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

basicincomecanada.org

151–160 of 259 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not see that poverty can also be the cause of those behaviours, rather than the reverse?

>There are direct causal relationships between all of these behaviors and poverty. Not seeking work will result in not having a job, drug abuse will make you lose your job, and having no job makes you poor. Etc. Not being able to afford education, or clean clothes, or a permanent residence rules you out of 99% of the job market, which is why so many give up on the job search. As stated by OP (and many parts of societ…

Not to mention -- college grads are ALSO finding employment rough, unemployment for college grads is > 7% -- surely if the economy looks bleak for people with a college degree, maybe its' a bit more bleaker for those without?

http://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2015/

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

#152

Assume for the sake of argument, that we woke up one morning and there were machines that could write code. Really good code, 30,000 debugged lines a day. They invented better languages that we couldn't even understand and were willing to do this work just for fun. In that world of super high productivity but few jobs, Would basic income make sense? And if not, what's a better system? (asking the BI opponents here) I…

We are not in the process of transitioning in this type of situation as we would see high productivity gains in every sector if we were. But for the sake of the argument, bellow is how I imagine such a future would look like. Note that basic income doesn't have to be part of it, but some form of redistribution will likely be necessary.

In a world where machines are better than humans at almost everything, unless we discover new laws of physics, machines will still require time and natural resources (space, energy and matter) to produce goods and services. Since there will no longer be a market for labor, the economy will be dominated by markets for readily available energy, space and matter (what economists sometimes call "land").

Robots will be in charge of automatically turning this energy and matter into the maximum amount of value for humans (hopefully).

For most people, "working" in this world will consist of going online, buying or trading an amount of energy, buying raw materials or spent matter that is ready to be recycled and pressing a "go" button.

Some people may also work on designing new better machines that produce finer goods. This will be mostly creative work as the technical part will mostly be automated.

People will not have to go out to work. Machine owners will be able to watch video of machines working maybe in an industrial park somewhere. The finished goods, spent matter (trash) and machines themselves, will be picked up and delivered by delivery robots.

If they wish for more variety, people will trade the production of different machines and they will trade different kinds of spent matter. They will also trade the machine designs and the land or space to host the machines.

The machines will sometimes have to be replaced when worn out or obsolete but that will also be done by machines.

The most important economic constraint will likely be global energy production likely based on what can reasonably be captured from the sun. People could own shares in energy production capacity.

Every day, as energy shareholders, people will receive their energy dividend, an amount of energy to be spent. They will be able to sell this energy, use it in machines to produce stuff or services or maybe store it in a battery.

There might be a level of inequality in this society. This will depend on how much governments allow ownership of things to be concentrated, especially ownership of energy production. Governments may redistribute so as to guarantee a minimal amount of livable space, energy and matter to everyone.

In this future universe, this minimal amount of redistribution of energy and matter (ie. trash) will give people a very high amount of value without them having to work at all (unless they want to as creative endeavors).

Not a bad existence in my opinion.

Something like giving people a minimal number of shares in the economy, shares of energy production or shares of GDP could make for an interesting way to implement something like universal income in a futuristic scenario.

It would probably create better incentives for people to want to grow total output or at least not hurt it too much than to tax and redistribute a fixed amount. It would also make the system robust to variations in real GDP due to natural causes, disasters etc. It's hard to fulfill a real basic income promise when total production suddenly drops.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See NPR's expose on rampant disability fraud There's no incentive for fraud in an unconditional benefit system. > It's hard to see how eliminating safeguards will improve things. Its actually easy to see, when the "safeguards" directly produce perverse incentives. Means-testing reduces the marginal benefit to finding additional income, encouraging a culture of dependence. And any type of conditional benefit scheme…

Yes, and if I redefine all errors as successes my program has no bugs. Back in reality, my application is not meeting business needs, and BI is still wasting a bunch of money on people who don't need it. Means-testing reduces the marginal benefit to finding additional income, encouraging a culture of dependence. And any type of conditional benefit scheme creates an incentive for fraud where the benefits of fraud outw…

> A Basic Job Guarantee (if you need a job real bad, the government gives you a real bad job) does not create incentives for fraud.

