391–400 of 413 posts
In related news, experts expect sales in Lotto tickets, malt liquor, and Taco Bell combo meals to explode in Finland.
This is not the kind of comment we need on HN. Please don't post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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While I second mrottenkolber that your guess is highly stereotypical, the intention of the polish state introducing their "500+" program seems to be exactly that: increasing the birth rate.
Do you have a source on that, or do you think lawmakers might also be concerned with the well being of children, mums, dads, single parents, young parents–no matter how many children/parents there are?
But besides those sources there is also the fact that the child-raising benefits are only unconditional from the second child on, for the first child there is a maximum monthly income to get it.[2] If the main goal was the well being part, then this would not make much sense.
[0] http://www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/250612,Poland-pays-out-mil...
[1] http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/02/11/poland...
[2] http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=16077&langId=en [PDF]
Instead of just giving people money our governments at federal / state / local levels should become employers of last resort for everyone who has exhausted their welfare or unemployment benefits. Guarantee 30 hours / week at minimum wage to anyone who wants to work. Even if it's just trail maintenance or graffiti cleanup they will at least be maintaining basic employment skills, and have enough spare time to retrain…
What's the point of making people do stupid ass jobs? Now I'm all for spending money on the commons in ways the private sector is too petty to address, but do this for the results of the investment, not just for employment. I'm more OK with adjusting UBI to cancel out fluctuations in infrastructure spending.
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Keynesianism is like making waves in a pond and pointing out how much higher the water has risen. It ignores where the resources come from and the jobs being performed in other parts of the global economy that must be cut, often in some other country, because the resources are being used for something else. If a country is going into debt to stimulate, its pulling resources from other countries where jobs have to dec…
It's totally misleading to think of the economy as a pond holding a fixed quantity of water. The water level does change, and sometimes you need to make waves to do it. For this, you should read Paul Krugman's babysitting co-op analogy, a basic description of how an economic depression functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op
If you increase the amount of money available, that bids up prices for the existing resources.
If low skilled labor is already fixed at an artificially high price (like a minimum wage), a general price increase will reduce the value of the fixed wages paid under these arrangements and increase employment.
But you could accomplish the same thing by lowering the minimum wage.
No additional value is created by stimulus. The extra money is just undermining the effect of things that have been hobbling the market all along.
But creating more money has other destructive effects and causes people to make unsound investments. It creates bubbles. These bad results can take years to develop.
All the quantitive easing the Federal Reserve did after the financial crisis has helped re-inflate the housing bubble. Rising rents that also cause people to have to move or suckers them into buying into the bubble. A replay of earlier stimulus.
While all the churn in the economy benefits some industries, it destroys wealth for all income levels in the long run. It puts the country in further debt and makes us weaker.
Instead of resources flowing to industries that make the country more prosperous in the long run, we over-invest in real estate.
Without all the subsidies, both direct and indirect, real estate would be a much smaller part of the economy and there would be more capital for investments that actually create more wealth, instead of things that merely appear to do so in the short run.
What's to stop UBI from "cancelling itself out" due to inflationary effects? Prior to UBI, the lowest possible income is zero. After UBI, the lowest income is X. The poorest people in the nation will have an income of X, so X becomes the new relative zero, the new baseline. Prices of everything (food, housing, whatever) will reset relative to X. So uni will become worthless shortly after it's introduced.... but only…
What's to stop UBI from "cancelling itself out" due to inflationary effects? Prior to UBI, the lowest possible income is zero. After UBI, the lowest income is X. The poorest people in the nation will have an income of X, so X becomes the new relative zero, the new baseline. Prices of everything (food, housing, whatever) will reset relative to X. So uni will become worthless shortly after it's introduced.... but only…
You're confusing the distribution of money with the supply of money. The distribution of money affects economic priorities. The supply of money (as total income per unit time) affects the overall inflation. While the priorities of an economy will certainly affect prices, it's that some prices will go up and others go down.
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Let's back to basics. How do we cover the needs of one person? Better, how do we cover only the need for food? You need to produce rice, beans and meat. How do you produce all that? A lot of ways ... but you need to produce. And that word alone is the problem here. The moment someone stops producing, he is a burden. He must be carried on by someones else production. The government does not produce anything. The momen…
You /might/ replace 'unfair' with 'immoral'. Lots of things in life are unfair and are just a part of life, so there's a mentality that unfairness is just a part of life. Hopefully those who wish to take from those who work can see that this is theft and theft is immoral.
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Explain to me why my tax dollars should pay for other people again? I am not sure I understand why my labor must pay for others against my wishes. If I want to donate to charity, I will. Taxes should be used to pay for shared resources (roads, police, military,) but paying other people's living expenses? No thanks. America has poor and unemployed, yet Democrats seem to have no problem with illegal immigration which r…
Much of your earning power is the result of work done by others, many of whom are long since dead. If you earn a living by using a computer for any purpose, you've taken advantage of work done by Michael Faraday, George Boole, John Backus, Tim Berners-Lee, and others too numerous to mention. Even if you didn't use one, you still benefit from being able to read and write, for example. So some of your earning power rea…
Modern day liberalism has become a religion, where "what should happen" and what's "morally right", and who has "advantage over others" replaces "God's commandments", "sin", and even in the case of affirmative action, "original sin" (being a white male, you are born having others more deserving than you).
And just like any other religion, it's all just a bunch of horse shit.
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Why don't we do a basic income lottery? - Anyone except previous winners can enter. - You can only enter once per drawing. - As the pool increases the payout does not, only the number of winners. - Winners get a basic income for life. - As another condition they agree to an amount of monitoring so that we can effectively study how they behave with the basic income. - This one would be hard, but you might have to be m…
The only bit i'd quibble with is becoming ineligible for other assistance programs - one concern pro-UBI economists raise is that if it replaces social programs, the cost of necessities like childcare and housing will just increase proportionally. There's a good argument to be made that certain social goods are actually better when there is no profit motive for the people providing it. Aside from that, I really like…
Can you elaborate on that? I honestly can't see it.
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I don't believe the two scenarios to be as similar as you do. Wealthy families are able to provide a layer of security that a government stipend never could. You can blow away your monthly stipend from your wealthy family on drugs and alcohol instead of paying the rent, and you're unlikely to end up living on the streets as your family will fold and send you more money. (anecdote: over the last 15 years I've met over…
(anecdote: over the last 15 years I've met over a dozen people who were and/or still are like this) I'm advocating for turning anecdotes such as this into data by actually performing a study.