831–840 of 1001 posts
It's really interesting to read this discussion and get a sense of how deeply the work-ethic is ingrained. Many commenters can't seem to imagine that people would do anything productive if they're not paid to do it. Is this really what you believe?
Perhaps a good thing to do with a universal basic income is tell people they can collect it from anywhere. This is what people do with social security and such. They go live in cheap countries where they can get dental and medical work done for 1/10th the price. Cheap food, cheap rent, etc. The lowered demand for these things in the US would lower prices here. Everybody wins!
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The money for the basic income comes from taxation. Even though everyone would get it, higher tax rates on people with middle or high incomes would mean they were no better off, or worse off. This isn't supposed to be a way to make everyone $x per month better off, it's a way to change incentives and replace welfare.
What I'm curious about is what's stopping a large portion of the population from simply quitting their jobs to live off basic income, thus decreasing the potential pool from which taxes to pay for basic income can be extracted? If it really worked out like you say it would, where people with middle or high incomes are no better off, I wonder what they would think when suddenly large swathes of the population are able…
And UBI will do better in this respect than per circumstance income transfers since you get to keep all the money you earn on top of it.
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Financial desperation squeezes the cognitive juice right out of you. In 2013, Harvard researchers did a study of how financial stress affects decision making. Denise Cummins, Ph.D. explains their findings in Psychology Today: "When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, a very different picture emerged: The cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the i…
"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, the cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cogn…
A lot of people see problems in getting basic income funded. But is there is a simple solution :) Generate the money, just print it! Everyone on earth will get an equal quantity of money, every month. Now this money can be used in two different ways. 1) Buy natural resources 2) Buy services This distinction is important: When somebody provides a service, like fixing your bike he gets money and can keep it. When you b…
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working...
"What can startups do to increase prosperity for everyone?" I think cheap quality housing is a huge area that would help everyone. Taxes and housing together eat up the vast majority of the earnings most people make. What could make a difference? - applying technology to building denser housing. for example, imagine cheap robotic excavation, so every house and building could bury all their parking lots and long term…
A few good ones here - another really interesting, current initiative is Bolsa Família, a Brazilian assistance program that functions similarly to a basic income subsidy - the main difference is that it requires families to demonstrate up-to-date immunizations and good school attendance rates for children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia
the one I'd recommend is an actual book "vozes do bolsa família".
message me if you want more info on this. wife does a phd related to this topic.
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Soviet Union: 7-20 million deliberately starved to death. [1] 1.5 million people executed during The Great Purge. [2] "Did pretty well". Cuba: thousands executed for the ideas they held; forced labor camps; and more than 1.2m fled 1959-1993 (about 10% of the current population). "Doing pretty well". Cuba was one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, before Marxists took over. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
USA: Extermination of natives, slavery, company towns and child labor, Jim crow etc. England: English colonialism from Drogheda to Amristar, plus the domestic Peterloo, child labor etc. Also, how many millions did England deliberately starve to death in the 1840s? Germany: I can list off what the Krupp/Voegler/Thyssen financed Nazi party did for a while, then go back to before that
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I'm not a big believer in minimizing college debt. I'm a believer in minimizing college . People who grow up in wealthy families naturally find themselves on a college track that seamlessly routes them to elite schools when they're 18 years old. People who grow up in poverty aren't on that track and might not even have much agency (due to their circumstances, requirements to work young, entanglements with the law) un…
One concern is that, especially during the transition, job descriptions requiring "4-year college degree" would become a de-facto (and legal) means of discriminating by class or social status, assuming that the rich would overwhelmingly continue to send their kids to college.
Based on my own experiences of transitioning voluntarily into homelessness, I am very excited by the focus on lowering the cost of living. Living more simply, and getting there by a slow and intentional process (NOT coercive or painful), leads to more enjoyment of life, and less fear of failure. Funny how living in the presumed failure state of western society recalibrates your instincts. I find myself wishing that s…