71–80 of 427 posts
Curious as to how the control group monthly amount ($50) was decided upon. Was it basically an incentive for those selected to participate?
Staying below that might encourage under-reporting on taxes; staying above that gives the researchers pretty reliable addresses and SSNs from participants.
Just a bit of quick math[0]: ~323,000,000 total US population 77.2% over the age of 18 ~250,000,000 total over the age of 18 $12,000 per year per adult = $3,000,000,000,000 per year [0] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045216
At what point does the government controlling your income start to impede personal freedom? Wouldn't any politician campaigning to increase the basic income be almost automatically elected?
(i) there are others in the same currency area who don't receive the income
(ii) the amount is insufficient to live on
(iii) there are insufficient jobs overall in the economy for all that want them
(iv) it isn't permanent
then all you actually have is a tax credit system with a different withdrawal mechanism. https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/is-basic-income-basi...
The pathologies of income schemes that cause all of them to be degraded and cancelled build up over time as people adjust to the new scheme and work out who is failing to reciprocate.
Overall basic income is theft from workers and will be seen as such by those workers. https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/is-basic-income-basi... They then agitate to have the income removed from those seen as cheating the system.
What we need are guaranteed jobs at a guaranteed living wage, paid for by the state working for the public good. Then private businesses finally have to compete for labour and that maintains the wage share.
People need something to do where they can be of service to others. Not paying off and left to rot.
But maybe there much smarter than I, and they secretly want to create these problems so they can capitalize on them.
Or maybe, they want to sap the proletariat of their drive so that the elite can remain the elite forever.
One factor that would be lost in a controlled, basic income test is the inflation effect. Implemented on a national scale, cost inflation of basic consumer needs is a near certainty. On a controlled test of 1000 people inflation would be nearly impossible to achieve without localizing the test to an absurd degree. I could see this test could serving as a dataset for calculating anticipated inflation rates on a nation…
Even if it was people's entire household budget being tracked, it'd be difficult to draw too many inferences from spending in the absence of price pressures driven by everyone else having UBI too.
So the first steps to a basic income are capital controls and a VAT, right? I wonder how long it will be until USA is ready for that stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Economists largely consider payments like this to be the best way to enact policies. It gives people more options instead of trying to control through legal pressures.
> Economists largely consider payments like this to be the best way to enact policies. It gives people more options instead of trying to control through legal pressures. That's not true at all, and in fact, the last time a large number of economists were surveyed about a proposal, the response was overwhelmingly in opposition: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/universal-basic-income Many economists would agree that,…
I’m referring to a general principle regarding transfer payments. They’re usually more simple ways to reach a desired outcome than alternatives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely, and this is also the problem with every* other basic income study that's been conducted over the past few decades. If you promise basic income for only 5 years, then I'm probably not going to quit my job and become an artist because I can't be unemployed for 5 years and expect to waltz back into a job. If you promise basic income "forever", then I'm far more likely to retire at 30 and plan to never work a…
Would you not work? Basic income is nearly not enough to access luxuries. Sure you should be able to live off it, but I think most people would likely want more, the difference from forced equality being that you can still work and keep that as luxury money.
Would they, though? That's the key question that I believe this study (and others like it) fail to address. Depending on the basic income amount, I believe it would be possible to live a fulfilling (if somewhat minimalist) life without needing to supplement that income.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't UBI operate on the premise that it's replacing many of the existing social programs? For example, unconditional money rather than food/housing assistance. If the participants of the study also get access to these things, doesn't that severely limit the usefulness of this study? Also, $1k/mo is pretty small. Are you just hoping to observe some behavioral changes at the margin with…
There seems to be a common bait-and-switch tactic performed by proponents of UBI, in which they mention UBI as a replacement for social programs when talking about affordability, but back away from that assertion when questioned about how to handle (for example) recipients that spend all of their UBI on drugs instead of food.
*Drugs are a different issue, that should be treated as a health problem and dealt with accordingly.