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Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

basicincomecanada.org

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Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#131

Post by sigmar »

err4nt wrote: post #87
troncheadle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright John Gault. If we're talking nation level, your startup is not a 'tentpole.' How does your market cap compare to GE, Google, Amazon, Lockheed? Those are redwoods, and there are plenty of those. You're a maple sapling, there are plenty of those too. You're doing that thing where the middle class rebels against their own interests by positioning said interests as the interests of the working class, because they…

The resources that I built my business on: - a chair - a table - electricity - any computer - internet - coffee (for food) - bathroom If you can bring your own laptop to a starbucks, they have plenty of the rest of those. A laptop can cost as little as 230$ USD, so thats really the only barrier and I beleive its an attainable goal for anybody in North America. If your life depending on having a laptop, thats somethin…

The fact that you replied to "without access to the same resources" with a list of physical needs seems to show that you really don't appreciate the disadvantages lower income people face. A laptop is fairly useless without the knowledge/education of what to use it for. Having time to go to a Starbucks is difficult for anyone with kids and without the money for daycare. Furthermore, the fact that you think everyone lives near a Starbucks is pretty illustrative of your privilege

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#132

Post by troncheadle »

err4nt wrote: post #107
mordocai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$230 extra above living expenses is not attainable without title loans or something similar for many in America. Not to mention that if the laptop breaks you have to know how to fix it yourself or pay $100+ to fix it (or buy another new one for $230). If you don't know enough about computers to transfer data off a "dead" machine then you have to pay $100+ for someone to do that even with the new one.

You must be joking, I know an awful lot of americans with laptops. Its not like mortgaging a house! And Im not talking about 'above living expenses'. When I bought mine I had no money for the electric bill. I leveraged the laptop purchase into paying that bill and many more after it!

Ok, I'm replying to you down the chain a bit because this is a great example of you just not getting it at all.

Do you have a college education? Did you go to a good high school? Do you have motivated peers? Growing up, did you have enough food to eat every day and every night? Do you have two loving parents? Or even one? Did you have a roof over your head every night? How many times did you change houses, schools, districts?

These and more are the factors out of the individual's hands that can severely negatively impact their ability to grow up and become successful.

You didn't 'just have a laptop and a desk.' You had a laptop, a desk, an education, a stable upbringing. MOST PEOPLE DON'T GET THOSE THINGS AND THAT IS THE OPPORTUNITY GAP. Again -- MOST PEOPLE DON'T GET THOSE THINGS AND THAT IS THE OPPORTUNITY GAP.

This comment I am replying to is just the worst kind of ignorance -- no, dude, there are SO many people in this country that can't afford a laptop. And if they could -- do you know how fucking expensive it is to learn to code??? You need one of 3 things -- 1: lots and lots of free time 2: a $50k education 3: an exceptionally great free public education ( I say exceptionally great because I'm not going to be that commenter that just says 'ugh google privilege and you'll get it.' You had privilege in excess, and now you have ignorance in excess. You need empathy and humility. I'm honestly disgusted by your comments. The kids I work with every fucking day don't have half the shit you grew up with and it makes ALL of the difference in their lives.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#133

Post by yummyfajitas »

bvinc wrote: post #123
yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

It's extremely counterproductive to, as the article puts it, "take the question of the moral quality of the poor off the table." The fact is that a large amount of poverty is directly correlated with "moral quality". Most poor people in the US (maybe Canada is different?) have low "moral quality", which I define as engaging in behaviors that are likely to keep a person poor. These behaviors include not seeking work […

I think this is a super simplistic view. You're basically saying: Bad decisions leads to being poor. Not a single person is under the impression that all poor people made good decisions. Of course there is a causal relationship! But it's much more complicated than that. Some people are poor because they were born physically disabled, or mentally disabled. Some people got sick and lost their job and savings. Some peop…

Does a poor man on the street, with no shower, no transportation, no cell phone, and barely enough money in his pocket to eat, really have the ability to seek work?

