3 ms·

Are there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?

by firesteelrain 1mo ago

bubbleRefuge 1mo ago
MMT job guarantee
- throwatdem12311 1mo ago
  Boy I sure love my ditch digging job for the government! My friend also loves his ditch filling job too!
  - schmidtleonard 1mo ago
    About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it. It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
  - mcmcmc 1mo ago
    You say this, but if the US actually expanded nationwide fiber like we were supposed to there would have been a whole lot of ditches to dig up and refill. Public works projects don’t have to be wasteful.
    - Tostino 1mo ago
      You may know this already, but we did lay the fiber already like we were supposed to have. Most of it just never got used until ~20 years later. Because corporations need to milk their profits.
estearum 1mo ago
UBI is not a solution because it will drive up land rents and be eaten by landowners.
skew-aberration 1mo ago
Land value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.
Wilsoniumite 1mo ago
not really, the unconditionality is kind-of a requirement. Pay people to not work and you skew in favor of not working, pay people to work and you skew in favor of working, pay them for any other condition and, well, it's skewed, or in economic terms, distortionary. You can still have conditional benefits on top, favor working or something else a bit more if you want, but the base needs to be unconditional.

Are there other alternatives to UBI in solving this problem?

bubbleRefuge 1mo ago

MMT job guarantee

throwatdem12311 1mo ago
Boy I sure love my ditch digging job for the government! My friend also loves his ditch filling job too!
- schmidtleonard 1mo ago
  About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it. It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
- mcmcmc 1mo ago
  You say this, but if the US actually expanded nationwide fiber like we were supposed to there would have been a whole lot of ditches to dig up and refill. Public works projects don’t have to be wasteful.
  - Tostino 1mo ago
    You may know this already, but we did lay the fiber already like we were supposed to have. Most of it just never got used until ~20 years later. Because corporations need to milk their profits.

estearum 1mo ago

UBI is not a solution because it will drive up land rents and be eaten by landowners.

skew-aberration 1mo ago

Land value tax / citizens dividend here is different to the UBIs sometimes proposed in contemporary US politics. The idea is that you tax and redistribute the profits on the scarce inputs to the economy, rather than the redistributing the outputs like manufactured grids and AI tokens.

Wilsoniumite 1mo ago

not really, the unconditionality is kind-of a requirement. Pay people to not work and you skew in favor of not working, pay people to work and you skew in favor of working, pay them for any other condition and, well, it's skewed, or in economic terms, distortionary. You can still have conditional benefits on top, favor working or something else a bit more if you want, but the base needs to be unconditional.