Jeez I wish people would quit this. Minimum income means guaranteed maximum prices for things like rent and food that you cannot live without. You think your $500 a month apartment isn't going to become $800 when the landlord knows everyone is getting at least $1000?
Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
121–130 of 158 posts
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?
That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positiv…
Helping people in need is not an inversion of right and wrong. What's an inversion of right and wrong is declaring somebody to be unworthy of even the most basic sustenance merely because they possess an insufficient quantity of green paper.
Basic human morality is that those who can help those who can't. Once we moved beyond the tribal village the whole question of how that works exploded in complexity and has never been satisfactorily answered, but that basic principle remains.
If Basic Income doesn't work, then obviously that's problematic. But I see no moral problem with the concept.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#123Serious question for folks here - do you believe we can successfully institute a meaningful basic income in the US with the current immigration policies? How would policies have to change given the increased incentives from UBI?
Serious answer: I don't think we can institute basic income with the current immigration policies without rioting in the streets.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#124Let's say that currently rent is $1,000 per month, food is $500, and Alice is earning $2,500. Now UBI is implemented and Alice and all fellow citizens receive $1,000 per month. What will keep the market from easing the entry level rent up to $1,500 and food to $1,000 since the money is available? At first glance it seems like we'd just be choosing a different number representing "broke".
The obvious answer here is that basic income won't be evenly distributed to all citizens. A household earning the average national income will get $1,000/month from the government, and see their taxes go up by about $1,000/month. So it's difficult to raise rent on everyone when only a fraction of your customers have true extra income. Imagine you're a landlord who runs a property for those of normal income. How much…
You ignore marginal utility. As you amass more of something, the value you place on each individual unit of it decreases. So $1 is worth more to me than to Bill Gates.
In any mutually-agreed upon transaction, both parties to the transaction will gain some amount of value ("utility" in economics jargon) relative to the amount they're giving up. Because $X is now worth (slightly) less (say, by $Y) to each BI recipient, the seller (or landlord in this case) can demand $X+$Y in exchange for his product. That is, he's demanding that the buyer continue to sacrifice the same amount of value, because the value of his own asset hasn't decreased. So you'll see prices increase.
There are other forces in play, too. One of them is price elasticity of demand. This tells us that things that people are less willing to go without (housing, fuel...) put more bargaining power in the hands of the seller than those that we're more willing to flex on (say, going out to movies). In this context, goods like housing and fuel will have a larger degree of price rise than will those where the consumer has greater bargaining power.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need to return to a wealth-oriented tax. Neither income tax nor VAT are taxes on wealth. But even as someone without a lot to worry about, I can't think of a fair way to tax wealth outside of land taxes, which would greatly disrupt the economy.
The estate tax is one mechanism we have now to tax wealth.
once a lifetime taxable events are prone to huge swings in revenue, not to mention all the schemes to evade.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet nowhere has this been "field tested" for any length of time. Unless one makes the case that it has been tested in the form of several countries in the 20th century. Places like the the Soviet Union, China, etc. We see that it failed in those places and in Soviet countries it failed fantastically. The fatal flaw in all of this...who is going to pay for it?
That and what economic activity will be suppressed as capital moves away from prior uses. Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment. The seen and the unseen indeed. Unless there's more than hand-wavy dismissive talk about the negatives such schemes bring, one is foolish to think that this does anything positiv…
> Nobody is talking about generating new wealth to make this happen: it's pure consumption and some of that will be at the expense of capital investment.
I've been talking about how minimum income can make the minimum wage obsolete and thus allow for the existence of a wider variety of jobs (and creation of wealth) that was previously unviable while also fixing the market inefficiencies created by putting an artificial price floor on labor.
> Morally, that any one person, by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is judged a provider, at gunpoint if necessary, to others who, by virtue of their relative lack of wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance, is such an inversion of right and wrong as to warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward.
No, completely wrong.
> by virtue of their relative wealth alone
Wealth exists only within an economy and thus is a social construct that makes it's owner intrinsically beholden to that society. Wealth thus increases the moral obligation to the society from which that wealth is derived.
> by virtue of their relative wealth alone, is considered worthy of substance
It is not their lack of wealth, but their mere existence that makes them 'worthy of substance'.
> warrant some serious soul-searching about what makes one worthy of punishment or reward
Taxes on wealth are not a punishment, they are the cost of maintaining and improving the society and allows the wealth to exist.
