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You got the Basic Income concept wrong. If someone takes a job, they get the income from that job IN ADDITION to the Basic Income. Basic Income is paid out un
by pm24601 13y ago
You got the Basic Income concept wrong.
If someone takes a job, they get the income from that job IN ADDITION to the Basic Income.
Basic Income is paid out unconditionally - i.e. no means testing. Rich or poor, employed or unemployed: you get the money.
This is similar to what:
1. Alaska does with its oil tax revenue.
2. U.S. and some states do with the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Why have Basic Income?
It would replace:
1. Food stamps.
2. Unemployment insurance
3. WIC
4. Section 8.
... and related bureaucracies because the money is unconditional, no government agency is needed to "validate" the person is poor enough to get the money.
There would be no stigma attached to receiving the money, no requirements on how the money was being spent. Just like Alaskans can spend their oil money how they want and people getting the fully-refundable EITC can spend that money how they want.
- sharemywin 13y agoI get that. My point is the service industry disappears. retail clerks, wait staff, gas station attendants, cleaners. Nobody does that work because they like it. Most of the people in the service industry work to get by. By choice or because they have to.
- ThomPete 13y agoMuch of that is going away because of automation, which is one of the reasons UBI is beginning to be seen as a potential solution to that problem. I.e. you are going to see an increasing number of people who have no background in tech, design, science, engineering, math etc. and therefore have no new potential of jobs and those they can get are Walmart which doesn't pay it's employees enough and thus put a big portion of the economic burden back on society.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> My point is the service industry disappears. retail clerks, wait staff, gas station attendants, cleaners. Nobody does that work because they like it. No, they do it because they need the money to live the lifestyle they want -- and often need more than the reasonable level at which UBI would be set any time in the near future. Otherwise, no one would work the hours in those industries to make more than even the (very high for UBI suggestions in the near term) $20,000 proposed in the first post in this thread, yet many people do. (Of course, lots of people "work" in those fields because they are either owners or immediately family of owners who stand to benefit, in the long or short term, from capital returns of the business, so they aren't working strictly for the wages, and UBI has little effect on them at all -- except perhaps to raise the wages that their big-chain competitors have to pay and increase their opportunity.) So, no, for a whole lot of reasons I don't see UBI killing the service industry.
- todd8 13y agoNote that Earned Income Tax Credit starts to phase out between $20,000 and $30,000 of income. By $55,000 its entirely phase out. So it doesn't work like Basic Income.