471–480 of 1001 posts
See also:
The One-Minute Case for a Basic Income - http://www.basicincome.org/news/2013/02/opinion-the-one-minu...
A flyer of the same: http://hypertexthero.com/work/basic-income-11-arguments/
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> worked for black money and collect the social benefit at the same time This one doesn't apply to BI, since you get the same amount of BI money whether you work or not and regardless of how much you earn.
I keep seeing this repeated in discussions about BI, but I honestly have no idea how it would be possible. I get that everyone receives the same size check, no matter what their income, but who pays for the BI program? I assume it is funded through taxes and that people that earn more income will pay higher taxes. So once you take BI received - taxes paid , people that earn more outside income get less from the BI pr…
So your first $10k (from BI) would be tax free. If you don't work, you don't pay any taxes.
Let's say you have a part-time job which pays $20k a year and the lowest marginal tax rate is 30%. You'd then pay $6k in taxes on that $20k.
Thus, your overall income would be $24k, much more than you got from just BI. This works if your only work is a single $100 lawn mowing job. BI, when coupled with an adequate standard deduction, eliminates disincentives to work.
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There's been a lot of research into this, particularly around the concept of savings as the big obstacle towards independence and freedom. The poorest people who struggle to achieve even a basic income (think participants in microcredit) face a difficult task of building enough savings to live past one catastrophic flood, one bad recession, one big purchase/investment (a new car that doesn't always break down vs. cra…
Participants' financial health, including savings and ability to weather economic shocks, is one of the key outcomes we'll be examining.
It seems that a large portion of the very poor / homeless is caused not directly by poverty, but indirectly by poor decisions caused by mental health issues.
Obviously BI is not a fix for the health care system, but how do you propose that BI should address people that don't really have "legal capacity" to make decisions on their own ? Do you support paying BI to some dedicated caregiver instead in such cases, or is it beyond the scope of this initial experiment?
Unfortunately, the explanation most consistent with data on happiness/satisfaction is that the primary utility gain from wealth is derived from gains in zero-sum social status. We can tell this even from the language of the post itself: "everyone should have enough money to meet their basic needs." Basic needs? Everyone in America has their basic needs. Almost all of the _basic_ needs of a human, i.e. those that we r…
For basic needs, I'd say that encompasses food, water, and shelter (at least in colder climates). A decent number of Americans don't have these met. Feeding someone on $3/day sounds somewhat challenging to me, and throw in shelter on top of that and I don't think your $2,000/year figure is going to cut it.
It seems pretty easy to me. $3 buys 24 chicken eggs, or 10 servings of Quaker Oats.
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Unemployment insurance is not BI. BI goes to everyone, Unemployment insurance only goes to people who aren't working legally. Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black market labor. BI does not do that. It does (if we get replace minimum wage with basic income) allow people to do work that pays nothing or very little. However, I would see…
True, the very liberal Dutch unemployment insurance which I was talking about was not BI. It had some similarities, but also some differences. The liberal unemployment insurance became too expensive. So the question is: where is BI different so that it becomes sustainable for the tax payer? > Unemployment insurance reduces the incentive to work because it pays people to not work. It similarly incentivizes black marke…
Of course BI will require increasing marginal taxes on the people who work. This shouldn't be economically catastrophic though, because you can structure the system such that there aren't disincentives to work and the UBI everyone receives is tax-free.
So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…
I'm really, really happy you're going forward with this! That said, I have just one question to this experiment - how it's going to handle media exposure? What I worry about is that the interaction with the greater world through mass media will blow the entire thing up and make it useless. I expect at least: - prices going up for rent and some stuff in areas where owners know population is on BI - people getting incr…
So, a question for the BI fans: I've seen it said repeatedly that BI will save us money (or at least, not be so outrageously expensive) in part because we can eliminate existing welfare programs. "Just cut a single check, no more overhead from several agencies", they say. But riddle me this: what do you do when someone on BI has a financial emergency or, as will happen with some regularity, just flat-out blows all th…
Personally, I'd hope the system would absolutely tell them "tough shit". There's got to be a line where the safety net gives out, because someone is too expensive to help. That's where family and charity hopefully take over. At the same time, I think your instinct is right, and it's something I've never heard mentioned before. It's almost inevitably that there'll then be the "food security" fund, and the "housing gua…
But see, that's why his is a trick question ...
If the answer is "tough shit" then it's a concession that implementing BI (or anything like it) is simply adjusting the "tough shit dial" to a relatively different value. There's still a benefits ceiling, beyond which it's "tough shit".
At that point it becomes difficult to justify any particular point on the tough shit dial - especially when todays tough shit was, four generations ago, essentially heaven on earth.
No benefits at all is a rational position. Endless benefits, cradle to grave is also a rational position. Neither of them are self-contradictory or loony. You may disagree with either of them but neither of them are crazy.
It's all of the bullshit in-between that is totally unworkable - both practically and theoretically. His question - and your answer - illustrate that very well.
What if we fix our society instead? What if instead of massive seeking of profiteering we actually double down on our efforts to improve lives today, right now in this very moment instead of some far distant realization of "when all jobs are automated" which is a highly debatable premise, and if even true, a long ways away.
That's the thing that is so frustrating to me about my fellow people in tech. Driven to automate. Why? To what end? If you stop and think who really benefits the most from this endless pursuit to automate, you will see it really isn't your common neighbor.
I will say I feel this way with most fields of research and schools of political thought as well. So much is being done for theoretical problems in the distant future, when we could double down on current issues. Instead we fund obscure research that may or may not reach fruition, or the underlying assumptions might change under this hope that some future results will solve our current problems, meanwhile the status quo remains for those suffering now. And you wonder why people are becoming increasingly weary with science, and even technology.
Technology was suppose to make people happier and have endless opportunities, yet it is becoming increasingly obvious society is even more unhappy, more anti-social, more fragmented than ever before. More people are unhappier than ever before, more people are committing suicide, more people are addicted to pain killers and opioids than ever before, more people are addicts in general. Sure we are living longer, long enough to stuff our faces with all the processed junk our wonderful technology has created so cheaply, but we have missed out on the meaning, I am afraid.
Maybe I have just become so cynical I can't work in tech anymore.
What can I say though. It pays good.
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You completely side stepped the question. I find it absolutely amazing how naive BI supporters are. I grew up poor in a ghetto in New York. Studied, went to university, became an engineer and am no longer in that socioeconomic bracket. However it is very apparent that the people in my current bracket (the one's that support BI), have no idea about the issues of the poor. Poor people are mostly poor because of the dec…
Somebody else suggested that payments should be divided into smaller amounts and disbursed more frequently. So instead of getting $1200 one a month (or whatever the amount is), you would get $20 every morning and $20 every evening. How do you think that would work in the neighborhood you grew up in?