Minimum income is not reward since it is given to everyone.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not the state. And when I look around, a lot of states certainly aren't 'for' or 'by' the people. Maybe you have to start thinking independently, rather than smugly reciting one-liners from school. The state is a large entreprise that gives us some things and forces us to do things and pay money under the threat of violence and incarceration. I argue for voluntaryism, the notion that people enter into contracts…
What you argue has been tried in the early have of the 20th century in the United States where workplace safety laws and minimum wages were ruled unconstitutional based on the theory of free contracting parties. It failed MISERABLY and by miserably I mean it left working people in ... literally ... misery. BTW, my 'smug one liner' I learned in school was uttered by President Abraham Lincoln who is widely regarded as…
Why do you say it failed miserably? Compared to what? Why do you think the conditions of that time were a result of legislation being insufficient as opposed to quality of life simply being lower in that period of time?
By the same logic I can say that not having minimum wage in the 12th century was the reason why people were suffering. It's entirely true there wasn't a minimum wage at that time either, but it completely ignores that: - It would have been impossible to implement during that period because of the way the job market worked and because of the technology of that time. - Their suffering is attributable to other things than the lack of legislation.
Until advances in technology makes safety regulations and safety equipment cheap, legislating them means putting people out of a job because the employer cannot pay for all of that, so they can't operate their business anymore. Have you ever considered that perhaps that was the case in the early half of the 20th century?
As far as I can tell society and the market does all the heavy lifting and then the government comes and enacts laws for things that were already becoming safer and better. Graphs like this are what lead me to the conclusion I've mentioned:
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/assuming-yo...
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
VAT is a great alternative to a US style sales tax, but it is still regressive and UBI + regressive taxation seems like a pretty terrible combination.
Not if the UBI is tied to the cost of living index. Essentially, this means the UBI will be immune to the regression of the VAT.
Nonsense.
Assuming the government intends to run something vaguely resembling a balanced budget, tax receipts (plus inflation away of govt debt) has to broadly, in the long term, equal money paid out (UBI + lots of other stuff). Which means (1) the government has to make up the portion of income tax revenues lost from high earners that spend relatively little by ensuring sales tax is sufficiently high to get the money back from lower earners that consume most of their monthly wage, and (2) every time the government puts the UBI up, they have to put taxes up [in the near future]
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. UBI can be thought of as large-scale debt forgiveness. You are simply giving people the means to escape (often, but not always) self-imposed debts. 2. UBI would lead to a huge jump in inflation (as a %, nearly as much as the initial UBI stimulus % of total money in circulation) as the vast majority of UBI recipients would have a large propensity to immediately spend that money, thereby simply releasing it into cir…
I don't understand #2. UBI wouldn't increase the amount of money in circulation, unless you paid for it by printing money or borrowing. But everything I've seen advocates for paying for UBI with taxes. For #3, the overall trend is that people have fewer children, not more, when they have more money. Maybe UBI money would be different somehow, but since you're positing the opposite effect from what we've seen so far,…
#2 is assuming UBI is a one-time cash injection to stimulate aggregate demand, similar to QE. I have a hard time seeing the path forward to the (substantially) higher taxation on the middle and upper classes needed to make UBI a reality with the current political and economic climate in the US. But this is subject to debate. You are correct that a redistribution of the tax burden, if feasible, would not lead to inflation.
#3 - yes, in agrarian societies poorer people have more children to help out with labor-intensive work. I think the situation would play out different in a services-based economy like the US.
The monetary aspect of UBI would not influence the wealthy, educated cohort's decision to have more children (usually capping out at 3). It would give lower-income individuals an incentive to have more children in order to claim more benefits, as is common for contemporary social services programs. If UBI was substantial enough to allow lower/middle income individuals to quit their jobs, they would also have much more time to have and raise children - not out of necessity, but out of ability.
Agreed that the effect on population size is uncertain and needs an actual study.
Re: Powerful Political Forces Are Aligning Behind Minimum Income
#130My prediction for Basic Income is that even if it gets introduced a few years/decades later a lot of people will complain (rightfully or not) about all those parasites not doing anything while "job creators" have to pay for it. At least in the US it won't work long term looking at the current discussions about tax rates.
The USA is uniquely unfit from a cultural standpoint to accept the idea of universal basic income. It's funny, the cultures that would easily accept such an idea are America's old enemies, the former Eastern Bloc countries. It's interesting how UBI is the way of the future, while America's own way of thinking is opposed to it.
The Eastern Bloc has been following the "way of the future" for a century.