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Just as the various US fiscal packages over the past few years are about to do the same. I consider UBI already tried on a mass scale at this point. There’s no

Just as the various US fiscal packages over the past few years are about to do the same. I consider UBI already tried on a mass scale at this point. There’s no intrinsic value to a dollar, handing them out en masse doesn’t enrich people

remote_phone 4y ago
I was a huge proponent of Andrew Yang and UBI. I was skeptical but thought why not, let’s try. I thought all it would do is create inflation but I was willing to try because the way things are going right now is clearly not working. After the pandemic distributing so much money to so many people, I think my initial thoughts were right. All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI. I think it doesn’t work and we need a better idea. That said, I still support Andrew Yang and the Forward Party.
- Kye 4y ago
  Covering a month or two of rent is not in any way UBI.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI. Whatever happened during pandemic was nowhere near UBI. For one, it was not universal. Second, it was temporary and very volatile, not something one could plan around.
  - mc32 4y ago
    And yet people didn’t take advantage of it and instead quit and farted around with the money. Not everyone of course, for many people it was critical but also for many it was a reason to quit and fart around and not follow their hearts to art or hobbies or something else productive as some UBI proponents predicted very hopefully.
    - lovich 4y ago
      A benefit that had an anticipated end date of within a year is, as the previous poster stated, too volatile. It was treated as a temporary windfall instead of a new reality that could be relied on and planned around
    - noahtallen 4y ago
      How much money do you think people got? Most people got around $2k over a two years. How is $1k/yr enough to quit a job and “fart around” with the money?
    - denkmoon 4y ago
      >instead quit and farted around with the money. Citation needed. You read too much reddit.
    - colonelxc 4y ago
      There were record high # of businesses being created during the pandemic. There's anecdotes that it is because they had the opportunity to do so now with some extra cash + time off. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/business/startup-business-creation-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/business/startup-business... https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072057249/new-business-applications-record-high-great-resignation-pandemic-entrepreneur https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072057249/new-business-appli... I had also seen some articles (citation needed!) that part of the employee crunch low-wage businesses are feeling is due to employees in those jobs taking their covid-money+time and training/interviewing/applying for office jobs. I don't think we have a measure on how many people got to pursue their hobbies (rather than 'farting around'), though I'm not sure it matters. UBI proponents don't think that all people will do something 'valuable' though, just that it will be a net positive.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Right, it was just the monitary handouts of a few thousands of dollars to individuals that caused this problem and not the near zero percent interest rates....
- Comevius 4y ago
  I mean the distribution of that money was upward. It's not like the wages were fixed or anything, or housing or any of that. The United States shouldn't even start with an approach like UBI. Universal health coverage should be the first. It's one of the basic tenets of civilization, not to mention that it costs literally half.
  - mc32 4y ago
    I concur with a basic level of universal health coverage, proactive basic coverage. I would not expand the definition of basic to cover any cosmetic and or elective procedures. And also not to introduce definition creep.
    - lovich 4y ago
      We’d have to allow for some definition creep, effectively freeze healthcare innovation, or let the basic level of healthcare fall to below basic after years of improvements and new drugs
      - mc32 4y ago
        So I think the state owes its citizens some modicum of health insurance, but it's not there to provide for non-basic health care --that which keeps a bell-curve fitting person in reasonable health for a reasonable amount of time (to be some independent health-body defined arbitrary time). Anything more should be up to complementary insurance of some sort or another. It may come to be that like cars, all cars even the basic ones upgrade their Window hand-cranks to automatic. However, that should come from an economic feasibility point of view rather than 60% of voters/deciders say they want it.
        Comevius 4y ago
