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The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

theatlantic.com

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Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#11

Post by mcbruiser3 »

uoaei wrote: post #5
mcbruiser3 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

net result being an increase in taxes on many (or at least mid-to-high earners) with zero benefits to society, only a built-in voting block for those who enable this edit: if I wanted upvotes I'd jump on the socialism/communism bandwagon. I feel sorry for the future if this is the prevailing thought :(

Being able to eschew shitty soul-sucking jobs in favor of real personal development is "zero benefit"?

who lives on $500 a month? and the economy will simply adjust to absorb this increase anyway, so hence my comment about zero benefits. also, for young people at least, "shitty" jobs build character, which seems ever more critical these days. after working a "shitty" job for a little while, a person may be motivated to better themselves, or at least get a better job.

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#12

Post by slifin »

I wish there was less focus on distributing money and more focus on free water, food and shelter for everyone

It's crazy to me in the UK that we have free healthcare, where you can get free water food and shelter if you're ill but if you're healthy you can go back on the street with potentially no food water shelter

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#13

Post by aaron-lebo »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #7
rothbardrand wrote: post #3

One of the things about UBI is that these pilot programs aren't UBI, because they aren't universal. Giving a segment of the population free money is going to benefit that segment, no question. Welfare and Quantitative Easing are both examples of that. But when you make it universal, my economics intuition says that the effect will be washed out by a commensurate rise in prices. Or put another way, you can subsidize t…

>you can't subsidize the many at their own expense and have it result in a positive effect. You can if it changes local incentives to cause a better overall outcome. For example, a tragedy-of-the-commons situation can be improved by having each over-user give up their share of use to a monopolist whose subsidies replace the lost income. This is explicitly one of the goals of replacing the current social safety nets w…

Sorry to be annoying on this topic, but:

This is explicitly one of the goals of replacing the current social safety nets with UBI.

UBI can't replace social safety nets. It's impossible. 12k for every adult is 3 trillion dollars, which almost always assumes cutting other programs. What about healthcare? I bet most would rather have comprehensive health coverage instead of 12k every year, but you can't have both. In the US we have neither.

You'd have to lose safety nets to make UBI work, financially. If you can show otherwise, do you mind explaining it?

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#14

Post by dredmorbius »

slifin wrote: post #12

I wish there was less focus on distributing money and more focus on free water, food and shelter for everyone It's crazy to me in the UK that we have free healthcare, where you can get free water food and shelter if you're ill but if you're healthy you can go back on the street with potentially no food water shelter

These services have real costs, and at least in the case of food, water, and shelter, risk (and its side effects) is a minor part of consumption, and so doesn't introduce distortions.

Ensuring income adequate for access to these necessities is a fundamental and long-established principle of economics. "A man must always live by his work" comes straight from Adam Smith.

The problems are multiple.

Wages tend to (or below) subsistence. Rents (economic) eat up excess consumer value, not just producer costs. Not all people can (or should) work. And there are cases where risk components and externalities can lead to both over- and under-consumption (famously: healthcare, both ways).

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#15

Post by lovich »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #13
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you can't subsidize the many at their own expense and have it result in a positive effect. You can if it changes local incentives to cause a better overall outcome. For example, a tragedy-of-the-commons situation can be improved by having each over-user give up their share of use to a monopolist whose subsidies replace the lost income. This is explicitly one of the goals of replacing the current social safety nets w…

Sorry to be annoying on this topic, but: This is explicitly one of the goals of replacing the current social safety nets with UBI. UBI can't replace social safety nets. It's impossible. 12k for every adult is 3 trillion dollars, which almost always assumes cutting other programs. What about healthcare? I bet most would rather have comprehensive health coverage instead of 12k every year, but you can't have both. In th…

part of our high healthcare costs are from not using a universal system. Other Western countries are achieving same or better outcomes with far less costs. I do agree that UBI will not work if we leave some of the things we consider basics now, such as food, housing, or(in my opinion) basic healthcare to be provided by competitive corporations, then we are essentially just going to be putting the money in their pockets

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#16

Post by dredmorbius »

Increasingly my thought is that UBI or a minimum living wage (enforced perhaps through an employer of last resort who sets an effective wage floor) must be balanced by a tax on economic rents, else the gains simply flow to rentiers.

