation to use control against political adversaries would be to great(See Biden's recent comments on how Spotify should do more about Joe Rogan and how Trump used his influence(Not taking a stance on any issues, just showing the issues exist and would have grave ramifications). My thought would be that as you have a product more and more automated and vertically integrated, let's say bread. Planting, harvest, milling, mixing, baking are all owned by a handful of companies with minimum human labor. Government should then hold bids to see who gets to supply the market, limiting each supplier to below a 20%(?) share as to keep multiple suppliers in the market but also spread the risk so you don't have a too big to fail. The companies would be paid via taxes and everyone would get free bread. Now, you would have to deal with the effects of that; people wasting bread because it's free, health effects of eating more bread because it's free are two that I can think of off the top of my head. One other thought on the after effects: We will have no way to educate and no way to punish those who commit crime. I like kids but I doubt I would want to spend the majority of my day trying to get a group of them to learn when I don't have to. And honestly, they would also feel like it is a waste of time because it is not needed. No one will want to spend their time policing ,running prisons, jails or courthouses either. Hell, you have a hard enough time trying to get people to serve jury duty now. I know we like to that crime will cease to exist if we have plenty, but there is more than the lust for physical items that drives crime. Desire to control others, lust. The transition to a society where everyone can get what they want, when they want it is fraught with pitfalls and traps. The best cases would end with up something like the Isaac Asimov's utopias or Ian M. Bank's Culture universe. Middle case is dystopias like Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Worst case is that humanity falls into a hedonistic loop, people stop learning and then things break. Probably wouldn't kill everyone but humanity would be reset at that point. Random tidbit that I didn't work in: If you can't design a system that is 100% perfect and requires no maintenance, you should design one that requires ~yearly maintenance. If the maintenance cycles are too far apart, no one will remember when to do it and how to do it. Later when it breaks, there might not be anyone who knows how to fix it.
wpietri 5y ago
It is definitely outside the box. But think of it like this: For the last few hundred years, human productivity has vastly increased. Thanks to technological progress, farming has gone from what the bulk of people do to a niche activity that most see only driving by. Who benefits most from the productivity increases? The rich. We are approaching gilded-age levels of inequality, while the wage for most workers is stagnant. What if instead of concentrating that wealth on a few people who won the "ovarian lottery" [1] we split the dividends of our ancestors' achievements among everybody? This isn't totally ridiculous. For example, Alaska has spent decade giving each resident about $1000/year from a fund built up with oil revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund So imagine a program like that but bigger. Maybe a poverty-level income for each person, like $1000/month. What would happen? Some people wouldn't work. But that's nothing unusual; only 63% of people in the US work right now. (And really, how many people are doing bullshit jobs that don't add much to the economy?) Others would keep working because they wanted more money, or just because they like working. (Personally, I'm in that last group.) Could this work? Personally, I'm skeptical but curious. But it's definitely not impossible. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-white-man-helped-him-succeed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-...
aerostable_slug 5y ago
It seems like those who don't want their old jobs back, don't want to work for the wages offered in places like sandwich shops, or think they're above a certain class of work prove this out. The "everyone really wants to work" idea seems pretty squarely in the land of myth, at least here in California. Someone has to wash dishes, dig ditches, empty bedpans, make sandwiches, etc. Further, the sandwich shop which employs family members etc. and doesn't pay an unskilled laborer $30/hour will crush the ones that do. Multiple businesses have demonstrated that virtue alone doesn't make overpriced goods sustainable in the long term. And nobody seems to want to examine the basic math behind adding $10 per hour to everyone's hourly wage.
i_dont_know_ 5y ago
So the "where the money comes from" part is a separate discussion (maybe another thread?), but I'll try to answer "how it (could) work". So, let's say there's some amount X that is enough for a person to afford housing, food, reasonable transport etc. It's as simple as saying "everyone gets this amount now, rich or poor". For a rich person, it'll be a drop in the bucket, but for a poor person it could mean the economic freedom to quit a bad job. A few quick points around this: * inflation. People keep worrying about this. Wages have stagnated since the 70s, and whenever raising minimum wage is mentioned, people say it will cause inflation. My counter-question is, how have we stagnated wages and still have inflation as high as it is now? It kinda feels like inflation isn't a result of growing wages but tied to economic growth in general. If inflation will just happen as part of economic growth, why not cut poor people in on the pie a little bit? (I know why, I'm asking rhetorically) * welfare. People think we're doing something like this already with welfare, except welfare comes with all kinds of random classist baggage. Should the person get welfare if they, say, try to buy some 'luxury' item that's not strictly needed to live but might give them a small hint of joy in an otherwise tough situation? This version just takes away the restrictions and qualifying conditions by saying everyone just qualifies. * no one working. Of course people would still work. It's just they wouldn't be forced to do so under pain of homelessness or starvation. Imagine saying "I quit" and still getting your base needs met. What kind of working conditions would people have to give you to keep you wanting to work? What kind of job satisfaction would need to become the norm? I realize many of these don't apply to many of the people in this forum, but it can make a huge difference in industries like food service, where working conditions and perks are... a bit different from tech.
InitialLastName 5y ago
The core observations of the universal basic income drive are that: a) The amount of actual human labor required in the developed world to maintain an acceptable standard of living for everyone in the society is decreasing (with no end in sight), b) Much of the profit and control of that decreasing cost of providing for the society is concentrating in the hands of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy people c) The process you noted: > The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? ... is already how things work, we just dress it up in a byzantine (and expensive!) welfare/social insurance/corporate bailout system and the proliferation of "jobs" that provide no meaningful value to society [0]. If a system could be created that replaces the indirect spending with direct spending, the people who need to be could still be motivated to do the societally valuable jobs (because people want more things still!), and the people who want to do things that are prosocial but not well-remunerated by the capitalist system (arts, education/research, activism/humanitarianism/social work [because there will assuredly still be problems]) will be more able to do so. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
