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Why we should all have a basic income

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Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#191

Post by stenl »

vectorpush wrote: post #108

Almost everyone here seems to be discussing the economic challenges of UBI, but so far I haven't seen much mention of the political challenges. UBI is a completely unworkable concept in the U.S.A and likely many European countries as well. American citizens will be literally shooting eachother in the streets before they accept such a massive wealth redistribution mechanism, and that resistance will be mostly made up…

Off-topic, but Americans literally are shooting each other in the streets. More americans have died in gun homicides than died in all wars since, and including WW2. Include suicides, and gun violence exceeds all US war deaths ever.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/27/...

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#192

Post by dzink »

During Brexit, people in job-starved areas of UK were reported as resentful for receiving handouts. They wanted gainful employment and their dignity back. You could have corporations foot the bill for basic income and people with certain values would still not want it. The image of being a breadwinner is so deeply instilled in some people that for them not being that, triggers mid-life-crisis: a depression, sense of meaningless existence, addiction, etc. Employment's bigger role is not just to provide income, but to keep people's minds busy and balance dopamine and add more meaning in their life. We have to provide solutions for all of the pieces of the puzzle if we want rapid automation.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#193

Post by AnthonyMouse »

pyrophane wrote: post #122
nickthemagicman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the wealth producers! We need a 100% inheritance tax! That way the wealth isn't going to people who didn't produce it! Then you redistribute that money to schools and training programs and small businesses to give opportunities to anyone to become a wealth producer! This improves the entire human race and not just the rich trust fund babies who haven't produced anything in their lives. I'm totally…

Your comment makes an excellent point. If our economy really was organized around incentivizing production, there are many things we could do to that end. In addition to a 100% inheritance tax, we could also surely implement policies that discouraged most types of rent-seeking and the passive growth of wealth that has allowed the richest in our country to become even richer without having to produce anything.

Except that an inheritance tax creates a large disincentive for people with children to create wealth, when passing that wealth on to their progeny is their motivation for creating it.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#194

Post by lstroud »

Politically, you would have to need guarantees against double dipping (constitutional amendment outlawing all other forms of distribution - welfare, food stamps). That's the problem with all the ideas like this...maybe they would be better, but you have to get from here to there. The transitions are almost always untenable and more complex than imagined (see healthcare)

Would be better to find something incremental.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#195

Post by tzs »

funkyy wrote: post #100
pikzen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaah, yes, automating the job of 2000 workers on a car construction line will certainly be replaced by 2000 service jobs. And those jobs will not be requiring higher education that these workers don't have, right. Also, basic income is a concept coming straight from liberalism. The comparison to communism isn't even remotely accurate.

It was same with industrialisation. All the crying that factories will destroy economies and cause massive unemployment which didn't do. It did a lot of good instead. Well, there was basic income in some communist countries and it failed on a social level.

> It was same with industrialisation

Not really. That was replacing human workers with new machines. New factories were needed to build those new machines. New supply chains were needed to supply those factories. New materials were being used in manufacturing.

Replacing those human workers required so many new things that it created a vast number of new job, much more than were lost.

Now we are tending to replace human works with old machines. Take a self-driving truck. That's just a normal truck (an old machine), with some computers (old machines) added, some motors (old machines) added to actuate the controls, and some sensors (old machines) added to provide input to the software.

