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A universal basic income would have some advantages over a minimum wage. Minimum wage interferes with supply and demand in the labor market, which is why some e

by bo1024 5y ago

A universal basic income would have some advantages over a minimum wage. Minimum wage interferes with supply and demand in the labor market, which is why some economists dislike it. UBI moves the supply curve to a different place, but it allows those principles to function.

bogwog 5y ago
UBI could allow the elimination of minimum wage entirely, along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs. It’s a no-brainer!
- njarboe 5y ago
  Most people working for minimum wage (and probably most people in general in the US) work pay check to pay check (like the Applebee's manager stated in the article). They max out their available credit so that the interest takes up all of the possible slack in their income. Under UBI how to you prevent people from now borrowing more money (spending it on a vacation, clothes, fancier car, etc.), paying all the UBI as interest and ending up back in the same financial situation they were before. I don't think UBI solves peoples financial problems. I think Thomas Paine's idea of getting a large lump sum when reaching the age of maturity has some merit. Maybe a manditory two year service in the military or other government org after high school and then they receive a large chunk of money to start their life ($200k or something like that). The person could spend it on school, start a business, down payment on a house, wedding, etc. Having classed in high school discussing what one should do with that money would be a great way for students to think about the future and in a positive way.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Under UBI how to you prevent people from now borrowing more money (spending it on a vacation, clothes, fancier car, etc.), paying all the UBI as interest and ending up back in the same financial situation they were before. Don't make UBI subject to garnishment/attachment to pay debt and exclude it from income considered available when determining bankruptcy terms. Lending behavior under those conditions will prevent the use of credit you are concerned with, and bankruptcy itself will resolve problematic cases to the extent that lending behavior does not prevent it.
    - njarboe 5y ago
      Most people in financial distress don't do bankruptcy. They run up their credit cards/car loans/etc. till the interest payments are high enough that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. They get stuck in that situation. I think in the US only the government can garnish wages. Private entities can only bug you a lot and wreck your credit. I just don't think UBI solves the poverty problem like many people think. But I sure would like some country to try it to see what happens.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    I find this comment very classist and detached from reality. Most minimum wage earners are not in poverty because they are taking too many vacations and buying too many luxury items: they are in poverty because rents are consuming 40-60% of their income, costs of essentials to live and commute to work are rapidly rising, and a single medical debt can wipe out all of their savings in an instant. Avocado toast is not destroying the middle class - corporate greed is. People aren't poor because they are lazy and stupid, as ultra-capitalist pundits would like you to believe to prevent you feeling empathy. America is systemically broken in a way that it is no longer 'the land of opportunity': poverty today is a trap that hardly anyone can escape by simply working hard and spending wisely.
- tacitusarc 5y ago
  It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven. As soon as you have a UBI, there will be massive political pressure to use it for some agenda. Of course everyone gets UBI… …except the polluters …and CO2 emitters …and meat eaters …and porn watchers …and weed smokers …and tobacco smokers …and alcohol drinkers …and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Cash welfare is extremely good, but an advantage of directly giving out non-cash welfare like food stamps is that they can't be stolen from the recipient. ie if everything was UBI and you ended up in debt or someone stole your bank account contents, you still can't pay for groceries. But with a guaranteed free groceries program then you can always get something. Unfortunately, non-cash welfare has tons of the manipulation you describe. You can get kicked out of public housing for using drugs and food stamps have all kinds of arbitrary limitations on them based on what the state legislature thinks you should be eating.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven Uh, no, it's not. The byzantine structure is because of (and in part to disguise the way that) every component of the system is agenda driven, and often by an agenda rather divergent from the overt purpose of the programs.
- astrange 5y ago
  Minimum wage has other effects. It eliminates extremely unproductive jobs, which I'm sorry if you don't like the freedom reduction, but it's a form of industrial policy that's useful when you're competing with other economies. Also protects workers from accidentally ending up in such a job, which is bad for them even if UBI would let them quit it easier. And of course, economists don't find it has the negative effects it used to theoretically have, because throughout the 90s they switched from just making things up to actually doing real-world empirical studies. (That is, it doesn't seem to have them up to "60% of local median income" IIRC.) I prefer sector-specific minimum wages though. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Denmark or Australia.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Minimum wage has other effects. It eliminates extremely unproductive jobs what are these "extremely unproductive jobs" you speak of? Is the job of a burger flipper really so bad that we should eliminate it from the economy? Is it so bad, that if someone's skills only allows him to do that job, that it's better for him to stay at home and twiddle his thumbs than to show up to work?