        Supporting people staying healthy, preventing diseases is a whole lot cheaper eventually. The idea behind universal health care is that you don't want to be overly stringent because it comes back to you down the line with vengeance. In my country for example you are recommended to visit the dentist at least once a year because prevention is important, and society can't exactly function well with people having bad teeth. Equal chances and all that, but also to avoid the cost down the line. In the United States however nobody cares, there isn't even a society, just a bunch of different classes living very different lives. If you can't afford good teeth you don't matter. You are not good enough. Problem solved. Good luck making it with your bad teeth. That's your problem, why should I pay for it. It's funny when people who call themselves Christians say this when Christianity is about realizing the eventual spiraling cost of not landing a hand to people, although this practicality evolved into morals over the ages. In the United States however there is a deep cultural problem, a lack of practical morality if you will, and that's not going to be easily solved.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  > All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI I mean, it's difficult to prove the counterfactual, but we had a pretty substantial economic meltdown that could have had a far more drastic effect on poverty rates, and which we recovered from very quickly. One could argue that it caused inflation; one could also argue that the inflation we saw was the build-up of 15 years of monetary policy detonated by a crisis.
- tbalsam 4y ago
  I really feel like there were excellent elements from the checks, and that a lot of the problems stemmed from rates being hard-locked at 0% greedily even as the market very obviously seemed to be headed towards a crash with how hot things were running. I kept looking for articles talking about the possibility of a crash, and it felt like the sentiment of the 2001 crash or so -- "it's not possible this time", "there's no way", etc. It felt like... insanity. I think that combined with other market issues added to inflation. I am not a financial expert, but I do like the idea of UBI for a few reasons (and hopefully it's sound in practice). Theoretically I believe it's like a resistor on the upper explosive growth of exponential mega-scale capitalism, which sort of needs that end of the scale and buffs the early game for most of us little one-or-twosie groups that aren't megascaled like that.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  Inflation is too much money for not enough goods. In a longer game, we should see production realign to produce enough goods and services for the people who need them. We currently have a system where most people have unmet needs sure to lack of funds to meet them, while massive quantities of cash chase around investment drama rather than producing passive change in people's lives. We need to realign production for people, and we ultimately do that by being willing to give people money. It worked in the fifties, after all...
- Bud 4y ago
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I dunno what your expenses look like, but for most people, the couple thousand bucks of stimulus that the government reluctantly squeaked out, plus some half-assed extension of unemployment benefits, is a hell of a long way from two years of UBI. Tons of the "paycheck protection plan" money went straight into the pockets of business owners rather than people who were barely scraping by even before the pandemic.
- longhairedhippy 4y ago
  It's not the checks that caused the inflation, it was the Fed increasing the money supply by 45% over 2 years.
another_story 4y ago
There's a big difference between redistributing a portion of money which falls inside the budget and "printing" trillions more that is added on as debt. Over the last few years we've also seen many people organize in their workplace and push for better working conditions. One could argue that wouldn't have been possible without the stimulus efforts.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Yes, now they make $15/hour and are poorer than ever with the longest decline in real wages on record
  - lovich 4y ago
    They were already poorer than their parents when it comes to basics like home ownership or being able to afford children when we did nothing. Is the correct approach just to accept serfdom?
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      The healthiest long term approach is to let the economy grow organically without artificially low rates or high deficit spending, and not treat marginal declines in asset pricing as a crisis. Monetary policy was used in place of where fiscal policy was warranted. But at the same time the fiscal excess was far too great over the past two years The bubble has already been created at this point, no avoiding it now.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Where is $15/hr a living wage? A trailer park outside Toledo? Mass media perpetuated that narrative of $15/hr being enough, not any economists.
  - another_story 4y ago