bjourne 5y ago
Read this article and the related studies: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ellyagg 5y ago
Not absurd at all and it doesn't need to be framed as a handout either. The US should have a single land tax and every American should be paid a citizen's dividend out of that. A "UBI" easily emerges from this fair and rational tax system. Economists across the political spectrum have advocated a single land tax. How we would force politicians to enact it is left as an exercise for the reader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax
JSavageOne 5y ago
I would prefer to fund it via a land value tax, which is seen as the most efficient form of taxation due to having no deadweight loss. Like the other commenter said, the concept of a UBI is already practically the reality in countries with strong welfare states where no one technically needs to work. We just disguise it with all this means-testing because as a society we're still devoted to this pro-work capitalist grind mental model of everyone needing to make a buck to justify their existence.
clairity 5y ago
ubi is ultimately about control: continue to extract wealth upwards and everyone who's left gets locked onto the money-printing teat (so that taxes don't even need to rise for said wealthy). it has its own logic: the already powerful and wealthy get to ossify socioeconomic stratification, creating a permanent gentry class. we should be fighting this dystopian gambit at every turn (note that dynamism is what makes political economies great, not stagnation). note that what we should instead be doing is pushing for more meaningful work up and down the economy.
arc619 5y ago
UBI is added on top of work so work will always mean you're better off. Would you give up your job just to spend all day doing nothing, or would you end up doing something productive? If you had infinite money, would you do nothing? What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work?
- nybble41 5y ago
  > What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work? For the most part they are the "uber rich" precisely because they prioritize earning, saving, and investing much more than average individuals, who for the most part put in just enough effort to fund what they deem an acceptable lifestyle comparable to their peers. If you want to know what UBI would look like for the average person, don't look at the handful of exceptionally successful entrepreneurs—instead, look at lottery winners, ordinary people with ordinary priorities who are suddenly given enough money to guarantee them a basic (or more than basic) income for life. It doesn't usually end well. > If you had infinite money, would you do nothing? Not "nothing", no. But I probably wouldn't care much about whether the things I choose to do have any value to other people, since I don't need to worry about whether they'll pay me to do them. Therein lies the core economic problem with eliminating the need to work or otherwise offer something of value (like access to capital) to earn a living: People will do things, sure—but most of what they'll choose to do in the absence of meaningful economic incentives will be unproductive.
dopidopHN 5y ago
Pool together all ( or most ) social benefits in one single payment to get some economy of scale.( removing the need to have specific admin XYZ to distribute XYZ benefits ) I live in the US, and from what I understand you guys have little to no benefits. But in place where it does exists, similar sums are already being spend between unemployment, rent assistance, affordable healthcare and the likes. To give you a idea the RSA in France is around 400€ / month. That’s pretty much a given if you do some paperwork ) A transition to UBI would mean to consolidate it to reach higher level. And make it non conditional. That’s a shift for sure.
sleepingadmin 5y ago
>How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits, UBI pretty well died as a subject. Everything the anti-UBI people have said would happen, is happening. So if it were universal, it would be worse than this. Trying to discuss UBI is complex because every single attempt at it has failed. There is a simplistic idea of UBI = $1000/month to every single person. Just start delivering cheques and see what happens? Everyone earns $1000 more and everyone bumps up in the progressive tax and hopefully you tax enough to keep the budget balanced and inflation under control? We know this doesn't work now. MMT is dead as a subject. We must do much more than just free money. Lets look deeper. What if we dismantle every single safety net. Welfare goes away, employment insurance, child benefits, old age pensions, indigenous UBI, etc. These all go away. We take those budgets and combine them and disperse equally. In essence what happens is that from a government budget point of view we aren't broke. At exactly the same time we also make a constitutional amendment requiring the government to balance the budget. What is this exactly? It's a negative income tax that Milton Friedman recommended ages ago.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits The amount of inflation is not especially high, it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it. In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work.
  - sleepingadmin 5y ago
    >The amount of inflation is not especially high From a historical point of view sure. The thing about WW1 boomers retiring in the 80s and causing major inflation. Sure it was a huge problem. This time it's the WW2 boomers retiring that will cause major inflation. But that effect hasnt quite kicked in. The inflation stems from benefits and low rates. Which low rates can be just called benefits as well. > it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it. So here we sit post-benefits. You and I can both agree people who couldn't work because of the pandemic shouldn't be left to starve. The consequence is extreme inflation, but worse. The USA has entered another recession. Nearby recessions means they are connected and therefore this is a depression. Which we can verify by the high correlation with psychological depression. What do you think, do you find more and more people around you are getting depressed? >In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment The countries like Germany and Switzerland that have implemented this are brilliant. Though to be fair countries which dont even need the amendment are that much smarter.
fulafel 5y ago
The comments here at the time of my writing don't provide a good explanation of it. There are practical UBI proposals out there that are revenue neutral for various countries that would largely replace income transfers of the existing social safety net, better go look them up. (There is no fundamental reason it needs to be RN but it's a good starting point to understand why it doesn't intrinsically mean more funding). It's not a panacea, generally it can make current recipients of means tested transfers well off in exchange for eliminating some problems associated with means tested programs.
sangnoir 5y ago
> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Counter question: assuming there's no UBI, and automation eats the world - Amazon Warehouses and delivery are 99% automated, as are Walmart and MacDonalds - nobody can work[1]. Corporations are still paying close to 0% taxes. How exactly is this supposed to work? Except a few in repairs and automation, and a handful of industries less amenable to robots.