    - astrange 5y ago
      That's for sure a productive job and it hasn't been eliminated here. Sunnyvale's minimum wage is $17/hr and McDonalds/Wendys/In-n-Out pay slightly above that (I read the posters in the drivethrough.) I've never seen a fast food restaurant in the area close, though of course family run strip mall places have as they often do. I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers.
      - gruez 5y ago
        >I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers. I don't think they were eliminated because of minimum wage. They were eliminated because of a combination of outsourcing/globalization, which set an upper bound on how much those jobs can pay (at least in the US), and baumol's cost disease, which set a lower bound on what workers were willing to accept. The two forces combined to make those professions unviable. Getting rid of the minimum wage probably won't bring those jobs back. If anything the jobs will go to more productive sectors (thanks to baumol's cost disease), rather than to the utterly unproductive ones like you mentioned.
- gruez 5y ago
  >It’s a no-brainer! ...aside from how it's funded. >along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs. That sounds great in theory, if everyone is the type of person that can take care of himself for $15k (or whatever) a year. But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people, which mean all the "administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs" that you're so against.
  - loudandskittish 5y ago
    > But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people Speaking from experience, such people already have to fend for themselves...so nothing really changes.
    - account42 5y ago
      Something changes: Those people can spend the energy that they currently need to chase after means-tested benefits on getting better. Being poor is not just expensive, it can also be extremely mentally taxing.
- bduerst 5y ago
  Eliminating complexity for the sake of eliminating complexity is not an effective solution, especially when it introduces new problems like inflation on income-elastic priced goods like housing. UBI is the epitome of a cocktail party idea: https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
xwdv 5y ago
UBI won’t do anything I’m afraid, that experiment already failed during the pandemic and now we have massive inflation across all assets.
- bduerst 5y ago
  The covid checks weren't UBI, only people under a specific income range were eligible. Also keeping businesses afloat solved stagnation (worst) at the cost of inflation (bad, but not the worst). I'm critical of UBI but using a global pandemic with millions of deaths as an example isn't what UBI is.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Umm, there might have been a FEW confounding factors during the pandemic that makes the conclusion not as clear as that.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  It is very tempting to draw a straight line between something you don't like and some other event that is negative and declare causation. Do you really think this is what is causing inflation? Perhaps there are other facts, such as trillions of dollars of almost zero interest money injected since 2008, massive tax cuts for highly profitable companies (eg AAPL) that result in great payouts to people who are already paying low taxes (long term capital gains), complex interacting forces that moved the cost of a barrel of oil from a low of $20 to over $100?
  - google234123 5y ago
    The 6 trillion in government spending, subsidizing labor non-participation with federal money, and canceling federal leases and pipelines and saking banks not to lend for fracking didnt help any of that. I'm not sure how I see how spending a ton more money (UBI) will help with inflation at this point. 100% debt-to-gdb is already a lot.
    - astrange 5y ago
      You might recall 2008, where we tried not spending money and what we got was a 10-year-long recession. Currently private investors are refusing to invest in oil even without environmental factors in the picture - they think it's a temporary spike and are insisting the oil companies pay them back dividends instead. https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1506654993633456137 https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1506654993633456137
glitchc 5y ago
1) UBI is not UBI unless everyone gets it. 2) Any income surplus generated by UBI is rapidly consumed by middle people and rent-seekers. That’s how we get inflation.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Any income surplus generated by UBI Typical UBI proposals are funded, e.g., by additional progressive taxes, and so no actual income surplus is generated (in a first-order analysis), income is redistributed, compressing distribution.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > funded, e.g., by additional progressive taxes At which point the proposal becomes a welfare system that pointlessly disburses and claws-back cash.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      Not really. The fundamental problem of means-tested welfare programs that UBI addresses remain: (1) Eliminates multiple sets of inefficient benefits/eligibility bureaucracy that duplicates functionality already performed as part of taxing authority. (2) Eliminates a counterproductive incentives associated with typical means-tested benefit eligibility, which has clawbacks at low income levels and rapid marginal rate (sometimes exceeding 100% with marginal income when tallied across all means-tested programs; this effect creates a barrier to progress beyond a low income level. (While progressive income taxes may be raised from previous levels to fund it, when viewed as clawbacks these changes typically kick in at much higher income levels and lower marginal rates than typical means-tested benefit clawback.)
      - account42 5y ago
        (3) Eliminates the psychological torment that being subjected to a means-tested welfare program can inflict.
      - 5y ago

by bo1024 5y ago

bogwog 5y ago

UBI could allow the elimination of minimum wage entirely, along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs. It’s a no-brainer!