    Not the point I was making. Stimulus allowed people leverage to push for change. The decline in real wages this year has little to do with that stimulus and has been happening over the last 40 years.
phpisthebest 4y ago
There is some flaws there. Covid spending was (and continues to be) completely corrupt and far from "universal" People that are making 6 figures are getting all kinds of free money, where people in the poverty range get squat... The difference? the 6 figure person has college loans, and children, the single person with no kids working at walmart gets nothing,
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rtp4me 4y ago
  What kinds of free money were people making 6 figures getting? I know many 6-figure people, and none of them got any kind of "free money". In fact, just the opposite...
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    the standard payments everyone got, child tax credits (those cut off at $150,000), Student Loan Forgiveness, Student Loan Payment Cancellation, shall I go on?
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Didn't the COVID PPP loans get shoveled out indiscriminately to anyone who even remotely looked like they had a business, without any kind of means testing or assurance that it was actually going toward employee paychecks? Then, much of it simply got forgiven. So convenient. Funny how when it comes to providing welfare to needy individuals, we must strictly means check every dollar so that it doesn't accidentally go to someone undeserving... but when it comes to shoveling money over to businesses, suddenly means testing is impossible.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        >Didn't the COVID PPP loans get shoveled Yes as I stated in my option, almost all COVID spending was highly corrupt, mismanages and ill-advised, that include the moronic PPP program where a good % of that money went to buy luxury and sports cars. It seems from your comment that you have the mistaken belief that because I dont believe people making 6 figures should get loan forgiveness or increased child tax credits, that must mean I support giving business owners no strings attached money.
jrnichols 4y ago
I'm inclined to agree, and the replies I see here are seeming to focus on the 2 stimulus checks. There were many months of extra unemployment benefits. People were in many cases making more on unemployment than they were their regular jobs. What we saw was rents going up first, real estate prices, and now inflation across the board. it was a whole lot more than the stimulus checks.
- rtp4me 4y ago
  My anecdotal evidence: I needed to get a new AC unit for my house last year (summer 2021). I finally was able to get a reputable HVAC company to come and replace the unit. Talking with the owner, he told me (very frankly) he could not get reliable help anymore because the weekly govt checks were higher than he could could pay for a full-time HVAC person in our small community. And before anyone says, "he should pay them more"; no. If he payed more, he would have to take a paycut for himself because his prices would not be competitive. Especially in a rural community...
  - idontpost 4y ago
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    > And before anyone says, "he should pay them more"; no. If he payed more, he would have to take a paycut for himself because his prices would not be competitive. Well that would not do at all. A business owner choosing to profit less so that his business could continue operating and his workers got a market wage? Get out of here with that crazy talk!
    - rtp4me 4y ago
      The real "market wage" was set prior to COVID - not during COVID with the tons of weekly unemployment checks handed out like candy. How can a small business owner even compete with the unlimited funding of the govt? Furthermore, why should a business owner profit less simply because able-bodied people were greedy and wanted free govt money over working a job? That is the real crazy talk.
thrown_22 4y ago
If you want to see the effects of UBI just write an extra zero on any note you see. We need government programs that targets peoples needs not their wants. Money is used to meet wants not needs. As a simple example a Stalinist food system in the US, with all the famines involved, would save lives for the first decade because people would start losing weight.
- krapp 4y ago
  >Money is used to meet wants not needs. What you think people use to pay for their food, clothing, shelter, taxes and medical expenses? The barter system?
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    The food in the US is not fit for purpose. A government monopoly is required to stop killing people with it. The same is true for shelter and medical expenses.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
asdff 4y ago
What, the stimulus checks that amounted to less than an electric car rebate? Come on. Most people probably poofed that money away paying down credit card debt; average credit card holder in the U.S. carries like $6k in debt at any given time.