Yes. Hundreds of thousands of people manage to do this even with the additional hindrances of no tengo permiso de trabajo and no hablo Ingles. But I'm sure that those illegal Mexicans are suffering from privilege, unlike the white man born into a country where welfare benefits usually exceed the mean GDP/Capita of Mexico.

The book Scratch Beginnings is well worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Scratch-Beginnings-Search-American-Dr...

I'm not even sure what you're suggesting though. It sounds like you're suggesting that we should continue shaming poor people as an effective means to prevent poverty. You don't think absolute desperation and lack of safety, security, health, and food, is enough of a motivation?

Apparently not.

You think shaming works?

No, I think ignoring the cause of the problem is not a road to a solution.

Maybe a basic income system is necessary for our society to function in the future. There are a lot of indications that this is the case.

I have yet to see even a back of the envelope calculation suggesting these benefits will occur.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#135

Post by pop8row9 »

mordocai wrote: post #98
err4nt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resources that I built my business on: - a chair - a table - electricity - any computer - internet - coffee (for food) - bathroom If you can bring your own laptop to a starbucks, they have plenty of the rest of those. A laptop can cost as little as 230$ USD, so thats really the only barrier and I beleive its an attainable goal for anybody in North America. If your life depending on having a laptop, thats somethin…

$230 extra above living expenses is not attainable without title loans or something similar for many in America. Not to mention that if the laptop breaks you have to know how to fix it yourself or pay $100+ to fix it (or buy another new one for $230). If you don't know enough about computers to transfer data off a "dead" machine then you have to pay $100+ for someone to do that even with the new one.

Grace is definitely a factor to consider.

The question I have is: should someone be required to work in order to live reasonably well?

One entrepreneur, JK Rowling, is worth USD 1 bil. She did not require many resources to attain this; a savvier setup could have allowed digital-only publishing. Value can literally be created from the mind.

Given this, should it not be an acceptable profession in society to provide mind-workers the space and time they require to produce works unique to them? Should they not have comforts if required?

Can not any individual create in such capacities, and is it not only our fear and reliance upon the tales of a dark history and historical slogans which keep us from thinking the problem through to completion and from the very consideration that such new ways of working are indeed possible at a civilization scale? Are we afraid of success?

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#136

Post by troncheadle »

err4nt wrote: post #120
CPLX wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- A position as a first class citizen in a tremendously wealthy industrial country that got that way by stealing resources and enslaving native populations for centuries, presumably

What exactly is a first class citizen? Care to explain?

'First class citizen', while not really used outside of programming, was likely meant in contrast to a 'second class citizen.'

"A second-class citizen is a person who is systematically discriminated against within a state or other political jurisdiction, despite their nominal status as a citizen or legal resident there." - Wikipedia

He's saying you probably did not suffer much at all because of systemic discrimination, and pointing out the glaringly obvious -- that you don't realize that majority of the people in this country DO suffer because of systemic discrimination.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#137

Post by yummyfajitas »

CPLX wrote: post #102
jackcosgrove wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third option which always costs $0.

There's never an option costing zero as long as the brother in question has the ability to punch you in the face and take your food for leaving him to starve.

So we need a BI because the poor will spend all their money on drugs, and then engage in violence against peaceful citizens who don't feed them?

That's an interesting view.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#138

Post by Applejinx »

err4nt wrote: post #92
kohanz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this is the same argument we see time and time again against higher taxes (not just Mincome). We saw it in 2008 with "Joe the Plumber". Some entrepreneurs are driven by maximizing profit margins and some aren't. If your opinion was widely shared, there would be almost no entrepreneurial success stories in countries with a much more socialist approach than even Canada (e.g. throughout Europe). I am a Canadi…

If they give taxes a bump of course, but what if they radically rearrange taxes. There are many voices i hear who believe people above certain limits should be taxed 90% or more, and some cutoff limits Ive heard have been 250k, or even 100k. If you suddenly fell into a 90% taxation bracket would you still be just as happy as today?