njarboe 5y ago
Most people working for minimum wage (and probably most people in general in the US) work pay check to pay check (like the Applebee's manager stated in the article). They max out their available credit so that the interest takes up all of the possible slack in their income. Under UBI how to you prevent people from now borrowing more money (spending it on a vacation, clothes, fancier car, etc.), paying all the UBI as interest and ending up back in the same financial situation they were before. I don't think UBI solves peoples financial problems. I think Thomas Paine's idea of getting a large lump sum when reaching the age of maturity has some merit. Maybe a manditory two year service in the military or other government org after high school and then they receive a large chunk of money to start their life ($200k or something like that). The person could spend it on school, start a business, down payment on a house, wedding, etc. Having classed in high school discussing what one should do with that money would be a great way for students to think about the future and in a positive way.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Under UBI how to you prevent people from now borrowing more money (spending it on a vacation, clothes, fancier car, etc.), paying all the UBI as interest and ending up back in the same financial situation they were before. Don't make UBI subject to garnishment/attachment to pay debt and exclude it from income considered available when determining bankruptcy terms. Lending behavior under those conditions will prevent the use of credit you are concerned with, and bankruptcy itself will resolve problematic cases to the extent that lending behavior does not prevent it.
  - njarboe 5y ago
    Most people in financial distress don't do bankruptcy. They run up their credit cards/car loans/etc. till the interest payments are high enough that they are living paycheck-to-paycheck. They get stuck in that situation. I think in the US only the government can garnish wages. Private entities can only bug you a lot and wreck your credit. I just don't think UBI solves the poverty problem like many people think. But I sure would like some country to try it to see what happens.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  I find this comment very classist and detached from reality. Most minimum wage earners are not in poverty because they are taking too many vacations and buying too many luxury items: they are in poverty because rents are consuming 40-60% of their income, costs of essentials to live and commute to work are rapidly rising, and a single medical debt can wipe out all of their savings in an instant. Avocado toast is not destroying the middle class - corporate greed is. People aren't poor because they are lazy and stupid, as ultra-capitalist pundits would like you to believe to prevent you feeling empathy. America is systemically broken in a way that it is no longer 'the land of opportunity': poverty today is a trap that hardly anyone can escape by simply working hard and spending wisely.
tacitusarc 5y ago
It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven. As soon as you have a UBI, there will be massive political pressure to use it for some agenda. Of course everyone gets UBI… …except the polluters …and CO2 emitters …and meat eaters …and porn watchers …and weed smokers …and tobacco smokers …and alcohol drinkers …and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.
- astrange 5y ago
  Cash welfare is extremely good, but an advantage of directly giving out non-cash welfare like food stamps is that they can't be stolen from the recipient. ie if everything was UBI and you ended up in debt or someone stole your bank account contents, you still can't pay for groceries. But with a guaranteed free groceries program then you can always get something. Unfortunately, non-cash welfare has tons of the manipulation you describe. You can get kicked out of public housing for using drugs and food stamps have all kinds of arbitrary limitations on them based on what the state legislature thinks you should be eating.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It recently occurred to me that the complex Byzantine structure of the existing welfare state does have one major advantage over UBI: it’s significantly harder to make the entire thing agenda driven Uh, no, it's not. The byzantine structure is because of (and in part to disguise the way that) every component of the system is agenda driven, and often by an agenda rather divergent from the overt purpose of the programs.
astrange 5y ago
Minimum wage has other effects. It eliminates extremely unproductive jobs, which I'm sorry if you don't like the freedom reduction, but it's a form of industrial policy that's useful when you're competing with other economies. Also protects workers from accidentally ending up in such a job, which is bad for them even if UBI would let them quit it easier. And of course, economists don't find it has the negative effects it used to theoretically have, because throughout the 90s they switched from just making things up to actually doing real-world empirical studies. (That is, it doesn't seem to have them up to "60% of local median income" IIRC.) I prefer sector-specific minimum wages though. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Denmark or Australia.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Minimum wage has other effects. It eliminates extremely unproductive jobs what are these "extremely unproductive jobs" you speak of? Is the job of a burger flipper really so bad that we should eliminate it from the economy? Is it so bad, that if someone's skills only allows him to do that job, that it's better for him to stay at home and twiddle his thumbs than to show up to work?
  - astrange 5y ago
    That's for sure a productive job and it hasn't been eliminated here. Sunnyvale's minimum wage is $17/hr and McDonalds/Wendys/In-n-Out pay slightly above that (I read the posters in the drivethrough.) I've never seen a fast food restaurant in the area close, though of course family run strip mall places have as they often do. I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers. I don't think they were eliminated because of minimum wage. They were eliminated because of a combination of outsourcing/globalization, which set an upper bound on how much those jobs can pay (at least in the US), and baumol's cost disease, which set a lower bound on what workers were willing to accept. The two forces combined to make those professions unviable. Getting rid of the minimum wage probably won't bring those jobs back. If anything the jobs will go to more productive sectors (thanks to baumol's cost disease), rather than to the utterly unproductive ones like you mentioned.
gruez 5y ago
>It’s a no-brainer! ...aside from how it's funded. >along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs. That sounds great in theory, if everyone is the type of person that can take care of himself for $15k (or whatever) a year. But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people, which mean all the "administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs" that you're so against.
- loudandskittish 5y ago
  > But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people Speaking from experience, such people already have to fend for themselves...so nothing really changes.
  - account42 5y ago
    Something changes: Those people can spend the energy that they currently need to chase after means-tested benefits on getting better. Being poor is not just expensive, it can also be extremely mentally taxing.
bduerst 5y ago
Eliminating complexity for the sake of eliminating complexity is not an effective solution, especially when it introduces new problems like inflation on income-elastic priced goods like housing. UBI is the epitome of a cocktail party idea: https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/ https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