dymk 5y ago

You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. We don't need to print more. And each doesn't need the spare $20B anyways.

tomrod 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Asset valuation is a bit tricky when you're an outlier. It's not terribly liquid.
- dymk 5y ago
  Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it. And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.
  - optimiz3 5y ago
    > And yet I have 37% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS You need a better accountant / portfolio manager.
    - dymk 5y ago
      Updated ;) ETR != highest bracket, ofc
optimiz3 5y ago
> You tax a couple dozen ultra rich billionaires and a couple dozen ultra profitable companies. There's plenty of money. The federal deficit is 2.8T for 1 year. If we confiscated the 100% assets of the top 10 US billionaires we don't even get close to half of 1 year of federal spending. It's not plausible that a massive increase in taxes would pay for UBI. https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-people-in-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl... As is, people not participating in the workforce right now is implicated in large parts of the various shortages. It's not clear how UBI improves things.
- dymk 5y ago
  The public holds over $22 trillion of the national debt. Bonds. Somehow we still get away with funding other welfare programs, even though we have a rising debt ceiling. Anyways, this is why you increase taxes on the ultra-wealthy, in order to pay for UBI. It doesn't mean more debt.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The "ultra-wealthy" are not where the money is. Besides, what many leftists actually end up saying by focusing on those is that Gates and Buffett should not be allowed to put their money towards eradicating malaria, giving every African safe drinking water, and countless such high-value causes. Instead that hard-won wealth should be taxed from them and frittered away to fund a one-time super binge of mindless political activism and foolish "green" boondoggles in the highly developed West. Needless to say, I think this is a very bad idea. You want to tax Larry Ellison's yacht and other ludicrous spending, fine by me. But that's the ultra-wealthy's consumption - it's not even their income, much less their wealth. If you can't tell the difference, you're not getting the point of this debate.
    - cherrycherry98 5y ago
      I agree with you, taxation does nothing but enable the government to work on projects it deems important in the name of helping the public. It's inefficient and obviously open to corruption. If we really think that it is unjust for money to be concentrated in the hands of the rich and should go to the public instead of their heirs or private interests, there should be an option of zeroing out one's bank account. That is, literally destroying money (not to be confused with wealth). This should have roughly the same effect as dividing up one's fortune and distributing it evenly to all holders of that currency.
asow92 5y ago
Even if we zero out every US billionaire (imagine that for a second; take 100% of their wealth and leave them with exactly $0) it would not even cover 1/5 of the US national debt. We can't see taking their money as a viable long term solution to UBI. Our debt is out of control and our day of reckoning will come eventually. Nothing is free; markets will correct for UBI and people will become just as poor as they were over time. Existing UBI studies cannot take into account for the _universal_ aspect of UBI because they are controlled studies — there will be unintended consequences. https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.h... https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-image/confiscating-us-billionaires-wealth-would-run-us-g/#:~:text=Estimates%20put%20the%20total%20wealth,30 https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-imag.... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/politics/national-debt-30-trillion.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/us/politics/national-debt...
- optimiz3 5y ago
  The COVID stimulus programs were a sort of UBI program. We're now starting to see mass inflation in part due to lower labor participation and excess liquidity. Obviously only part of the picture as quantitative easing and low rates are also driving excess liquidity, and omicron is also driving lower short-term labor participation.
  - asow92 5y ago
    Emphasis on the sort of part; universal means universal—everyone gets it. It's not Universal Guaranteed Income, it's Universal Basic Income. My wife and I worked the whole time and we made too much to ever get any stimulus. So we worked while we saw many people our age goofing off and seeing just how long they could ride the unemployment wave—yes, they really were proud of this. Meanwhile another half our peers want their college debt forgiven because they can't cut it in the real world with their liberal arts degree. Mark my words: if they ever do get around to slashing college debt, those who did what they were supposed to will be left there with their bill in hand while everyone else who made every ill-advised decision gets off for free.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
False. You'd need 4 trillion dollars a year to give 12k to everyone in the US. That would mean doubling US federal expenditures. And some people would stop working, hence stop paying income tax. Some businesses would leave the country. I do expect someday it will be feasible though. Maybe in my lifetime.
- dymk 5y ago
  Maybe we lower the US military spending budget to "only" be 10% higher than the next highest spender. That should free up some cash. Gotta start somewhere :)
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Emphasis on the 'some' in some cash. As bloated as the US military is, it 'only' has a budget of $700B and a good portion of this is veterns welfare programs. This should put into perspective how ludicrously expensive UBI truly is