I can run my business on about 20K a year if I'm frugal. It's another 'laptop' type business and while I can make use of capital to build value, that's not the core business.

I would absolutely accept a 100% marginal tax rate on over 100K a year and be happy about it. I live in an area with extremely low cost of living compared to NYC or SV, and I can build mindshare and interact with extremely happy, encouraging customers and become authoritative in my field with or without raw capital.

Put it this way. I have personal friends who were names on the back of vinyl record albums when I was a kid. On the whole, they are not over 100k a year either, and some of the things they love and cherish most are not (to them) core businesses earning over 100k a year.

If you don't figure you can be happy and fulfilled without millions and billions of dollars, you're doing something wrong. I have no problem with overruling your opinion here, and saying 'you have it wrong, and if you don't understand marginal taxation you're not entitled to opinions about it, still less to scaremonger people over it'.

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#139

Post by jimmyk »

Applejinx wrote: post #78
sanxiyn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can some people exploit basic income system to "rob us"? Maybe they can fabricate people which don't actually exist? (Or more realistically, delay reporting death to collect basic income of dead people.) These are concerns, but hopefully modern government can deal with fake identities. These still seem a lot better than current welfare system. If you consider giving basic income to people who spend $500 on weed "…

Absolutely. If you don't like it, sell them weed and then you have their $500. It always boggles my mind how many people would rather see the system grind to a halt, rather than anybody naughty be consuming. I would much rather see a class of people with disposable income.

  Absolutely. If you don't like it, sell them weed and then
  you have their $500.
Except now, you've used your time and resources to produce weed instead of other goods and services. The people who would have used that $500 to buy those other goods and services will subsequently have a lower standard of living.

If someone steals $5k from me and uses that $5k to buy my car, am I just as well off as I was before because I still have my $5k?

Re: Basic income doesn't emphasize divisions between poor and working people

#140

Post by VLM »

clavalle wrote: post #94
yummyfajitas wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. In the past I argued that the poor are completely rational and simply choose to exploit the safety net. It's a hypothesis I can't rule out. https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wo... But that doesn't explain many of their other bad behaviors, e.g. wife beating.

Domestic abuse is not limited to the poor. But, back to the point, assuming they are not as rational as the rest of us, somehow sub human, is a harmful position to take -- it precludes any positive action to change the incentive structure of the poor -- in your view, no matter what is done, they are still broken creatures beyond help. That you admittedly take that position with other more useful hypothesis still wort…

"it precludes any positive action"

Not really. On a nation scale its more or less a justification of imperialism or at the very best unequal alliances. That is going thru a bit of a popularity lull at every scale from large imperialism 19th century style down to recent brexit. Its smaller scale equivalent in the welfare state has been under intense turmoil for decades... was the CCC a great idea or a horrible unconstitutional experiment? Was closing all the mental hospitals some of which were abusive and tossing the crazy people into homeless shelters a wise idea? A large fraction of economically non-viable young black men are very expensively warehoused in prisons, that's not going to scale much larger either financially or ethically although it's worked very well up to this point (for everyone but then incarcerated economically non-viable young black men, anyway).

The general zeitgeist at the nation level seems to be to let them fail in place and kind of ignore the problems, while patting ourselves on our backs for our wise non-interference. Look at the path from Somalia to Zimbabwe to South Africa and the inevitable outcome of western civilization doing nothing. Or the future of a country like Nigeria where they're gonna give birth to a billion people, but they'll never produce food for more than 50 million long term sustainably or maybe 100 mill temporarily western industrial ag style, but we're hands off in the west, so unless China saves them ... (and Chinese gotta eat too, so what are the odds of that...).

I figure based on the above national level analysis, the individual welfare level analysis should anticipate the checks getting cut off in the coming decades then its sink or swim time. That'll be an interesting time to live in Detroit.

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