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Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

nytimes.com

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Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#111

Post by drabiega »

visarga wrote: post #75
witty_username wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If robots take all the jobs, then nobody has to work anymore and everything will be very cheap. Think robot maids, drivers, and robot-cooked meals. People are so used to today's world of not-so-many-robots that people think not having a job is bad.

Not having any money or job is bad, though. I don't see the state as being reliable enough to care for the mass of useless and unemployed. They will probably set the UBI at a level below the necessary, there will be protests and riots, people will ask for more, politicians will tell them their excuses for why it isn't possible. If push comes to shove, owning some land and cultivating it could be a job. The earth will…

This is roughly the starting conditions for large parts of America. The problem is that is isn't very efficient. The people who have the resources to do this generally have better options and the people for whom this would be preferable to the lives they are living have neither the knowledge or resources to do this.

There are certainly groups in the middle, farming cooperatives are still present in the area where I grew up, but those that exist do so largely for ideological reasons: family tradition or religion.

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#112

Post by [deleted] »

kefka wrote: post #85
maxxxxx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in my teens I worked summer jobs in a German social welfare agency (Sozialamt). There were many families that had been on welfare for generations and it was noticeable that their kids had no idea how to make progress in school or how to hold a job. They simply didn't know and had nobody who could tell them. They also had no role models. I think with basic income there is a risk that a lot of people will fo…

I'm unsure about the German system... I've been on welfare here in the USA. The way it works is dependant on your income. The more you make by hard work, the less assistance you receive. That sounds fair... Until you realize that section 8 (housing) is the same way. Food stamps are the same way. At the time, there was a cutoff for the free clinic (which counted benefits as income).. I made $100 too much. When doing w…

[deleted]

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#113

Post by refurb »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #98
refurb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that we tax the rich too little The top 3% of income earners pay 51% of all income taxes.[1] You think that's too little? What should that number be? [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/high-income-...

That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that taxes on the richest brackets are at their lowest point in like 50 years, while simultaneously those people have accumulated an even higher portion of the total wealth/income in the economy. Taken out of context, what you are saying seems significant. Looking at it historically, the rich haven't really had it better regarding taxes and their share of th…

The percent of all income taxes paid by the wealthy has gone up over time, not down.

As mention before on HN, yes rates were higher a while ago, but so were deductions. Nobody actually paid a 90% marginal rate.

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#114

Post by sharemywin »

grahamburger wrote: post #104
sharemywin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe people should start owning the robots.

I remember thinking this as a kid. "Just make it illegal for a corporation to own a robot, each person only owns one robot and they keep the value it generates." Thought I'd solved the problem ;) I think the reality is that it's not really a 'robot' in the sci-fi sense - it's a thousand automated machines doing one tiny piece of the process, and slowly your factory with 500 employees only needs 5, and output and qual…

why not own part of one. of course I think the world will reorganize into 3 markets managed by blockchains/oracles: equipment rental, labor/services market, attention market.

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#115

Post by vehementi »

grahamburger wrote: post #91
vehementi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they not talk about the tax increase that pays for it? It's supposed to be closer to neutral. I.e. people making $100k get an extra $10k tax burden to cancel out the $10k they just got. Pretty important factor to include in the discussion, yeah?

Don't they actually get more like an extra 30-50k burden to cancel out the 10k they got and pay 10k to several other people?

The people who make under 10k outnumber the people making good money by a factor of 3-5?

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#116

Post by dctoedt »

funkysquid wrote: post #48
jbob2000 wrote: post #28

Something that is missing from the basic income/poverty debate is the notion of "learned helplessness"; after a long time in poverty, people get used to the lifestyle and have difficulty adjusting to "regular" life. For example, if you've been homeless your entire life, you've never had to lock your apartment door or carry a key around. My partner (a social worker) had a client who's apartment was always getting robb…

"He couldn't hold down a job and regularly missed appointments." I think this is part of the problem - right now in society, if you can't be on time and hold down a job, you'll go hungry and have no place to live. Basic income removes that harsh penalty, and lets people live regardless of whether they can make an appointment.

> right now in society, if you can't be on time and hold down a job, you'll go hungry and have no place to live. Basic income removes that harsh penalty, and lets people live regardless of whether they can make an appointment.

Historically, that would be an incredible luxury. (I'm interpreting "make an appointment" as a figure of speech that encompasses, e.g., sowing crops at the right time of year, harvesting when the crops are ripe, hunting when the game is afoot, etc.)

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#117

Post by drabiega »

cmurf wrote: post #100
maxxxxx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in my teens I worked summer jobs in a German social welfare agency (Sozialamt). There were many families that had been on welfare for generations and it was noticeable that their kids had no idea how to make progress in school or how to hold a job. They simply didn't know and had nobody who could tell them. They also had no role models. I think with basic income there is a risk that a lot of people will fo…

Right. The income value I keep seeing floated is in the realm of US$8000 per year. This is not basic income, it's basically a large tax credit. I don't know why it's called basic income, there's nothing really basic about it when it can't completely pay for one basic thing like say rent or mortgage.

Actually, under some models $8000 could be enough. A job paying that much locks you down, but if you got that much in basic income you could move somewhere for which that is enough to leave, albeit cheaply. I know there are places in rural Pennsylvania where you could get by on that. Those places don't have much for jobs to go around, but population influxes of people with lots of free time and a willingness to work a little for some spending money could change that.

On the other hand, there exists a worry that people on such an income who couldn't find additional work would keep getting pushed around to new areas as the influx develops each cheap locale.

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#118

Post by arprocter »

cmurf wrote: post #100
maxxxxx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in my teens I worked summer jobs in a German social welfare agency (Sozialamt). There were many families that had been on welfare for generations and it was noticeable that their kids had no idea how to make progress in school or how to hold a job. They simply didn't know and had nobody who could tell them. They also had no role models. I think with basic income there is a risk that a lot of people will fo…

Right. The income value I keep seeing floated is in the realm of US$8000 per year. This is not basic income, it's basically a large tax credit. I don't know why it's called basic income, there's nothing really basic about it when it can't completely pay for one basic thing like say rent or mortgage.

You mention rent. Something I'm confused about BI is that it doesn't seem to account for regional prices - 8k for housing goes a lot further in Newark than it does in Manhattan, and when you start comparing different regions the differences are probably even greater

Re: Why a Universal Basic Income Will Not Solve Poverty

#119

Post by cmurf »

djsumdog wrote: post #63
jbob2000 wrote: post #28

Something that is missing from the basic income/poverty debate is the notion of "learned helplessness"; after a long time in poverty, people get used to the lifestyle and have difficulty adjusting to "regular" life. For example, if you've been homeless your entire life, you've never had to lock your apartment door or carry a key around. My partner (a social worker) had a client who's apartment was always getting robb…

There is a much much deeper question here. Which life is really better? I took 10 months off where I lived with just two backpacks. I wasn't homeless by any means, I had my savings I was living off of (technically homeless I guess, but not in the cultural sense). Even though I had a lot of expensive electronics, I didn't buy a lock until about 7 months in. Even then, a lot of hostels didn't have large enough lockers…

Call it vagrancy, it sounds more romantic :-) I've been doing the travel and vagrancy thing for a few years and it's a very different experience having owned and lived in the same house for 15 years before that. And it's very valid to question which is better and realize that mainly they're just different, and also it can be viewed as a continuum, rather than succumbing to binary logic and the ensuing value judgment.

The barrier to entry is money, whether savings or income. I rather like the moment the fictional Sam Clemens just starts grokking the concept of Star Trek economics and decides it might be worth giving up cigars for. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708829/quotes?item=qt0551002

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