remote_phone 4y ago

I was a huge proponent of Andrew Yang and UBI. I was skeptical but thought why not, let’s try. I thought all it would do is create inflation but I was willing to try because the way things are going right now is clearly not working. After the pandemic distributing so much money to so many people, I think my initial thoughts were right. All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI. I think it doesn’t work and we need a better idea. That said, I still support Andrew Yang and the Forward Party.

Kye 4y ago
Covering a month or two of rent is not in any way UBI.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI. Whatever happened during pandemic was nowhere near UBI. For one, it was not universal. Second, it was temporary and very volatile, not something one could plan around.
- mc32 4y ago
  And yet people didn’t take advantage of it and instead quit and farted around with the money. Not everyone of course, for many people it was critical but also for many it was a reason to quit and fart around and not follow their hearts to art or hobbies or something else productive as some UBI proponents predicted very hopefully.
  - lovich 4y ago
    A benefit that had an anticipated end date of within a year is, as the previous poster stated, too volatile. It was treated as a temporary windfall instead of a new reality that could be relied on and planned around
  - noahtallen 4y ago
    How much money do you think people got? Most people got around $2k over a two years. How is $1k/yr enough to quit a job and “fart around” with the money?
  - denkmoon 4y ago
    >instead quit and farted around with the money. Citation needed. You read too much reddit.
  - colonelxc 4y ago
    There were record high # of businesses being created during the pandemic. There's anecdotes that it is because they had the opportunity to do so now with some extra cash + time off. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/business/startup-business-creation-pandemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/business/startup-business... https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072057249/new-business-applications-record-high-great-resignation-pandemic-entrepreneur https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072057249/new-business-appli... I had also seen some articles (citation needed!) that part of the employee crunch low-wage businesses are feeling is due to employees in those jobs taking their covid-money+time and training/interviewing/applying for office jobs. I don't think we have a measure on how many people got to pursue their hobbies (rather than 'farting around'), though I'm not sure it matters. UBI proponents don't think that all people will do something 'valuable' though, just that it will be a net positive.
pixl97 4y ago
Right, it was just the monitary handouts of a few thousands of dollars to individuals that caused this problem and not the near zero percent interest rates....
Comevius 4y ago
I mean the distribution of that money was upward. It's not like the wages were fixed or anything, or housing or any of that. The United States shouldn't even start with an approach like UBI. Universal health coverage should be the first. It's one of the basic tenets of civilization, not to mention that it costs literally half.
- mc32 4y ago
  I concur with a basic level of universal health coverage, proactive basic coverage. I would not expand the definition of basic to cover any cosmetic and or elective procedures. And also not to introduce definition creep.
  - lovich 4y ago
    We’d have to allow for some definition creep, effectively freeze healthcare innovation, or let the basic level of healthcare fall to below basic after years of improvements and new drugs
    - mc32 4y ago
      So I think the state owes its citizens some modicum of health insurance, but it's not there to provide for non-basic health care --that which keeps a bell-curve fitting person in reasonable health for a reasonable amount of time (to be some independent health-body defined arbitrary time). Anything more should be up to complementary insurance of some sort or another. It may come to be that like cars, all cars even the basic ones upgrade their Window hand-cranks to automatic. However, that should come from an economic feasibility point of view rather than 60% of voters/deciders say they want it.
      - Comevius 4y ago
        Supporting people staying healthy, preventing diseases is a whole lot cheaper eventually. The idea behind universal health care is that you don't want to be overly stringent because it comes back to you down the line with vengeance. In my country for example you are recommended to visit the dentist at least once a year because prevention is important, and society can't exactly function well with people having bad teeth. Equal chances and all that, but also to avoid the cost down the line. In the United States however nobody cares, there isn't even a society, just a bunch of different classes living very different lives. If you can't afford good teeth you don't matter. You are not good enough. Problem solved. Good luck making it with your bad teeth. That's your problem, why should I pay for it. It's funny when people who call themselves Christians say this when Christianity is about realizing the eventual spiraling cost of not landing a hand to people, although this practicality evolved into morals over the ages. In the United States however there is a deep cultural problem, a lack of practical morality if you will, and that's not going to be easily solved.
InitialLastName 4y ago
> All we saw is inflation after 2 years of essentially UBI I mean, it's difficult to prove the counterfactual, but we had a pretty substantial economic meltdown that could have had a far more drastic effect on poverty rates, and which we recovered from very quickly. One could argue that it caused inflation; one could also argue that the inflation we saw was the build-up of 15 years of monetary policy detonated by a crisis.
tbalsam 4y ago
I really feel like there were excellent elements from the checks, and that a lot of the problems stemmed from rates being hard-locked at 0% greedily even as the market very obviously seemed to be headed towards a crash with how hot things were running. I kept looking for articles talking about the possibility of a crash, and it felt like the sentiment of the 2001 crash or so -- "it's not possible this time", "there's no way", etc. It felt like... insanity. I think that combined with other market issues added to inflation. I am not a financial expert, but I do like the idea of UBI for a few reasons (and hopefully it's sound in practice). Theoretically I believe it's like a resistor on the upper explosive growth of exponential mega-scale capitalism, which sort of needs that end of the scale and buffs the early game for most of us little one-or-twosie groups that aren't megascaled like that.
sdenton4 4y ago
Inflation is too much money for not enough goods. In a longer game, we should see production realign to produce enough goods and services for the people who need them. We currently have a system where most people have unmet needs sure to lack of funds to meet them, while massive quantities of cash chase around investment drama rather than producing passive change in people's lives. We need to realign production for people, and we ultimately do that by being willing to give people money. It worked in the fifties, after all...
Bud 4y ago
egypturnash 4y ago
I dunno what your expenses look like, but for most people, the couple thousand bucks of stimulus that the government reluctantly squeaked out, plus some half-assed extension of unemployment benefits, is a hell of a long way from two years of UBI. Tons of the "paycheck protection plan" money went straight into the pockets of business owners rather than people who were barely scraping by even before the pandemic.
longhairedhippy 4y ago
It's not the checks that caused the inflation, it was the Fed increasing the money supply by 45% over 2 years.