DoktorDelta 5y ago

This Stanford article provides some explanation and also references several studies for more in-depth reading: https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/ https://basicincome.stanford.edu/about/what-is-ubi/

tomrod 5y ago

At face value, and with traditional neoclassical economics, it does appear to be an infeasible facade. Ex nilho creation of Robison Crusoe style goods. From a practical reality, we already have a UBI of $0 guaranteed, and with time cost that increases if people want to seek welfare benefits. A UBI could be implemented, potentially, solely on streamlining of processes to decrease the costs of welfare benefit search. Likely a realistic funding would be a mix of improving services delivery (lowering costs) and taxation of capital holders (offset some of the gains that put labor out of work). Under neoclassical theory, there are major differences in the two workhorse models of overlapping generations versus infinitely lived agents. An OLG model better approximates groups of people and their lifecycles. In my view, this is a slow-burn fight w/in the optimal taxation literature, based solely on the papers themselves and having not participated in the conferences! [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24335 https://www.nber.org/papers/w24335 [2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/258.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed019/258.html

alangibson 5y ago

> government prints money and gives it away for free In some circumstances this is actually a good idea. One core idea of Modern Monetary Theory is that printing money is only inflationary when the economy is at capacity. So giving money to people that can't or won't work actually drives growth because they can spend. If you moralize about economics or think MMT is wrong, this sounds like a horrible idea. If you only care about results, then it's a great idea.

rootusrootus 5y ago

> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I'm not a committed supporter of UBI, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt (or more) but I assume the whole point is to promote wealth redistribution. Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes. It sounds infeasible with the current budget, because of course it is. But modeling the final result isn't that simple I'd guess. More money into the circle, so the circle gets bigger, etc. So while it'd be easy to shoot it down using a single iteration of the circle, I'd like to see someone do a longer term simulation. I'm sure they have, I just haven't seen it.

prepend 5y ago
> Not print money. So you give everyone some amount, say 12K/year, and then support it with taxes. I’m trying to say this with utmost respect. But $12k x 330M is $4T/year. In 2021, the US collected about $4T [0]. The US spent about $7T [1]. So it would take lots of iterations to figure this out. I think there are some efficiencies so you can reduce some of this budget but introducing a UBI like this would up the spent to $10T and require an extra $6T in taxes every year. It just seems so non-sensible. As the only way to reach this level would be to inflate money so it bought nothing much. Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something. Or free housing for everyone is more feasible since that seems more achievable than increasing tax revenue by 150%. Even if you seize every penny of US billionaires assets that’s only $4.2T [2]. At least that covers the first year but then those assets are gone. [0] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/revenue/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/reven... [1] https://apnews.com/article/business-economy-government-spending-financial-crisis-14dab966ccfab3e22c5f4095f84542fa https://apnews.com/article/business-economy-government-spend... [2] https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/ https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires/
- kemitche 5y ago
  > Proposing this seems less likely than just researching Star Trek replicators to reduce the need to buy food or something. The problem with that is, without UBI, replicators don't solve the problem. The corporation that invents such a thing would get rich and charge the poorest to use it. We currently HAVE enough food, shelter, and health care as a society to cover everyone, but the efficiency/productivity gains haven't sufficiently sufficiently benefited everyone. UBI is one proposed option for correcting that situation. As for the actual cost - just as an exercise for trimming, without going into excessive detail: * About 80 million of the 330 million in the US are under 18[1]. Let's assume 4 year olds don't need UBI. Maybe there's a childcare credit, maybe not, but for the sake of NOT encouraging parents to have kids just for the paycheck, let's start UBI at 18+ years old * About half of US households make over $75k right now[2]. 33% make over 100k. I'm handwaving a bit here, but let's say the tax changes to support UBI result in increased taxes, and the "breakeven" point is somewhere around the 75k mark (i.e., above 75k household income - which would be 87k for a 1 person home, or 99k for a 2 person home, with the UBI - there's enough taxed off that the household is paying as much or more in taxes than they get from UBI). With those two tweaks, you're down to 125 million people or less that are getting more than they put in. And that comes to about 1.25T USD. And... if you look at our spending trends[3], that 7T USD number for 2021 you quoted already includes 1.6T in "income security". So it might actually be possible to hit UBI with the current budget/deficit by rearranging how the money is distributed. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri... [3] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spending/trends/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...

bhandziuk 5y ago

> nobody has to work That's generally not the expectation. The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. You want to buy a house, buy a car, travel, eat at fancy restaurants, buy expensive things, you still have to work. But if you want to quit your job and find another one you don't need to fear starvation or eviction because you are without income for a few months. It's the same logic as preventative medicine. Instead of dishing out money for surgery you can catch problems earlier when they are cheaper to fix.

