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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

#351

Post by wolfgke »

jimnotgym wrote: post #350
prostoalex wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in your position would make a similar decision? Do you expect the tuition rates and housing rents in the college town of your choice to go up or down? What happens once the education system and landlors absorb and accommodate the influx of revenue?

Or maybe more people would leave their jobs and go to teach? Maybe the local community college would have higher qualified ex industry teachers and it would spread the students around other towns?

If there is a larger supply of well-qualified people who want to teach, the wages for teaching will go further down (supply and demand). I have a little doubt that this is an intended consequence.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#352

Post by krrrh »

thephyber wrote: post #139
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…

I've heard convincing arguments[1] from economists that we should convert our existing "safety net" and "welfare" programs to simple UBI (aka BIG). The argument tends to circle around the fact that the existing programs dis-incentivize getting off disability or Section 8 because the recipient is penalized in a step-function way (as soon as they get a job, they may become ineligible or could be charged with a crime).…

I haven't listened to this episode yet, but it's worth noting that Milton Friedman was advocating for this very position in the 1960s. Here's the relevant clip from Free to Choose:

https://youtu.be/82SG_EpCsVs?t=1524

And a 1968 clip from an interview with William Buckley Jr.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#353

Post by prostoalex »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154
prodmerc wrote: post #15

If everyone gets $1000 every month guaranteed for "basic needs", the prices for those basic needs will increase accordingly. And independently. So you'll end up spending that $1k on either housing, bills or food. So you will still need a job if you want all three of those things, not sit around and contemplate what you should do with your life. It's sort of like how the ACA raised the overall price of insurance. Givi…

> Prove me wrong. Ok here we go. > If everyone gets $1000 every month guaranteed for "basic needs", the prices for those basic needs will increase accordingly. And independently. So you'll end up spending that $1k on either housing, bills or food. They don't get $1000/month for "basic needs", they get $1000/month for whatever they want . It's completely unconditional. Which means people wouldn't go out and buy twice…

> is excellent because it allows you to increase the housing stock without reducing nominal housing prices and causing existing homeowners to go underwater on their mortgages

So is inflation, and the real estate markets are usually the first to adjust.

Your view of housing is this commodity that's in low supply only because we don't have enough manpower to build more. In reality anyone with a knack for cheap housing can become a proud homeowner in Detroit, Baltimore, rural parts of Mississippi or Kansas relatively on the cheap. Kansas will even throw in some free land grants, so a homeowner and a landowner, living the dream.

People don't want just any cheap housing. They want proximity to their work, in a good school district for their kids, with quick access to transportation, cool restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance. The supply of those will still be constrained.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#354

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ElComradio wrote: post #339
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand what your objection is. Suppose you're right and a $5000 voucher will cause a $1000 increase in tuition for three years, after which new schools will open and the competition causes tuition to fall again. So as a parent, for the first three years I'm up net $4000/year and $1000/year is going to build new school capacity to meet increased demand, and thereafter I get the whole $5000/year. Am I…

You are basically saying that what happens in the short term is not relevant, but as taxpayers, a lot of people will be upset by profiteering in the manner I described, even if it is only for 1-3 years. Or from another angle- what will prevent an ever increasing amount of tuition such as happened with the higher education system? "We need to raise the voucher to $10,000 now…"

It's not really profiteering. Expanding capacity costs money. That's where the money is going.

And what you're getting at is one of the reasons that a UBI is better than vouchers.

Suppose you create a $5000 education voucher and there was previously a school with a tuition of $4000. That is now over; they might as well charge $5000. And if there is a higher quality school charging $10,000 and people whine that the voucher doesn't cover it and have the value of the voucher increased, now every school will charge $10,000, because that is the only way to get the whole voucher and there is no reason not to.

But suppose you replace that with $10,000/year in cash like a UBI. Can all schools now raise tuition to the entire amount? Obviously not, because all else equal people will still prefer the $7500/year school so they can spend the remaining $2500 on whatever they want.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#355

Post by chronial »

Koshkin wrote: post #238
jjawssd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans do not trust that the government has their best interests in mind, ergo Americans do not want to have their money taken away from them to pay for government programs.

A government, while being a necessity, is not to be trusted. The Founding Fathers understood that, and they made it clear to others. A government is a mechanism that is prone to deterioration over time, and it takes a substantial effort to keep it in a shape in which it protects people's interests rather than its own. Also, from the historical prospective, governments are the ones who are responsible for most killing…

> How, then, can an intelligent person trust a government?

Because that's just the better option. Somebody is always going to gather a lot of power with a big organization.

The choice you get is between an organization whose purpose is to serve the masses (democratic goverment) and organizations whose purpose is to serve very elites (corporations, organized crime).

