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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#171

Post by antisthenes »

jpatokal wrote: post #157
dota_fanatic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people in the developed world do NOT live like kings of old. They have bosses. They struggle to find mates. They live in small, impermanent homes with no land of their own. They tend to be in debt, and don't even understand how permanent that debt will be for them. They're socially at the bottom. This is nothing like a king, who could have a large family, and was well fed, had permanent shelter, didn't pay rent,…

You are mixing social class with quality of life. Despite being at at the top of the social pyramid, kings of the past did not have many things that most of today's poor (in the US) do, like electricity, running water, air con, motor vehicles, antibiotics, the Internet etc.

Social class is inseparable from quality of life.

80% of the hierarchy of needs is immaterial, so at best your argument is weak. In many cases people will actually sacrifice physiological needs to fulfill the spiritual, intellectual and social ones (flipping the need pyramid)

Re: My own private basic income

#172

Post by grotsnot »

wturner wrote: post #137
j2bax wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference is Oprah provides a little value to a lot of people (whether it be therapeutic, entertainment or what have you). Collectively, she is providing a lot more "value" because of the platform and distribution she has achieved. Your garbage collector provides great value to you, but no value to the grand majority of people.

My point was that each garbage collector is more valuable to the person paying for them than Oprah Winfrey is, but Oprah makes hundreds of millions of dollars and the garbage collector makes a typical wage. I understand the reasoning that Oprah provides a little value that is distributed to a lot of people and that the garbage industry in its totality is more valuable than Oprah. With all that, I still think it's a b…

If millions of people each like Oprah enough to give her a dollar, she makes millions.

(pardon the napkin math) If you live in a town of, say, 25k people and your town has 10 garbage collectors (napkin math: each pair covers 1000 people's trash every weekday) each earning minimum wage 15k/year (if it takes 1min to pick up trash for an average household of 2, we get just over the standard 2k work-hour year. To me this sounds like fast operation and low house size. But the low end of the trash costs demonstrates the point), then each person in town is paying $6 to their garbage collectors. Even more considering benefits and non-labor costs. If healthcare, garbage truck maintenance and, I dunno, landfill fees (are those a thing?) cost the city a mere 100k/year, every person is paying $10 for garbage collection.

So in the napkin scenario, for each individual, garbage collectors are valued at 10x what Oprah is. And that's with all my napkin math assumptions choosing the lowest costs. Plausible scenarios could go as high as 100x individual value for garbage collection over Oprah mic talking. But Oprah can do her less-individually-important job for 1000x more people. It's an issue of reach.

Re: My own private basic income

#173

Post by oblio »

weberc2 wrote: post #133
opportune wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real life isn't just an elaborate Austrian economics simulator. In this case, there are a lot of complex dynamics at play: will workers emigrate elsewhere if trained well (Basically the IIT problem)? Are constituents/subjects ok with reductions in their quality of life so that other people can be provided these resources. To act as if the market will magically fix this is lazy and not realistic. Also yes of course I…

I have a really hard time believing that governments will do better at distributing resources equitably than a market. To act as though governments can magically fix this is lazy and not realistic.

Governments alone won't. Nor will markets alone.

Re: My own private basic income

#174

Post by dota_fanatic »

jpatokal wrote: post #157
dota_fanatic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people in the developed world do NOT live like kings of old. They have bosses. They struggle to find mates. They live in small, impermanent homes with no land of their own. They tend to be in debt, and don't even understand how permanent that debt will be for them. They're socially at the bottom. This is nothing like a king, who could have a large family, and was well fed, had permanent shelter, didn't pay rent,…

You are mixing social class with quality of life. Despite being at at the top of the social pyramid, kings of the past did not have many things that most of today's poor (in the US) do, like electricity, running water, air con, motor vehicles, antibiotics, the Internet etc.

Because they are strongly tied; we are social animals. Are you saying for millions of years, our ancestors on average had lower quality of life than the developed world's poor?

