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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#121

Post by marcosdumay »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #63

I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor. Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists. People who have money, and therefore power, in the Unite…

That was a big part of the deal that "solved" the Industrial Revolution. The other big part was training the ones that managed to survive.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#122

Post by vkou »

haltingthoughts wrote: post #100
vkou wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no law of economics that says the latter two have to be supply limited, to the grotesque extent that they are. I'll give you housing though. One of the reasons housing is expensive, though, is because it is closely tied to job opportunities.

Exactly, there are many laws that result in those being very supply limited.

I strongly doubt that. Which laws do this for education? Could you point me to a couple?

There isn't some sinister cabal of teachers, that restricts supply, for the purposes of keeping their wages high. There isn't a grotesque system of receipts payable, and the user not paying the real price of service, and hidden, unitemizable fees at my local high school (Two of those do, however, start appearing when you go to university.)

There is more then enough education to go around. The problem is that it's not evenly distributed. I'm not talking about sending every kid to Harvard, here.

Healthcare certainly has people restricting its supply, but also has the exact same problem. We have the budgets for it, we have the doctors, and nurses to provide it - but we don't provide it very evenly.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#123

Post by scarmig »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #105
scarmig wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's something fundamentally different from using a negative income tax to implement a guaranteed minimum income.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#124

Post by 1_2__3 »

dsacco wrote: post #117
e_d_e_v wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…

There was probably a nicer way to make that point without attacking the parent's awareness of "the value of basic human interaction." For what it's worth, I didn't infer any value judgement about caste in the comment.

I did and think the reply's tone was perfectly reasonable given the parent comment's dismissiveness.

Yeah I do like interacting with people. Even "minimum wage workers" who last time I checked were still people.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#125

Post by [deleted] »

dsacco wrote: post #117
e_d_e_v wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…

There was probably a nicer way to make that point without attacking the parent's awareness of "the value of basic human interaction." For what it's worth, I didn't infer any value judgement about caste in the comment.

[deleted]

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#126

Post by contras1970 »

cbanek wrote: post #4

> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…

> Someone in a movie box [...] is practically a useless annoyance > Honestly, do we really like interacting with the people with minimum wage jobs? Not really.

This may not be substantive enough for HN guidelines, but you know what? Ewwwww!

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#127

Post by funkyy »

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…

I would like to see UBI tests performed in pathological areas, or areas close-to-pathology - in real world environment without hype enforced on them.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#128

Post by rpearl »

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…

But sometimes that scarce resource is time. You pay a person for their time doing a service. For instance, waiting tables. Cleaning. Staffing a counter. Driving a truck. Nothing (or very little) is constructed there, it is just a service rendered.

And you can therefore consider financing UBI by virtue of the time saved by automating these tasks. You take that time saved and hand it back as dollars instead of translating it into additional profit.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#129

Post by zimzam »

sparkling wrote: post #39

From Henry Hazlitts 1946 classic "Economics in One Lesson": You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage you substitute unemploy…

Economics has been evolving from a field dominated by navel-gazing theorists to being more behavioral and research-based.

Try letting go of the 70 year old theories and read some modern research.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#130

Post by atemerev »

goldbeck wrote: post #7
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.

[citation needed]

Some numbers:

Current US population: 324 million people, 250 million adults.

Poverty line income: $22,000 for the family of four (it is hard to estimate individual poverty line income, but it's more than $22,000 / 4. Let's say $12,000, which is $1000 / month).

Total cost of universal basic income of $1,000/month for the US: $3 trillion per year.

Total US income tax revenue: $1.8 trillion for personal income tax, $0.4 trillion for corporate income tax.

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