Regarding your specific point regarding killing people: I think you are oversimplifying here. With the opium wars and the subsequent flooding of china with opium, British trading companies probably already firmly hold the record for killing people on a large scale. For more recent examples, I would point towards the commercial part of the US Industrial-Military complex.

But yes, the government is then frequently instrumentalized to do the actual killing. I would assume this to become harder the stronger and more democratic a government is.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#356

Post by vernon99 »

jondubois wrote: post #323

If I had basic income, I would go back to study, get a PhD in Computer Science Majoring in AI/Machine learning and then I would try to do something meaningful with it. I am tired of doing pseudo-intellectual software 'engineering' tasks - I would like to use my intellect to tackle difficult problems instead of trivial problems like building UI components and managing databases. Unfortunately, I can't afford to go to…

+1 to wolfgke. With BI costs for such mundane work would increase as less people would be inclined to do it. As a result more of such work still remaining in the states would move overseas to the countries with no basic income. That leads to a whole bunch of negative consequences.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#357

Post by wolfgke »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #66

Capitalism is going away, no matter what, once we have massive unemployment due to automation. You think people are just going to accept starvation? Shit will get real, real fast. And most people aren't as articulate or reasonable as the people on this site. There will be massive violence. A better way to look at UBI is that it's not about giving poor people money. Its about keeping the fabric of society together and…

> Capitalism is going away, no matter what, once we have massive unemployment due to automation. You think people are just going to accept starvation?

Let's for the sake of the argument assume this is true. But if people really believe this - why don't they stop producing kids (and advocate other people to do so, too)? I find it really crueling to produce children that will have such a useless and crueling life.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#358

Post by prostoalex »

jimnotgym wrote: post #350
prostoalex wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in your position would make a similar decision? Do you expect the tuition rates and housing rents in the college town of your choice to go up or down? What happens once the education system and landlors absorb and accommodate the influx of revenue?

Or maybe more people would leave their jobs and go to teach? Maybe the local community college would have higher qualified ex industry teachers and it would spread the students around other towns?

That very well may happen, and many retirees on Social Security do return to teaching, many consider it a way to "give back".

Considering the Social Security program has been around since 1935, it's probably safe to say that existence of such people for 80+ years did not lead to a decline in college costs.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#359

Post by jondubois »

wolfgke wrote: post #328
jondubois wrote: post #323

If I had basic income, I would go back to study, get a PhD in Computer Science Majoring in AI/Machine learning and then I would try to do something meaningful with it. I am tired of doing pseudo-intellectual software 'engineering' tasks - I would like to use my intellect to tackle difficult problems instead of trivial problems like building UI components and managing databases. Unfortunately, I can't afford to go to…

The fact that someone is paying you to do these jobs shows that the things you do do have a lot value to someone (your boss, the company's customers etc.). So your existing job is far from being meaningless. Instead of crying for a UBI you should better cry for people not to buy software that does "trivial stuff". If people were willing to spend a lot of money on software that does highly not-trivial stuff, there pro…

If me and my colleagues were better educated and less stressed on average, we would introduce fewer bugs into the system and we would waste less time debugging issues that should never have existed in the first place. I guess I believe that education has a really good ROI.

Re: Why we should all have a basic income

#360

Post by crdoconnor »

closeparen wrote: post #349
crdoconnor wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Creating jobs is one thing, but creating meaningful jobs is something completely different. * Hoover Dam * Lincoln Tunnel * LAX * LaGuardia Airport Just a few examples of things created by jobs created primarily to give people work. >Are these meaningless jobs really better than universal basic income? Would you rather pay somebody to build the next Lincoln Tunnel or pay for them to write some poetry and start an em…

Those things weren't created primarily to give people work, they were created to fulfill demand for electricity and transportation, respectively. If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic. We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no…

>Those things weren't created primarily to give people work

They absolutely were.

They were created under the auspices of the Public Works Administration (originally Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works) - part of the 1933 New Deal:

https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/1...

"Functions: Administered a comprehensive public works program to promote and stabilize employment."

>If no one needs to commute to work in Manhattan, then there is no need for a Lincoln Tunnel. If no one has business meetings or disposable income for leisure travel, then LAX and LaGuardia would be idiotic.

That does not change the fact that these infrastructure works were created primarily to give the unemployed jobs and wouldn't have existed without it.

>We do see this kind of stuff - huge infrastructure projects with no users - in China.

Some of the infrastructure is like that but most has enough users to justify its existence. Their infrastructure-building binge isn't crazy. Our intentional lack of infrastructural improvement (which is entirely about artificially throttling employment and wage growth) is crazy.

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