It turns out electricity, air con, motor vehicles, and the internet are not the source of happiness, as much as advertising would like us to think otherwise. I bet your average homeless person in America would happily trade for a life in time past if it meant family, community, offspring, and the like. So much of our work today is meaningless, the same can't be said for our evolutionary history as apex predators.

Along many facets, yes, life is much better. But let's not pretend that we haven't regressed in many ways, for much of the population on Earth.

Re: My own private basic income

#175

Post by erikcw »

aerovistae wrote: post #83
bigtunacan wrote: post #74

Can someone clarify this piece for me? I don't understand how the author is able to completely avoid taxation on the rents. >My wife and I don’t need the money we make from owning most of the business. We live off the salaries of our jobs, and reinvest virtually our entire share of the business. These reinvestments count as “losses,” and so officially we have never made any income or paid income taxes on our share of…

If they took any sort of money from their business, it would be taxed as income. But if the money just stays inside the business and is used to buy more rental buildings-- what's there to tax? So the business keeps growing and growing. Case A: the owners take a paycheck of $100,000. It gets taxed at 30%, they get $70k. Case B: the owners take no paycheck but instead buy a $100,000 property through the business with t…

But in Case B, wouldn't they have to pay the corporate income tax on that $100,000 before they buy the next property (39.1% in 2017)? I thought each property is a capital expense which gets depreciated over time. So you can't buy a second property with your profits and deduct it as an expense in the current year. Am I missing something?

Re: My own private basic income

#177

Post by jonbarker »

wturner wrote: post #122
mod wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average citizen values YOUR garbage collector far less than they value Oprah. They value their own, certainly, but that value is reflected by the enormous sums we collectively pay to have our garbage removed. The garbage industry is worth a lot more than Oprah. You also pay (indirectly) your garbage worker a lot more than you pay (indirectly) Oprah, so things might be working out closer to how you value them than…

I still can't get my head around the logic that a garbage collector gets paid next to nothing relative to someone who is paid millions to talk into a microphone and the reasoning is that the latter "provides more value". "They provide more value" just seems like a very partial catch phrase to make this all look less absurd than it actually is.

Many people kind of happy produces a higher area under the curve than a few people really happy. Watching Oprah makes many people kind of happy. Your garbage collector every day makes you and the people on your block very happy (or relieved).

Re: My own private basic income

#178

Post by cortesoft »

cookiecaper wrote: post #155
cortesoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally ignoring the crux of his argument, which is centered on ownership; how we decide who owns what, how we tax owned things versus earned-through-work things, and how we tax the things people do with what they own. Yes, a piece of property earns rent because it has 'value' to someone else; however, who gets to earn that value? At some point, this piece of land was 'unowned', and then someone came along an…

>Do they have to pay society a fee for being able to claim it as their own? In most areas, yes. There is a property tax that is charged as a percentage of the land's value. If the owner fails to pay this fee to society, society revokes his ownership, forcefully seizes the land if necessary, and resells the property to another person who is willing to pay the imposed fee.

Right, which means the real question is 'how much should those taxes be?'

Re: My own private basic income

#179

Post by KingPrad »

ue_ wrote: post #163
drewcon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> keep people poor, underfed, and uneducated so that they will always be a cheap source of grunt labor. Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. There is no conspiracy to "enslave" anyone, nearly all public health and wealth measures over the last 100 years are overwhelming up and to the right. That growth did not happened throu…

>Poor, underfed, and uneducated is the default position for human beings. We were born into this world, as a species, with nothing. Have you had a look at 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread ? Here's an excerpt: > For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Eu…

Thank you for the reference. I look forward to reading this.

Re: My own private basic income

#180

Post by dredmorbius »

obstinate wrote: post #4

On some level, this is basically "capitalism 101." If I don't need my resources now, I can put them to work so that I can later benefit from them. This leads to me having productive assets, which pay me some return. If I could not acquire productive assets, there would be much less reason to save. And it's unclear how one would save, as banks would likely not exist either. You can solve this problem somewhat by havin…

this is basically "capitalism 101."

I would, well, did, actually, argue that's precisely the point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659043

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