Izkata 5y ago
> The expectation is that there's more than enough wealth to allow for everyone to have a baseline of income to meet their most basic needs. Yes, that's what they said: nobody has to work. They can if they want the additional perks you've described, but they don't have to.
- bhandziuk 5y ago
  I guess you're right. I interpreted that as "no body works" which...is not what they said.

throwawayboise 5y ago

It is unfeasible. The reason money works is because it is an abstraction for someone's production of value that is way easier than bartering for everything. physical labor, skilled labor, educated thinking, management, knowledge transfer... anything that is valuable to someone else. If you just pay people to sit on their asses, many of them are just going to sit on their asses, creating nothing, simply consuming resources. The host (civilized society) cannot survive when everyone is a leech.

browningstreet 5y ago
Most people don't actually want to live at the UBI subsistence level so they'll work to live at a higher level. Some people need help for a while, and the infrastructure needed to dole out services to those in need creates waste and neglect.
frickinLasers 5y ago
People who work bullshit jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs) are already unintentional leeches. UBI would disincentivize that inefficiency. Then those who want to sit on their asses with their $1200 could do so guilt-free, and, in my rosy vision for the world, the fraction who want to do something more fulfilling than making money for "the host" (e.g., FAMAG, Wall Street, I dunno) would be empowered to focus on things that are important to them, and probably to humanity as well.

izzydata 5y ago

When more work is automated the same amount of work is completed with less humans doing it. Currently that means that normal people make less money, but it doesn't have to be that way. Wealth distribution could remain the same as more things are automated. A lot of people believe we passed the point where the country makes enough money from a small enough number of people that they could re-distribute it as it used to be. A lot of people also believe that a huge percentage of society is engaging in "bullshit" jobs because there isn't enough real work that needs to be done.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

You cut most of our bureaucratic social safety net (food stamps, disability, social security, etc) and replace it with a system where everyone gets enough for the bare basics. If you were smart, you'd fund it with a carbon tax. In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. People say this would increase inflation. Maybe. Let's trial it with 1% of the population and find out.

tomrod 5y ago
> In all honesty I don't see UBI becoming a thing until we start automating ourselves into unemployment. From a political stability perspective, I expect this would be wise to get in front of.
- kaibee 5y ago
  From a political perspective, it is easier to profit (in terms of political capital or actual capital) from a crisis than it is to prevent it. If you prevent it, then you've spent a lot of capital all for most people to say "well, nothing even happened!". It is a sad state of affairs.
zeepzeep 5y ago
> until we start automating ourselves into unemployment Still waiting for steam engines to replace human labour...
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  John Henry would have a word.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
That's a tad bit insane - disabled people won't be able to find jobs, whether you want it or not. You are pushing them deeper in poverty by giving them the same amount of money as you give to someone who chooses not to work.

arrosenberg 5y ago

The ideal way would be to pass a national Land Value Tax, and use the proceeds to fund UBI. The country has plenty of money, but it's all accumulating to landlords. An LVT is the most effective way to both moderate the excesses of the wealthy and continuously fund a social safety net. It would also let you eliminate most other forms of social safety and taxation, since Land/Natural Resources are the greatest stores of value.

rcpt 5y ago
This really is the only way to make it work. Only problem is that once you eliminate poverty the no-longer-impoverished have a tendency to pull the ladder up behind them
spiderice 5y ago
So if landlords now have to pay for everyone's UBI, why aren't the Landlords just going to raise rent to get that money right back?
- tomrod 5y ago
  Tying UBI to CPI/rental index would quash that dynamic's profit seeking reasonably, I think.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  The Land Value Tax is tied to the assessment of the value of the land. If the landlord raised the rent 20%, sans improvements (which are not taxed), the assessed value of the land itself would go up 20% as a reflection and nullify the incentive to raise rent in the first place. The only way you can raise rents (in a way that nets a profit) under a LVT is to improve the property or provide services. If you own a 4 unit complex and you want a higher return, you need to build more units, a gym or provide on-site dry cleaning. This also means more efficient land-use in areas of high land value (i.e. densely built town/city centers). Since no more land can be produced, and speculation cannot produce profit, the incentivized usage is a productive one (building more housing where it's in high demand). Philosophically, a person who supports this concept wouldn't view it as the landlords paying everyone's UBI. We can respect every American's right to enjoy private property, while also holding the value of that property as a public trust. The LVT payments represent the capture of that value, and the UBI is the mechanism by which the public share is distributed.

zozbot234 5y ago

Universal basic income is not "anti-work", it's pro-work. The GP seems a bit confused. The simplest way of putting it is that everyone gets a "baseline" subsidy that's at best just enough to live a minimally dignified life. But working to earn a supplemental income can never leave you worse off. And even when this can be described as "anti-forced" work, that's because having such a safe baseline gives you the flexibility of trying for a better fit. It's something everyone would want for themselves.

agravier 5y ago

I think that many yearn for an idealized life in a small, relatively isolated community, low tech and free of fiat currency. They try to imagine workarounds for the fact that it's not actually currently possible in reality. UBI, anarchism, antiwork and other radical ideas are proposed patches to the cold and lonely reality of modern metropolitan life. They would probably not work, but they are not really the point. The point is to imagine some escape from the current crushing system.