another_story 4y ago

There's a big difference between redistributing a portion of money which falls inside the budget and "printing" trillions more that is added on as debt. Over the last few years we've also seen many people organize in their workplace and push for better working conditions. One could argue that wouldn't have been possible without the stimulus efforts.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Yes, now they make $15/hour and are poorer than ever with the longest decline in real wages on record
- lovich 4y ago
  They were already poorer than their parents when it comes to basics like home ownership or being able to afford children when we did nothing. Is the correct approach just to accept serfdom?
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    The healthiest long term approach is to let the economy grow organically without artificially low rates or high deficit spending, and not treat marginal declines in asset pricing as a crisis. Monetary policy was used in place of where fiscal policy was warranted. But at the same time the fiscal excess was far too great over the past two years The bubble has already been created at this point, no avoiding it now.
- asdff 4y ago
  Where is $15/hr a living wage? A trailer park outside Toledo? Mass media perpetuated that narrative of $15/hr being enough, not any economists.
- another_story 4y ago
  Not the point I was making. Stimulus allowed people leverage to push for change. The decline in real wages this year has little to do with that stimulus and has been happening over the last 40 years.

phpisthebest 4y ago

There is some flaws there. Covid spending was (and continues to be) completely corrupt and far from "universal" People that are making 6 figures are getting all kinds of free money, where people in the poverty range get squat... The difference? the 6 figure person has college loans, and children, the single person with no kids working at walmart gets nothing,

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rtp4me 4y ago
What kinds of free money were people making 6 figures getting? I know many 6-figure people, and none of them got any kind of "free money". In fact, just the opposite...
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  the standard payments everyone got, child tax credits (those cut off at $150,000), Student Loan Forgiveness, Student Loan Payment Cancellation, shall I go on?
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Didn't the COVID PPP loans get shoveled out indiscriminately to anyone who even remotely looked like they had a business, without any kind of means testing or assurance that it was actually going toward employee paychecks? Then, much of it simply got forgiven. So convenient. Funny how when it comes to providing welfare to needy individuals, we must strictly means check every dollar so that it doesn't accidentally go to someone undeserving... but when it comes to shoveling money over to businesses, suddenly means testing is impossible.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >Didn't the COVID PPP loans get shoveled Yes as I stated in my option, almost all COVID spending was highly corrupt, mismanages and ill-advised, that include the moronic PPP program where a good % of that money went to buy luxury and sports cars. It seems from your comment that you have the mistaken belief that because I dont believe people making 6 figures should get loan forgiveness or increased child tax credits, that must mean I support giving business owners no strings attached money.

jrnichols 4y ago

I'm inclined to agree, and the replies I see here are seeming to focus on the 2 stimulus checks. There were many months of extra unemployment benefits. People were in many cases making more on unemployment than they were their regular jobs. What we saw was rents going up first, real estate prices, and now inflation across the board. it was a whole lot more than the stimulus checks.

rtp4me 4y ago
My anecdotal evidence: I needed to get a new AC unit for my house last year (summer 2021). I finally was able to get a reputable HVAC company to come and replace the unit. Talking with the owner, he told me (very frankly) he could not get reliable help anymore because the weekly govt checks were higher than he could could pay for a full-time HVAC person in our small community. And before anyone says, "he should pay them more"; no. If he payed more, he would have to take a paycut for himself because his prices would not be competitive. Especially in a rural community...
- idontpost 4y ago
- ryandrake 4y ago
  > And before anyone says, "he should pay them more"; no. If he payed more, he would have to take a paycut for himself because his prices would not be competitive. Well that would not do at all. A business owner choosing to profit less so that his business could continue operating and his workers got a market wage? Get out of here with that crazy talk!
  - rtp4me 4y ago
    The real "market wage" was set prior to COVID - not during COVID with the tons of weekly unemployment checks handed out like candy. How can a small business owner even compete with the unlimited funding of the govt? Furthermore, why should a business owner profit less simply because able-bodied people were greedy and wanted free govt money over working a job? That is the real crazy talk.

thrown_22 4y ago

If you want to see the effects of UBI just write an extra zero on any note you see. We need government programs that targets peoples needs not their wants. Money is used to meet wants not needs. As a simple example a Stalinist food system in the US, with all the famines involved, would save lives for the first decade because people would start losing weight.

krapp 4y ago
>Money is used to meet wants not needs. What you think people use to pay for their food, clothing, shelter, taxes and medical expenses? The barter system?
- thrown_22 4y ago
  The food in the US is not fit for purpose. A government monopoly is required to stop killing people with it. The same is true for shelter and medical expenses.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

asdff 4y ago

What, the stimulus checks that amounted to less than an electric car rebate? Come on. Most people probably poofed that money away paying down credit card debt; average credit card holder in the U.S. carries like $6k in debt at any given time.