4 ms·

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is u

• hashmap 5mo ago
  You never see it how. Like in terms of raw resources or political will?
  • troosevelt 5mo ago
    I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore). That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible. I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends. I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing. It's rough out there.
    • hashmap 5mo ago
      Oh, yeah $12k would not do it. For a UBI to work we would have to shift a significant portion of the concentrated wealth. I too was laid off long enough ago that by now I would be in a bad spot without help, also no mortgage or anything, and I don't travel or go out much. UBI of any degree would do something, but it would have to be much higher than $12k to tread water just due to rent alone. Aside from UBI we would likely need to decouple housing from profit, it has the same problem as healthcare. Demand for it is inelastic to a certain degree, everyone needs somewhere to live.
• pydry 5mo ago
  Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g. * A job guarantee like we had during the great depression * Lowering retirement age * Raise minimum wage * Expanding medicare to everyone It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby! Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.
  • fluoridation 5mo ago
    Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name. If you're giving people more money in exchange for nothing (or nothing of any value to anyone, as in the case of a job guarantee), it's effectively indistinguishable from UBI.
    • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name The extra steps reduce costs and encourage offsetting production. Those are important steps!
    • pydry 5mo ago
      "When our grandparents built the hoover dam, the lincoln tunnel and the triborough bridge with a job guarantee that was just money for nothing - UBI with extra steps." ^ this would be an accurate representation of your opinion then?
      • fluoridation 5mo ago
        That job guarantees exceptionally produce useful things doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth.
• guzfip 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  • troosevelt 5mo ago
    Have you lived on 12k? 24k puts you near poverty level. $1k per month will cover food expenses, it won't cover transport, shelter, and certainly not medical. On 12k per year you have enough money for food and praying that an emergency doesn't happen. It's hard enough living on 40k, and I'm not even in a place where costs are expensive.
    • krapp 5mo ago
      UBI will never happen in the US so it's a pointless argument. Americans will have plenty of pawn shops and short-term loan services to help them, though.
    • hackable_sand 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • happytoexplain 5mo ago
        How is not wanting to live in poverty using the poor as a foil? How is it hypocritical/fake to care about people who are in situations that I don't want to be in? Isn't that just logical?
  • JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard I get where you're coming from. But this is politically unworkable, and for good reason. If AI increases productivity, that means more wealth, which means living standards should go up.
    • AshleyGrant 5mo ago
      > $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard > I get where you're coming from. You do? Have you priced out health insurance lately? I have. Insurance on HealthCare.gov for my partner and I would be $1700/month for what amounts to catastrophic coverage. It had around a $20k deductible and covered nothing other than an annual physical prior to hitting the deductible. With $2k/month to work with between us, I guess we have to somehow find a place to live and eat on the remaining $300 as we pay for our functionally worthless health insurance since there is no way in hell we could afford to pay the deductible.
• animegolem 5mo ago
  And even if you did get the 60k and never can find work again are you gonna be happy about the next door neighbor working for 120k and getting his 60k on top?
  • site-packages1 5mo ago
    Well I can tell you that I work 40+ hours a week and am very unhappy my neighbor has a more expensive house than me. Someone should do something!
  • abakker 5mo ago
    All the proposals I’ve seen would set the marginal tax rate on the 120 so high that his earnings would end up more like 40k from the 120k job and then he gets his 60. So, still some benefit to working, but a very progressive tax rate on higher earnings. Not sure I agree with this, but that is what I’ve seen.
    • baal80spam 5mo ago
      > 40k from the 120k job I would not get up in the morning in such case.
  • Aurornis 5mo ago
    Your neighbor would get $60K UBI but their tax bill would go up by $80K because the government needs tax revenue to pay the UBI. For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• bobsmooth 5mo ago
  >Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? If we go back to a 60% corporate tax rate, for sure.
  • Aurornis 5mo ago
    You could put a 100% tax on revenues (not profit) of AI companies and it would come out to a low couple hundred dollars per person per year right now. A 60% corporate tax rate wouldn’t get to the levels needed for UBI proposals either.
  • what 5mo ago
    They’ll just find a way to have $0 of profit. You have nothing to tax.
• Lerc 5mo ago
  Like the post above says that there are multiple issues at play with AI. The same can be said about universal income. The pay levels are not comparable because you are also recompensed with time. You may choose to spend your time in a number of ways that you find rewarding that also reduce your expenses. Making your own meals, clothes, furniture, beer, wine etc. There are a lot of people who would enjoy doing these things but are too time poor to do so. Your expenses also reduce by the amount you must spend in order to make yourself available to work. Travel, work clothes, medical certificates when sick. You can spend a lot in order to be paid. If you want a world with a reasonable distribution of income levels. It stands to reason that those receiving more right now should receive less. Certainly, the absolute wealthiest should reduce the most, but on a global scale, it is hard to defend that those in the top 10% of incomes should retain their position. The proposal for how much a universal income should pay is a variable to be argued itself. I can certainly see it being argued for at a lower level than ultimately desired since something is better than none. In a sense the end state of a universal income in an equitable world would be remarkably simple. The income available divided by the world's population, Those reviving more than their share now may not be happy about it, but I'm not sure they have a right to their larger portion either.
• stale2002 5mo ago
  > do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Almost definitionally it would. If society is saving a bunch of money on all that saved labor, that extra value is still there, it just needs to be appropriately redistributed
• ip26 5mo ago
  If companies are faced with the choice between: - employ you at 60k/yr - replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.
  • mschuster91 5mo ago
    The problem is, companies will go for the third route: hire a company in India to launder AI. It has already worked out once with the offshoring wave.
    • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
      This will still wind up with them paying UBI eventually
      • DaSHacka 5mo ago
        For the Indians?
  • xboxnolifes 5mo ago
    What if the machine in this context is 3x as productive as you?
    • hettygreen 5mo ago
      Then it replaces 3 people's jobs, requiring paying 3 UBI's in this thought experiment.
      • joquarky 5mo ago
        What un-corrupted person or system is going to perform this assessment?
  • JeremyNT 5mo ago
    The solution to the subsequent devaluation of labor, and ability for tech oligarchs to pocket the cash instead, will not be found in capitalism. Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table. UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.
• ggsp 5mo ago
  Fair warning: I’m quite ignorant in terms of economics, so this is a naïve way of looking at it. The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?
  • andriamanitra 5mo ago
    The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation. Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down. But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.
• omikun 5mo ago
  People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.
  • mvdtnz 5mo ago
    That's an absolutely enormous claim to make with zero evidence.
    • contingencies 5mo ago
      The modern (social or economic) history of China, Europe, Russia, UK, US are all good case studies. In aggregate, I think they underscore the reality of the system. Every year we now have high profile people coming out of the system screaming about how insane it is: bankers, traders, politicians, military intelligence. If you had to boil it down to a single book debunking late 20th century pax Americana international macro-economics, it's hard to go past Confessions of an Economic Hitman, although not written formally. I've personally had chapter one verified by an Indonesian diplomat. Alternatively, take the quippy summary of a world-recognized capitalist, George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics.
• flashgordon 5mo ago
  Not to mention inflation. Whats not clear is whether UBI is cash or does it include access to "basic" facilities like health, education and housing?
• joquarky 5mo ago
  Also, UBI will inevitably become just as convoluted and corrupted as our current tax laws.