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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#331

Post by darpa_escapee »

Frondo wrote: post #274
darpa_escapee wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about it with you. They are there to take the most basic info (movie, time) and money, and give you a ticket. It's also always done thru a thick bit of glass that makes communication sometimes difficult if not painful. This has not been my experience at all. People who work at theaters get discounted, if not free, tickets to movi…

"Speak for yourself. There is nothing more aggravating to me than self-checkout, it is slow, ... " Oh, man. I never use the self-checkout. It's part of the invisible work movement--stuff someone used to be paid to do for you, now you do yourself. Same thing with pumping your own gas. I miss Oregon, for how there was always someone to pump your gas for you. Is gas cheaper here in Washington, where you have to do it yo…

Having become used to having gas pumped for me and cheap gas, it's a pain travelling where I have to pay a premium and pump it myself.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#332

Post by learc83 »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #65
bryanlarsen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative income tax is just Friedman's name for UBI. They're functionally identical.

UBI (at least in all the circles I've seen) refers to basic income wherein the government gives an unconditional sum of money to citizens. Negative income tax is not unconditional.

Every serious UBI proposal includes an progressive income tax increase.

Everyone gets the UBI, but the more money you make, the more you're paying in additional taxes to support the UBI. At some threshold you're paying as much in additional taxes as your making in UBI payments. Past another threshold and you're paying more in additional taxes than you're taking in.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#333

Post by wbillingsley »

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.

The main barrier to UBI is that the same groups in the population that are so in favour of it are also fiercely determined immigration must be open. And guess what happens to the first country to say at the same time "anyone can come here" and "we'll give anyone living here (not just a limited closed trial scheme) $40,000 per yer no-questions-asked". It may just be a transient effect (things might even out steady-state) but that would be a very big transient effect with some pernicious consequences (eg it'd be in other countries' accounts-balance interests to keep their welfare low, and to be harsher to the poor, to encourage more net recipients to move to the UBI country, while offering low-tax environments to encourage the UBI's wealthy to squirrel away their money there)

Globalisation is ending at the right time for a UBI to emerge, but so long as the first priority is ensuring globalisation is never dented, UBI can't get to the starting line. There are two hundred mice; they can all see the bit of cheese that looks like the solution to many of their problems in the trap; but nobody's going first.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#334

Post by learc83 »

atemerev wrote: post #130
goldbeck wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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…

Every serious UBI proposal includes an progressive income tax increase.

Everyone gets the UBI, but the more money you make, the more you're paying in additional taxes to support the UBI. At some threshold you're paying as much in additional taxes as your making in UBI payments. Past another threshold and you're paying more in additional taxes than you're taking in.

Effectively you only need to provide the full UBI for people making very little per month.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#335

Post by [deleted] »

zimzam wrote: post #116
mamon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…

This assumes that the primary reason to start a company is to become fantastically wealthy, which I would contest. Sure, most founders want to get rich, but I'd assert most would be just as happy to end up in the 8 figure range ($10's of millions) as they would in the 9-10 figure range. (And such a reduction would require taxes on a scale far beyond what UBI would require) Few people are going to consider starting a…

[deleted]

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#336

Post by [deleted] »

BeetleB wrote: post #151
mamon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…

>The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Commonly stated, but any real data to support it? I think what kills the economy more is when the barrier to entry is high. This impacts mostly non-wealthy folks. In the US, it is ridiculously trivial to set…

[deleted]

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#337

Post by freshhawk »

brandonmenc wrote: post #19
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…

> 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. Your smartphone gives you all of these answers now.

Those smartphones answers are full of paid shills and scores made up of fraudulent votes. Even people who aren't on HN (and likely at least know this, if they haven't literally done it) are starting to catch on to that these days.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#338

Post by freshhawk »

ebiester wrote: post #209
lordlimecat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way we have every time an industry has disappeared in the past: by participating in the newly opened industries. Is it rough when (for example) shipping crates put a bunch of longshoremen out of a job, when they are in their 50s and too old to easily retrain? Sure. But how many people now not only enjoy (as customers) the benefits that Amazon provides, but also enjoy the employment benefits of a massively ex…

50% of the population have an IQ below 100. 16ish percent have an IQ below 85. What are they going to do? We've already essentially phased out the useful work that people under IQ 70 can do. It's likely that it's creeped up to 75 or 80, even. As these are automated, let's creep it up to 90. It also takes out those who are poor and have no branch on which to gain experience for their first job. If we have eliminated t…

> What are these newly opened industries that will work with these people?

As far as I can tell, it's "magic future ones" and the evidence for these statements is "because I hope that's what happens".

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#339

Post by adrianN »

mjevans wrote: post #175
PeterisP wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is one of things that can be solved by UBI - currently in many regions housing is scarce in places "where all the jobs are" and plentiful, cheap, and even empty and abandoned in places with few jobs. This imbalance happens in 'competition' between different centers, and also in the process of urbanization. We have people leaving their granparent's houses, and leaving them empty, just to go to the big city whe…

I agree this could help a little, but the "nice" places are still where people will /want/ to live. Where you see a city now is either a nice place, or someplace that has strategic value of some kind. (real cities, not suburb towns) Markets work best when lightly regulated, when there's corrective action to smooth out the ups and downs of overshoot and collapse tendencies. Something I see lacking is the will to ensur…

I think a lot more people would live closer to greenery if they wouldn't have to commute to a job.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#340

Post by prostoalex »

Eyas wrote: post #217
Taek wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society as opposed to making them dependent on jobs which take all of their time, don't pay nearly enough, and block any and all opportunity for a way out because there's no free time or disposable income.

We should also work on better ways to equip society to have skills that are more "valuable" in the modern high-tech world, absolutely. The incompassioante charge made by the gp is still fair, I think: Saying these workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante. Yes, these workers provide little value in terms of profit to the business, but looking at societal value at a larger scales, these jo…

> workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante

By creating the minimum wage floor the government enforces the notion of value creation. With hypothetical example of minimum wage set at $10 an hour everyone producing $10.01 worth of value within a 60-minute period gets to stay, everyone producing $9.99 and below gets to leave.

Compare that to Asian societies where some companies have an [usually older] tea and coffee lady in the break room. The pay is usually next to non-existent - the lady is usually retired and has a variety of savings and a safety net. She doesn't do it for a paycheck, but she craves human contact, so helping out with tea and coffee while chatting to younger employees is fulfilling her social (but never financial) needs at that age.

Such a position is impossible in US corporate environment within the current framework of labor laws, so we deny older people gigs with simple communication opportunities. Not necessarily because US companies are generally more evil and stingy.

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