xwdv 5y ago

UBI won’t do anything I’m afraid, that experiment already failed during the pandemic and now we have massive inflation across all assets.

bduerst 5y ago
The covid checks weren't UBI, only people under a specific income range were eligible. Also keeping businesses afloat solved stagnation (worst) at the cost of inflation (bad, but not the worst). I'm critical of UBI but using a global pandemic with millions of deaths as an example isn't what UBI is.
cortesoft 5y ago
Umm, there might have been a FEW confounding factors during the pandemic that makes the conclusion not as clear as that.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
It is very tempting to draw a straight line between something you don't like and some other event that is negative and declare causation. Do you really think this is what is causing inflation? Perhaps there are other facts, such as trillions of dollars of almost zero interest money injected since 2008, massive tax cuts for highly profitable companies (eg AAPL) that result in great payouts to people who are already paying low taxes (long term capital gains), complex interacting forces that moved the cost of a barrel of oil from a low of $20 to over $100?
- google234123 5y ago
  The 6 trillion in government spending, subsidizing labor non-participation with federal money, and canceling federal leases and pipelines and saking banks not to lend for fracking didnt help any of that. I'm not sure how I see how spending a ton more money (UBI) will help with inflation at this point. 100% debt-to-gdb is already a lot.
  - astrange 5y ago
    You might recall 2008, where we tried not spending money and what we got was a 10-year-long recession. Currently private investors are refusing to invest in oil even without environmental factors in the picture - they think it's a temporary spike and are insisting the oil companies pay them back dividends instead. https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1506654993633456137 https://twitter.com/PEWilliams_/status/1506654993633456137

glitchc 5y ago

1) UBI is not UBI unless everyone gets it. 2) Any income surplus generated by UBI is rapidly consumed by middle people and rent-seekers. That’s how we get inflation.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Any income surplus generated by UBI Typical UBI proposals are funded, e.g., by additional progressive taxes, and so no actual income surplus is generated (in a first-order analysis), income is redistributed, compressing distribution.
- adolph 5y ago
  > funded, e.g., by additional progressive taxes At which point the proposal becomes a welfare system that pointlessly disburses and claws-back cash.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    Not really. The fundamental problem of means-tested welfare programs that UBI addresses remain: (1) Eliminates multiple sets of inefficient benefits/eligibility bureaucracy that duplicates functionality already performed as part of taxing authority. (2) Eliminates a counterproductive incentives associated with typical means-tested benefit eligibility, which has clawbacks at low income levels and rapid marginal rate (sometimes exceeding 100% with marginal income when tallied across all means-tested programs; this effect creates a barrier to progress beyond a low income level. (While progressive income taxes may be raised from previous levels to fund it, when viewed as clawbacks these changes typically kick in at much higher income levels and lower marginal rates than typical means-tested benefit clawback.)
    - account42 5y ago
      (3) Eliminates the psychological torment that being subjected to a means-tested welfare program can inflict.
    - 5y ago