No one needs a job. People need good and services, which (in a system that is basically market structured) income is a means to provide. A job isn't a need, its multiple steps removed from needs.

A "Basic Job" labor army programming is a reasonable means of providing stability in income, currency in marketable skills, and providing for infrastructure and other public needs during a short-term disruption in the private economy negatively effecting employment that does not involve a long-term transformation in the nature of the economy and the kinds of work likely to be in demand.

Its a very bad way of dealing with long-term structural unemployment, providing a social safety net during a period of substantial transformation of the jobs in demand which either makes people permanently unemployable or requires substantial time devoted to retraining to regain employability for displaced workers, etc. Its a good component of a set of policies to address the Great Depression, but not for an economic revolution driven by automation and other developments.

> EITC also has minimal incentives for fraud.

Sure, because EITC has a fairly gradual falloff of benefits with increasing income at the top end (and because, though risk of getting caught may be fairly low, sanctions for tax fraud are very steep), it creates only a fairly mild incentive to fraud through concealed outside income. Certainly, rolling all primarily means-tested (but not mainly conditioned on other needs) social benefit programs into EITC, both raising the cap and broadening the range appropriately, and keeping the fairly mild fall-off at the top would substantially reduce overall complexity, and reduce incentives for fraud, at the cost of directing less funds to the neediest at the bottom (due to the phase-in part at the bottom end of the scale with EITC.)

Of course, the only differences between an EITC and a UBI funded (insofar as funds are needed beyond those from replaced means-tested programs) increased high-end taxes in a progressive income tax system is:

(1) EITC doesn't reach the bottom end of the distribution as effectively, due to the phase-in,

(2) EITC is effectively (other than as mentioned in #1) equivalent to a UBI funded by an increased tax on a narrow range of income toward the low (but not absolute bottom) end of the scale (the range at which the UBI phases out.) rather than one funded by an increased tax at the top end of the scale, as in most UBI proposals.

UBI is basically EITC with those two problems fixed.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which one is that?

Leave your brother to die on the street, cold and hungry and ignored. Of course.

After sleeping on the street for one night, the brother might also choose to spend his money on rent rather than weed the next time around.

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

#155
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>the poor will spend all their money on drugs,

If and when attempting to formulate coherent arguments, avoid using such absolute statements.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The poor commit 4x as much domestic abuse as high income people. And I single out domestic abuse because unlike robbery or selling drugs, "stealing a loaf of bread to feed his hungry children" is a nonsensical excuse for beating one's wife (or spending one's money on drugs and tobacco) 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 p…

Why should it be low money? Because private contractors (with far, far less resources in terms of capital investment in equipment and bulk materials) are just better?

Sounds good. My little town has a giant hulking diesel powered snow muncher, hundreds of times the size of a consumer snowblower, which munches huge impacted Vermont snowdrifts and TAKES THEM AWAY, paid for by my tax dollars.

Hell, yes, fix the infrastructure, across the board. Pay good money to work on that. Hell, I'd sign up, I like supporting my community. The heavy machinery does most of the hard labor anyway.

Unless you're literally suggesting introducing meaningless and inefficient physical labor for poor money just to punish poor people for being poor? I think maybe you are.

Civilized societies have giant diesel power snow munchers. Just saying. We have big machines and robots and stuff, now.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at what level do we accept there's assholes and move on and not let them ruin it for all of us? If we have a program that helps 1 person and 1 person scams it, we might get rid of that program. What if it helps 10 for every 1 scammer? 1,000? 1,000,000? Certainly with the last we'd say it's ok.

We stop when the marginal cost of additional oversight exceeds the marginal benefit of additional fraud prevented. I.e., we keep increasing oversight until diminishing returns causes $1 of additional fraud prevention spending to reduce fraud by $0.99. I don't know where that point lives, but as NPRs expose demonstrates, that amount is certainly larger than zero and probably a lot larger than where we are now.