This is a "land tax", but writ large and applying across all (or most) rent-seeking goods, including especially productive (as distinguished from strictly financial) asset classes.

In the case of Stockton, and most other West Coast cities, this would mean land taxes to incentivise further development and housing supply, as well as updating zoning and building codes to allow denser and mixed-use development.

The wildfire situation in the already housing-constrained SF North Bay strikes me as a tremendous opportunity to reconsider housing, rents, asset taxes, and zoning.

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#17

Post by mistercow »

imron wrote: post #9
uoaei wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to eschew shitty soul-sucking jobs in favor of real personal development is "zero benefit"?

How many people will engage in real personal development, and how many people will just spend more time on Netflix and Facebook?

There will be some of each, but either one results in more jobs for everybody else.

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#18

Post by yellowstuff »

rothbardrand wrote: post #3

One of the things about UBI is that these pilot programs aren't UBI, because they aren't universal. Giving a segment of the population free money is going to benefit that segment, no question. Welfare and Quantitative Easing are both examples of that. But when you make it universal, my economics intuition says that the effect will be washed out by a commensurate rise in prices. Or put another way, you can subsidize t…

Sure, if you simply gave everyone $1 for every dollar they already have, all you do is double prices and change nothing of substance.

But I think the pro-UBI argument would be that you don't need to increase the money supply to do it. About 60% of Federal spending is on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Reducing the spending on these programs, and other inefficient transfers such as welfare and disability will pay for much of UBI, and the rest is paid for by raising taxes. The net outcome is that rich people will pay a bit more to the government than they do now, poor people get a bit more than they do now, but the major effects are 1) inefficient bureaucracy is eliminated, 2) bad incentives are eliminated (such as disability payments forbidding any gainful employment, and 3) the stigma of welfare payments is removed when everyone gets them.

I don't think this will work in the US because 1) there's no political will to reduce existing entitlement programs and 2) there's a lot of resentment in the working class against recipients of entitlements, and 3) racism. However, the argument that UBI will fail because it requires printing money is probably wrong.

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#19

Post by nicholas73 »

rothbardrand wrote: post #3

One of the things about UBI is that these pilot programs aren't UBI, because they aren't universal. Giving a segment of the population free money is going to benefit that segment, no question. Welfare and Quantitative Easing are both examples of that. But when you make it universal, my economics intuition says that the effect will be washed out by a commensurate rise in prices. Or put another way, you can subsidize t…

Are you going to eat more food with UBI? Probably not.

Are food prices going to rise if others eat more food? No, we have spare capacity for food production.

Also, a bigger topic, but supply and demand is not linear like they teach in school. Food prices are fairly cheap and stable in America because of excess capacity plus the fact that producers face thin margins plus spoilage. It will take a lot before prices move "commensurately".

This is just one example.

Re: The latest experiment in basic income will be coming to Stockton, California

#20

Post by andrewla »

rothbardrand wrote: post #3

One of the things about UBI is that these pilot programs aren't UBI, because they aren't universal. Giving a segment of the population free money is going to benefit that segment, no question. Welfare and Quantitative Easing are both examples of that. But when you make it universal, my economics intuition says that the effect will be washed out by a commensurate rise in prices. Or put another way, you can subsidize t…

The "commensurate rise in prices" is the tricky part. I think what you would see would be a percentage increase in prices corresponding to the average percentage increase in income. Since UBI is a flat amount, not tied to income, that average percentage is going to be so close to 0 as to be completely irrelevant. Even if it's not close to 0, for low-income (or UBI-only income) households especially, the marginal increase in income should be significantly higher than the marginal increase in prices.
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