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Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

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Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#41

Post by jpindar »

xienze wrote: post #31
appearsonline wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One wonders which humans you surround yourself with to consider that "basic human behavior".

Trying to maximize earnings is basic human behavior, sorry to break it to you. Welfare scams occur regularly, and that's before UBI. And you're dodging the bigger question: I'm on UBI and my money runs out, can't afford to feed the kids. Multiply that by at least several thousand people every month. Now what?

Same as now. You don't get more food stamps just because you ran out.

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#42

Post by jpindar »

snarf21 wrote: post #34
jerkstate wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the price of goods and services will go up because everybody suddenly has more money and the owners of the businesses that sell those goods and services have just had their taxes doubled, so we're back to square one anyways.

I worry about this too. Who cares if you have more money if it has less buying power per dollar? This is also why I worry about drastically higher minimum wage. Poor people have more money but all the places they spend it have higher costs that lead to higher prices. Rich people don't spend the majority of their money at Wal-Mart so it affects them less. EITC and other tax reductions on the poor seems more effective…

>Who cares if you have more money if it has less buying power per dollar?

People who are broke care. Some money is always better than no money.

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#43

Post by jrs95 »

phkahler wrote: post #37

Another missing element in the model: People who need it most are renting. You hand everyone $1000 per month and I guarantee there will be a large uptick in rents. This will short circuit economic activity and just push the money straight to those who own rental property, thereby increasing the wealth gap while raising the cost of living. I won't all go into this effect, but certainly a lot of it will.

Everyone getting it buys a lot of the same goods, including housing. You'd expect increased demand to bring prices up a bit across the board, but I don't think it's as huge as you're making it out to be.

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#44

Post by mseebach »

lightbyte wrote: post #35
mseebach wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with nerves being struck and everything to do with your 150 year out of date social analysis being so absurd that it's not even wrong. By the way, the lower class is striking back, but it looks more like a fake tan and a combover than the image of St. Petersburg in 1917 you seem to lust for.

>By the way, the lower class is striking back, but it looks more like a fake tan and a combover than the image of St. Petersburg in 1917 you seem to lust for. Are you implying the lower class is "striking back" by electing a NYC real estate billionaire as president? Who are you thinking they are striking against, themselves?

Well, there's me and Michael Moore. https://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/

> Who are you thinking they are striking against, themselves?

Being right is not a prerequisite. The workers that rose up in communist revolutions 100 years ago got throughly screwed over.

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#45

Post by jrs95 »

rbanffy wrote: post #15
chimeracoder wrote: post #5

A couple of things right off the bat. This study assumes that: - There is zero effect on propensity to work - The national debt has no secondary effects on the economy - Changes in taxation do not affect consumption or investment behavior, at any tax level. Those first two right there are incredibly massive assumptions, and they amount to two of the biggest criticisms of these proposals in the first place. And the th…

> - There is zero effect on propensity to work OTOH, imagine parents that today can't be present to raise their kids may have the option of dropping one of their jobs to be with their family.

Or someone wasting their time working at one of 10 fast food places that are all right next to each other that no longer has to do that. How much is that job, or even that entire business, really contributing to the economy?

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#46

Post by jrs95 »

xienze wrote: post #18
snarf21 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and no mention if this would affect welfare and other social programs. So if someone still gets all the aid they do today and $1K per month, then there is more money to spend but are there more people who want to work where that money is spent? I think it likely that this would cause low end job wages to rise, not necessarily increase employment.

> and no mention if this would affect welfare and other social programs. Which is quite surprising because every, and I mean every, UBI proposal talks up how much money we'd _save_ because welfare would be eliminated. I just don't see how that's possible, because inevitably there are going to be a lot of people with real or self-imposed crises crying about how they don't have enough money to pay rent or buy food, and…

It's not really a ridiculous leftist fantasy, it was originally a conservative idea as an alternative to the welfare state. And as for what to do when people say they can't afford X, you raise the payouts so they can (if they really can't afford it).

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#47

Post by hawat »

jrs95 wrote: post #43
phkahler wrote: post #37

Another missing element in the model: People who need it most are renting. You hand everyone $1000 per month and I guarantee there will be a large uptick in rents. This will short circuit economic activity and just push the money straight to those who own rental property, thereby increasing the wealth gap while raising the cost of living. I won't all go into this effect, but certainly a lot of it will.

Everyone getting it buys a lot of the same goods, including housing. You'd expect increased demand to bring prices up a bit across the board, but I don't think it's as huge as you're making it out to be.

It will rise inflation, probably - as you will have a lot more cash in the market... And finally "nothing will change".

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#48

Post by specialist »

"Economy" is the movement of money.

Of course wealth redistribution via progressive taxation, in this case via UBI (or negative income tax) increases the economy.

Conflating wealth growth (aggregation, transferring, hording) with economic activity is how we got into our current mess (accelerating inequity).

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#49

Post by jrs95 »

tnzn wrote: post #12
chimeracoder wrote: post #5

A couple of things right off the bat. This study assumes that: - There is zero effect on propensity to work - The national debt has no secondary effects on the economy - Changes in taxation do not affect consumption or investment behavior, at any tax level. Those first two right there are incredibly massive assumptions, and they amount to two of the biggest criticisms of these proposals in the first place. And the th…

You believe 12k a year basic income will make people work less ?

As someone who made about that much a year recently, absolutely. I wouldn't have just sat on my ass though. I would've been able to go to school instead of wasting years of my life working minimum wage just to get by.

Re: Study: A universal basic income would grow the economy

#50

Post by dm319 »

We need to await the results of the Finnish study[1]. As an aside, I wish all politics would take an experimental scientific approach as the Finnish are doing. They are randomly selecting 2000 unemployed in a specific area and trialling the basic income for two years. I hope they have also selected a control population. At the end of two years they will assess how the scheme affects cost and employment status of that group.

[1]http://basicincome.org/news/2017/05/finland-first-results-ba...

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