That is mathematical, but the marginal benefit can't exclusively be considered in terms of the financial health of the program. The imposition of fraud prevention creates a lot of negative externalities (in relation to the finances of the program) on people who are recipients or potential recipients. False positive detections of fraud, or heavy burdens of evidence will cause a feedback effect by causing people who we would want to qualify as recipients to commit fraud in order to elude oversight, thereby (if focused on the solvency of the program) justifying even further oversight, and higher overheads.

Also, since the purpose of the program is to reduce poverty, not to detect fraud, another effect is that the additional oversight will keep people away from the program, either by (as above) their inability to navigate the efforts to protect the program from fraud, but also by the effect of intrusive (and possibly personal and demeaning) questions and inspections has on people's self-image who choose to accept the aid (as per TFA), causing them to avoid taking it to avoid social stigma.

I know these are the types of points that laissez-faire libertarians laugh at i.e. "imagine someone who is taking my money refuse any indignity; they can always choose to starve," but those sorts of libertarians don't think that poverty is a concern anyway. When those types get to design programs like this, they end up largely populated by people who are willing to navigate them as a job, hence largely fraudulent, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The vast bulk of overhead is ultimately fraud control in some form, and as that expands, so the program expands, while the number of people being helped stays steady or even shrinks. This massive administration is farmed out to contractors to reduce ballooning costs (cronies, friends of friends and/or benefactors - an externality that affects us all as a rise in corruption) who are rewarded for finding more fraud with a higher proportion of the budget of the program. Their primary motivation then becomes to find excuses to exclude people from the program.

This is depressing to even type. The reason one would have basic income is to eliminate this. I believe that every millionaire should receive a check. Means-testing is a scam.

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

#158
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least some of the budget would come from realizing reductions in bureaucratic overhead from eliminating the welfare apparatus and costs associated with crime (which poverty is the biggest predictor of). We also always seem to have enough money to bomb the ever living shit out of brown people in all the far flung regions of the universe, so I don't understand why cost should ever be an issue. I don't think need is…

US uses a lot of debt for those bombs.

When you have bombs, debt doesn't mean much.

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

#159
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The huge majority of pro-UBI writings I see talk up the benefits in great detail but either ignore, or misrepresent, the costs. Lots of naive idealists support UBI - but I also frequently see UBI advocates who purport to be "evidence-based" and "rational", and yet who fail to provide even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how they propose to fund their scheme. Instead they do 1 of 3 things: 1. Provide eviden…

OTOH, back of the envelope calculations by detractors are usually misleading by an order of magnitude. For example 320 million Americans * 15K/year in basic income = 4.8 trillion dollars that has to come from new taxes and spending cuts. But if it all comes from tax increases than somebody currently making the average income will see their taxes go up by exactly amount as their BI payment. Is that actually a tax incr…

All of them, even pro-UBI articles with numbers that can be reversed to figure out what they mean in concrete-ish terms, agree its $2 trillion or more.

This one for instance (~$13k) that argues it will save money:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...

Its pretty clear the entire savings comes from cuts to Medicaid & Medicare & Agricultural subsidies.

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> 3. Propose a low (subsidence-level) basic income, which represents a major cut in benefits to pensioners and the disabled. Since those two groups receive the bulk of current welfare spending, redirecting their benefits is the only means by which a UBI can be feasible.

That one one went with a clear option #3.

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As for your solution, it works-ish, but ultimately requires maintaining Medicare & Medicaid which inflates the cost beyond what you propose or admitting you are doing #3 also.

So you'd need to actually raise ~$5.8 trillion to make your system work. It can work, you'd just need to basically double the current tax levels.

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

#160
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic productivity in all industries could be improved by introducing flogging / periodic executions of lowest performing staff. What's more likely: someone takes a risk knowing that if they fail their kids won't be homeless, or knowing that if they fail, they will be?

Some companies do this to a lesser degree -- every year they fire the bottom 10% of performers -- also known as stacked ranking.

I think most firms that tried it have since scrapped it. It turns out to be about as effective as firing a random 10% and promoting another random 10% of staff.

Consider: a project is floundering. You put your best engineers on it to try and save it. It fails anyway. They get fired! Yay stack ranking.

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