Note that not many new physical things are required for self-driving trucks. The novelty is in the combination, and in custom software and some custom electronics. Custom software and electronics do not generate many jobs--it takes the same number of programmers and electrical engineers regardless of whether you are making one truck or a billion trucks. For the non-new physical things needed, like motors to move controls, orders go up at motor factories and maybe they have to add a shift and so that creates some jobs. But the motor factory is likely highly automated, and so adding a shift just represents a handful of jobs.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#196

Post by lgas »

edblarney wrote: post #172
programmarchy wrote: post #23

UBI is attempting to cloak itself in free market rhetoric, but it's bullshit. Yes it may "incentivize" some individuals to work, but only by disincentivizing others. It takes money from top wealth producers, discouraging their labor, and gives it to people who aren't producing as much wealth, effectively subsidizing unproductive work. This will make everyone poorer in the long run. The struggling artist meme is an ap…

"UBI is attempting to cloak itself in free market rhetoric, but it's bullshit." I'm not a fan of UBI - but it's not 'bullshit' in the manner it's presented. UBI is really a 'negative income tax' - and it was first proposed by 'Milton Freeman' - a super-duper free market capitalist. If you take progressive taxation, then make the lower ends negative - you have UBI. The concept came from economists - not socialists. Bu…

Milton *Friedman

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#197

Post by dasil003 »

jakeogh wrote: post #117
anonfunction wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that logic all taxes and social policies are theft.

Correct. Personal taxes (taking things via threat of force) are theft. It does not matter who is doing the taking.

You would not have been in a position to earn any of the money you have without public infrastructure paid for by taxes. Maybe you would have been successful under an anarchy, but I doubt that is the case for the majority of HN'ers, and my best guess is that your ideological position would crumble pretty quickly if you were forced to live in the world which you ostensibly desire. Fortunately for everyone I can't see that happening without massive death and destruction.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#198

Post by sokoloff »

Balgair wrote: post #74
omilu wrote: post #30

Here is the same author in 2014 attempting to explain how basic income won't lead to massive inflation: https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-... >>> It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.* There is no sure fire way to reduce the value of a dollar then to redis…

"The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value." Wait, so then how does inheritance work? Like, your grandmother worked for it, but you just snowboard all year long. What am I missing here?

Money can be thought of as a claim check on labor. You work doing something valuable and get money. You spend some and save some. What you have saved/invested and not spent and passed on to someone else still has value.

In the snowboarder's case, someone worked for that money and gifted it to them. Totally consistent if you don't overly focus on the "YOU have to work for it" but rather "SOMEONE has to work for it"

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#199

Post by ng12 »

dzink wrote: post #192

During Brexit, people in job-starved areas of UK were reported as resentful for receiving handouts. They wanted gainful employment and their dignity back. You could have corporations foot the bill for basic income and people with certain values would still not want it. The image of being a breadwinner is so deeply instilled in some people that for them not being that, triggers mid-life-crisis: a depression, sense of…

And when they voiced anger about the government accepting immigrants when there already wasn't enough work to go around they got called racist.

I think UBI's effect on immigration is an interesting topic and one I don't see discussed in most articles. What does it mean to be a citizen of a country when, statistically speaking, you're a drain on the economy? How does immigration fit into that model? In my mind UBI doesn't require changing how we view work, it requires changing how we view citizenship and statecraft.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#200

Post by sokoloff »

jganetsk wrote: post #17
omilu wrote: post #2

>>>Basic income guarantees you a monthly starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life If the poverty line stayed constant, basic income is a no-brainer. But basic income makes the cost of goods rise. Demand for goods increases, but supply diminishes. Nobody will do the crap jobs without higher pay, raising the price of everything. Basic income is impossible.

Claims are misleading, wrong, and unsupported. > Demand for goods increases. Citation needed. Demand for some goods will possibly decrease: like payday loans or bankruptcy law. Demand for luxury goods won't change at all: yachts, private jets. But even the demand for Big Macs probably won't change all that much. Apply the same exercise to a bunch of other sundry cases: buying a house, life-saving medication, buying a…

> Demand for luxury goods won't change at all: yachts, private jets.

Are you sure about that? Who will be bearing the tax burden to pay for UBI? Are not those the people who are currently buying yachts and private jets?

Business jet usage may decline as well as a substantial part of that usage is to generate income and growth for their businesses. With higher taxes, there is less incentive to risk money to grow your business further, putting negative pressure on business aviation.

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