danenania 5y ago

One way to think about it: we already have a basic income in the US. Nobody starves to death in the US. Nobody is denied medical care in the emergency room. In many places (though not everywhere), there are shelters where a person can sleep inside. There are food stamps and a patchwork of welfare programs. However meager they may seem, things like this amount to a form of universal basic income. Does it prevent people from working? In some cases, you could say it does--there are populations in every city that survive off this safety net, though they don't live well. But in most cases, it doesn't prevent people from working. The vast majority of people are willing to work for a better life than what the US "basic income" can provide. What makes you think this would be any less true if the basic income was, say, $30k per year instead of whatever the equivalent is now to provide the meager safety net we have? It's certainly possible to survive on a $30k basic income in many places in the US, but for most, it won't be an easy or especially pleasant life. Most people will want better. With a basic income that's a bit more substantial (and has no strings or stigma attached), people will have more freedom to make choices that can truly improve their circumstances, rather than being stuck on a treadmill of barely making ends meet with no space to come up for air and consider education or career changes.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
barbazoo 5y ago
Nicely written. I like to think of UBI as a tool to get out of a local minimum which isn't easily possible if you're a slave to your minimum wage job.
wonderwonder 5y ago
I am not trying to disagree at all, in fact I think we very much need to do more for the poorest among us, especially the kids. Where does that 30k come from though? For 300 million people, that's 9 trillion dollars a year, ~half of GDP. Inflation would be out of control, essentially Venezuela / Zimbabwe levels.
- loceng 5y ago

TuringNYC 5y ago

>> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I grew up around a lot of poor people. One issue in the US is healthcare. If you make <13k (or whatever your state limit is) you dont qualify for government healthcare. Also, 13k is too little to actually purchase private healthcare, so there is a "donut hole" where it makes sense not to work below a certain wage since you get less with income than with no income. The solution here is obvious to me -- if you provide some of the benefits without means-testing (i.e., the "U" in "UBI") then people are incentivized to work even bits without risking losting healthcare/foodstamps. Another example was in college -- if you earned even a bit of money, your student aid often went down commensurately. At that point, why would you work? You were no better off unless you could make a LOT of money. I realize this has changed over the past 20yrs. Also, as someone who's gone thru this -- this is a very delicate process. You do one thing wrong, and you're in bureaucratic hell for months without benefits. The "safe" thing to do is to earn nothing -- God forbid you earn a thousand here or there and lose medical care. The whole system of means-testing makes no sense. It seems to be more a way to create jobs for bureaucrats.

dustymcp 5y ago
It Works like this in Denmark

zeepzeep 5y ago

> How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Nobody HAS to work, correct. If they only want to survive, they don't need to work. Everyone gets money for food, water, shelter and education; no questions asked. If you want an iPhone or eat something nice, you should probably get some money though. Universal basic income isn't much usually, it's enough to survive, enough for a livable life. That's paid by taxes of the majority of people that will still work, because people usually want more than just to survive, so they'll work. They'll just not work at Starbucks for 10 years to pay their student loan, they'll find a job that they like, a job with meaning.

bloaf 5y ago

If you give someone a fish, they starve after a day. Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish. But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve? UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.

themaninthedark 5y ago
I am against UBI because I think we aren't there just yet with technology but I do agree that we need a way to ensure that "everyone can eat" when the time comes. Right now we also need to look at how we can provide job for those who are affected by automation and not just say that the coal miners need "learn to code" and move. Edit to add: We have some industries that are highly automated, ie. semiconductor manufacturing. Yet they still have raw inputs that take non-automated work. If we were able to develop a complete automated line, I would support gov/private group "socializing" the output.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Can you nail down what it will look like once we are there?
  - themaninthedark 5y ago
    Technology wise, there are a lot of diffrent visions of how it might look like. I liked the description of the Universal Constructors in Diamond Age, toothed gears that captured atoms and placed them into buckets, sorting the elements out of the ocean water. That is probably more fantasy though, more likely to like like how it does now with modular rock crushers, moving belts, etc. Food supply is going to be interesting(read difficult), we can automate harvesting grains(rice, wheat, corn) easily. But things like tomatoes, lettuce, spinach rely heavily on human labor to tend and harvest. One of the things that is noticeable is that as we select foods that ship and store better(which we will be doing more of as we automate more) they are less tasty. Maybe we can engineer foods that are easy to harvest, tasty and transport well but that will necessitate us to get over our fear of GMO. On the societal front, I would not want the government to have control of the manufacturing systems because the temptation to use control against political adversaries would be to great(See Biden's recent comments on how Spotify should do more about Joe Rogan and how Trump used his influence(Not taking a stance on any issues, just showing the issues exist and would have grave ramifications). My thought would be that as you have a product more and more automated and vertically integrated, let's say bread. Planting, harvest, milling, mixing, baking are all owned by a handful of companies with minimum human labor. Government should then hold bids to see who gets to supply the market, limiting each supplier to below a 20%(?) share as to keep multiple suppliers in the market but also spread the risk so you don't have a too big to fail. The companies would be paid via taxes and everyone would get free bread. Now, you would have to deal with the effects of that; people wasting bread because it's free, health effects of eating more bread because it's free are two that I can think of off the top of my head. One other thought on the after effects: We will have no way to educate and no way to punish those who commit crime. I like kids but I doubt I would want to spend the majority of my day trying to get a group of them to learn when I don't have to. And honestly, they would also feel like it is a waste of time because it is not needed. No one will want to spend their time policing ,running prisons, jails or courthouses either. Hell, you have a hard enough time trying to get people to serve jury duty now. I know we like to that crime will cease to exist if we have plenty, but there is more than the lust for physical items that drives crime. Desire to control others, lust. The transition to a society where everyone can get what they want, when they want it is fraught with pitfalls and traps. The best cases would end with up something like the Isaac Asimov's utopias or Ian M. Bank's Culture universe. Middle case is dystopias like Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Worst case is that humanity falls into a hedonistic loop, people stop learning and then things break. Probably wouldn't kill everyone but humanity would be reset at that point. Random tidbit that I didn't work in: If you can't design a system that is 100% perfect and requires no maintenance, you should design one that requires ~yearly maintenance. If the maintenance cycles are too far apart, no one will remember when to do it and how to do it. Later when it breaks, there might not be anyone who knows how to fix it.

