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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#101

Post by nfriedly »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #80
nfriedly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the only realistic way for a small player to beat Amazon at selling physical goods is to charge more and convince customers that it's worth it.

What would keep Amazon from adjusting to this or Acquiring the company if it got big enough? Those are tiny tweaks that they could make easily. Plus Amazon is much more than just a place to buy. They are data services, logistics, analytics, seller services, infrastructure etc...

> What would keep Amazon from adjusting to this

Obviously not much. The point I was trying to make was that a small player probably can't compete with Amazon on price, but they may be able to compete some other way.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#102

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

FussyZeus wrote: post #43
chris_va wrote: post #33

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

> My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. The thing is though, most people who would benefit from UBI are not currently generating enough economic value to live, or bar…

If you don't see a dime I wouldn't call it an UBI. "Unconditional" is supposed to mean that everyone gets the same amount of dime.

If you are concerned with progressive income tax as a means of financing it. Consider the possibility to implement UBI based on land rent instead, like the Alaska oil fund but the rent from all kinds of natural resources that really should be shared fairly anyway.

Regarding the issue that people would work less:

- Perhaps that's not a big problem. Just think of all the people in telemarketing that could just stop contributing to that particular problem. Or perhaps some other truly evil industry, like tobacco, would people with an UBI be more inclined to not work in unethical industries?

- Perhaps more people would dare to start their own business. Trying truly weird stuff that no one would invest in otherwise.

- Perhaps it contributes enough stress reduction in people to have significant effect on healthcare costs

- Given the safety net of an UBI, a lot of laws and institutions surrounding employment could perhaps be relaxed and more dynamic.

In my mind the potential benefits to the economy and could be quite interesting

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#103

Post by Retric »

CJKinni wrote: post #66
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

> All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people I'm not very educated in this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that while UBI doesn't create money, but it can move money from people with a lower ratio of money-spent to money-made, to people with a higher ratio. If that's the case, the money that's actively being used should increase.

Saving ever more money is deflationary by removing it from the economy, but spending money is not inflationary because spending money does not create more money.

In the simplest possible term demand for money is created through taxes and loans because people need it at a future date to meet these obligations. Spending money does not remove these obligations so it does not devalue money.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#104

Post by JSDave »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

UBI avoids the step function where there is no (economic) incentive up until the "income floor". Policies like UBI could ally people (politically) of low to mid income.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#105

Post by bryanlarsen »

scarmig wrote: post #85
SirensOfTitan wrote: post #44

I really don't understand why ideas like the Negative Income Tax aren't being considered before Universal Basic Income. In that scenario, the government just sets an income floor and pays the difference ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax ). UBI makes little sense whenever someone making 500K a year still gets it unconditionally. The marginal utility of that is nil, but its tax implications are massiv…

The issue with negative income taxes is that they create steep effective marginal tax rates. Suppose you set the floor at 12k, and suppose someone has an existing job at 12k. They immediately lose all incentive to work, because they could make the same amount by not working at all. Your effective marginal tax rate is 100%. There are ways to make this effect less pronounced, but those ways end up morphing a negative i…

If you set the floor at 12K, that means that people with no income get a refund of r*12K where r is the tax rate, not that they get a refund of 12K.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#106

Post by rpearl »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #57
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Well, it's believed to be cheaper to house the homeless than to leave them on the streets. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/25/housing-first-homel... ]

And there's plenty of housing, just not really in places that are convenient to jobs. If you didn't need a job, that becomes less of a problem. So giving people enough money for a secure housing and food situation--somewhere, anywhere--strictly decreases suffering.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#107

Post by atemerev »

DonbunEf7 wrote: post #58
atemerev wrote: post #5

Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two. It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.

No, by counterexample of USA. The 2015 average income per capita was $57,540 [0]. The 2015 poverty guideline for a family of five was $28,410 [1]. Clearly there is more income per capita than required to keep everybody out of poverty. A second source, the Census, is pretty reputable too: "Median household income in the United States was $56,516 in 2015." [2] Edit : This statement isn't helpful since it is a median, n…

Do you assume normal distribution of income? Because income is Pareto distributed, and shifting the median changes other parameters quite unusually.

For your convenience: US Gini index is ~41%, and, correspondingly, the alpha parameter of Lomax (Pareto type II) distribution is ~1.71. If you plug the median in [1], and try to run any income redistribution scenarios, it doesn't work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomax_distribution

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#108

Post by marcosdumay »

FussyZeus wrote: post #43
chris_va wrote: post #33

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

> My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. The thing is though, most people who would benefit from UBI are not currently generating enough economic value to live, or bar…

> in a country as rich as mine it's embarrassing that we still have such vast areas of the country that look more like the slums of Brazil than the cities they're usually parked next to.

Well, the slums of Brazil also do not look anything like the cities they're parked next to.

With the increasing economical disparity, less and less reliable government services (and laws), anti-intellectual culture and many other trends visible on the media, it looks the US is getting more and more of the "features" Brazil is working hard to exterminate. That's concerning.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#109

Post by falcolas »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #57
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Housing, supply limited? Except in the land-limited big cities, I don't see this as the case at all. Education would certainly be important, but most don't pay for that directly (just through Taxes); no reason for that to change.

Healthcare, yeah, that also needs addressing, regardless of the UBI decisions.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#110

Post by thescriptkiddie »

the_gastropod wrote: post #67
chris_va wrote: post #33

I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…

The best explanations I've heard effectively make the assertion that a country's land is collectively owned by its citizens. Its citizens can then charge rent (via taxation) to individuals or corporations using the land. UBI is the distribution of that rent.

Politicians are loath to acknowledge this, but the fundamental purpose of taxation isn't just to fund the public good, it is to discourage rent-seeking. Economic rents (not to be confused with the rent you might pay for an apartment) are dead weight, so any tax that can target them without disrupting actual productive work is effectively free money. One of the best ways of doing this is, as you proposed, to tax the unimproved value of the land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

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