wpietri 5y ago

It is definitely outside the box. But think of it like this: For the last few hundred years, human productivity has vastly increased. Thanks to technological progress, farming has gone from what the bulk of people do to a niche activity that most see only driving by. Who benefits most from the productivity increases? The rich. We are approaching gilded-age levels of inequality, while the wage for most workers is stagnant. What if instead of concentrating that wealth on a few people who won the "ovarian lottery" [1] we split the dividends of our ancestors' achievements among everybody? This isn't totally ridiculous. For example, Alaska has spent decade giving each resident about $1000/year from a fund built up with oil revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund So imagine a program like that but bigger. Maybe a poverty-level income for each person, like $1000/month. What would happen? Some people wouldn't work. But that's nothing unusual; only 63% of people in the US work right now. (And really, how many people are doing bullshit jobs that don't add much to the economy?) Others would keep working because they wanted more money, or just because they like working. (Personally, I'm in that last group.) Could this work? Personally, I'm skeptical but curious. But it's definitely not impossible. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-white-man-helped-him-succeed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-...

aerostable_slug 5y ago

It seems like those who don't want their old jobs back, don't want to work for the wages offered in places like sandwich shops, or think they're above a certain class of work prove this out. The "everyone really wants to work" idea seems pretty squarely in the land of myth, at least here in California. Someone has to wash dishes, dig ditches, empty bedpans, make sandwiches, etc. Further, the sandwich shop which employs family members etc. and doesn't pay an unskilled laborer $30/hour will crush the ones that do. Multiple businesses have demonstrated that virtue alone doesn't make overpriced goods sustainable in the long term. And nobody seems to want to examine the basic math behind adding $10 per hour to everyone's hourly wage.

i_dont_know_ 5y ago

So the "where the money comes from" part is a separate discussion (maybe another thread?), but I'll try to answer "how it (could) work". So, let's say there's some amount X that is enough for a person to afford housing, food, reasonable transport etc. It's as simple as saying "everyone gets this amount now, rich or poor". For a rich person, it'll be a drop in the bucket, but for a poor person it could mean the economic freedom to quit a bad job. A few quick points around this: * inflation. People keep worrying about this. Wages have stagnated since the 70s, and whenever raising minimum wage is mentioned, people say it will cause inflation. My counter-question is, how have we stagnated wages and still have inflation as high as it is now? It kinda feels like inflation isn't a result of growing wages but tied to economic growth in general. If inflation will just happen as part of economic growth, why not cut poor people in on the pie a little bit? (I know why, I'm asking rhetorically) * welfare. People think we're doing something like this already with welfare, except welfare comes with all kinds of random classist baggage. Should the person get welfare if they, say, try to buy some 'luxury' item that's not strictly needed to live but might give them a small hint of joy in an otherwise tough situation? This version just takes away the restrictions and qualifying conditions by saying everyone just qualifies. * no one working. Of course people would still work. It's just they wouldn't be forced to do so under pain of homelessness or starvation. Imagine saying "I quit" and still getting your base needs met. What kind of working conditions would people have to give you to keep you wanting to work? What kind of job satisfaction would need to become the norm? I realize many of these don't apply to many of the people in this forum, but it can make a huge difference in industries like food service, where working conditions and perks are... a bit different from tech.

InitialLastName 5y ago

The core observations of the universal basic income drive are that: a) The amount of actual human labor required in the developed world to maintain an acceptable standard of living for everyone in the society is decreasing (with no end in sight), b) Much of the profit and control of that decreasing cost of providing for the society is concentrating in the hands of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy people c) The process you noted: > The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? ... is already how things work, we just dress it up in a byzantine (and expensive!) welfare/social insurance/corporate bailout system and the proliferation of "jobs" that provide no meaningful value to society [0]. If a system could be created that replaces the indirect spending with direct spending, the people who need to be could still be motivated to do the societally valuable jobs (because people want more things still!), and the people who want to do things that are prosocial but not well-remunerated by the capitalist system (arts, education/research, activism/humanitarianism/social work [because there will assuredly still be problems]) will be more able to do so. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

bjourne 5y ago

Read this article and the related studies: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ellyagg 5y ago

Not absurd at all and it doesn't need to be framed as a handout either. The US should have a single land tax and every American should be paid a citizen's dividend out of that. A "UBI" easily emerges from this fair and rational tax system. Economists across the political spectrum have advocated a single land tax. How we would force politicians to enact it is left as an exercise for the reader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_tax

JSavageOne 5y ago

I would prefer to fund it via a land value tax, which is seen as the most efficient form of taxation due to having no deadweight loss. Like the other commenter said, the concept of a UBI is already practically the reality in countries with strong welfare states where no one technically needs to work. We just disguise it with all this means-testing because as a society we're still devoted to this pro-work capitalist grind mental model of everyone needing to make a buck to justify their existence.

clairity 5y ago

ubi is ultimately about control: continue to extract wealth upwards and everyone who's left gets locked onto the money-printing teat (so that taxes don't even need to rise for said wealthy). it has its own logic: the already powerful and wealthy get to ossify socioeconomic stratification, creating a permanent gentry class. we should be fighting this dystopian gambit at every turn (note that dynamism is what makes political economies great, not stagnation). note that what we should instead be doing is pushing for more meaningful work up and down the economy.

arc619 5y ago

UBI is added on top of work so work will always mean you're better off. Would you give up your job just to spend all day doing nothing, or would you end up doing something productive? If you had infinite money, would you do nothing? What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work?

nybble41 5y ago
> What do uber rich people do all day? Why do they work? For the most part they are the "uber rich" precisely because they prioritize earning, saving, and investing much more than average individuals, who for the most part put in just enough effort to fund what they deem an acceptable lifestyle comparable to their peers. If you want to know what UBI would look like for the average person, don't look at the handful of exceptionally successful entrepreneurs—instead, look at lottery winners, ordinary people with ordinary priorities who are suddenly given enough money to guarantee them a basic (or more than basic) income for life. It doesn't usually end well. > If you had infinite money, would you do nothing? Not "nothing", no. But I probably wouldn't care much about whether the things I choose to do have any value to other people, since I don't need to worry about whether they'll pay me to do them. Therein lies the core economic problem with eliminating the need to work or otherwise offer something of value (like access to capital) to earn a living: People will do things, sure—but most of what they'll choose to do in the absence of meaningful economic incentives will be unproductive.

dopidopHN 5y ago

Pool together all ( or most ) social benefits in one single payment to get some economy of scale.( removing the need to have specific admin XYZ to distribute XYZ benefits ) I live in the US, and from what I understand you guys have little to no benefits. But in place where it does exists, similar sums are already being spend between unemployment, rent assistance, affordable healthcare and the likes. To give you a idea the RSA in France is around 400€ / month. That’s pretty much a given if you do some paperwork ) A transition to UBI would mean to consolidate it to reach higher level. And make it non conditional. That’s a shift for sure.

sleepingadmin 5y ago

>How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits, UBI pretty well died as a subject. Everything the anti-UBI people have said would happen, is happening. So if it were universal, it would be worse than this. Trying to discuss UBI is complex because every single attempt at it has failed. There is a simplistic idea of UBI = $1000/month to every single person. Just start delivering cheques and see what happens? Everyone earns $1000 more and everyone bumps up in the progressive tax and hopefully you tax enough to keep the budget balanced and inflation under control? We know this doesn't work now. MMT is dead as a subject. We must do much more than just free money. Lets look deeper. What if we dismantle every single safety net. Welfare goes away, employment insurance, child benefits, old age pensions, indigenous UBI, etc. These all go away. We take those budgets and combine them and disperse equally. In essence what happens is that from a government budget point of view we aren't broke. At exactly the same time we also make a constitutional amendment requiring the government to balance the budget. What is this exactly? It's a negative income tax that Milton Friedman recommended ages ago.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

zozbot234 5y ago
> Given the tremendous inflation occurring because of non-universal benefits The amount of inflation is not especially high, it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it. In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work.
- sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >The amount of inflation is not especially high From a historical point of view sure. The thing about WW1 boomers retiring in the 80s and causing major inflation. Sure it was a huge problem. This time it's the WW2 boomers retiring that will cause major inflation. But that effect hasnt quite kicked in. The inflation stems from benefits and low rates. Which low rates can be just called benefits as well. > it would've been quite normal back in the 1980s (post Volcker, even). That's why the Fed is slow at addressing it. And of course, the global pandemic had much to do with it. So here we sit post-benefits. You and I can both agree people who couldn't work because of the pandemic shouldn't be left to starve. The consequence is extreme inflation, but worse. The USA has entered another recession. Nearby recessions means they are connected and therefore this is a depression. Which we can verify by the high correlation with psychological depression. What do you think, do you find more and more people around you are getting depressed? >In the latter part of your comment, you're talking about two versions of the same thing. Calling budget constraints 'MMT' does not change how they work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_budget_amendment The countries like Germany and Switzerland that have implemented this are brilliant. Though to be fair countries which dont even need the amendment are that much smarter.

fulafel 5y ago

The comments here at the time of my writing don't provide a good explanation of it. There are practical UBI proposals out there that are revenue neutral for various countries that would largely replace income transfers of the existing social safety net, better go look them up. (There is no fundamental reason it needs to be RN but it's a good starting point to understand why it doesn't intrinsically mean more funding). It's not a panacea, generally it can make current recipients of means tested transfers well off in exchange for eliminating some problems associated with means tested programs.

sangnoir 5y ago

> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? Counter question: assuming there's no UBI, and automation eats the world - Amazon Warehouses and delivery are 99% automated, as are Walmart and MacDonalds - nobody can work[1]. Corporations are still paying close to 0% taxes. How exactly is this supposed to work? Except a few in repairs and automation, and a handful of industries less amenable to robots.