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We're officially launching UBI

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Re: We're officially launching UBI

#31

Post by GuB-42 »

eksu wrote: post #4

Can someone explain to me why UBI is preferable to a negative income tax? I don’t get why we’ve come up with a worse version of a 40 year old idea. Are these two ships passing in the night or were there some perceived problems with Negative Income Tax that UBI is supposed to solve.

UBI is just a special case of a negative income tax where numbers cancel out.

The biggest advantage of UBI is its simplicity. You just get your UBI, done, much easier for people to understand and for the government to manage.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#32

Post by whb07 »

I wonder what the differences are between UBI and the day to day life’s of people who get straight cash payments for being citizens like: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Native American tribesmen with successful casinos etc.

To my knowledge, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows (technical term) for them either. They suffer stagnation, heavy dependency into oil money(for those in the Middle East), and it’s dsfinitely a time bomb which those in power know it’s coming.

If anyone could present some points so we could further advance this point, id be grateful

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#33

Post by mbesto »

eksu wrote: post #13
mbesto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, aren't they essentially the same thing?

No. Universal Basic Income is ‘Universal’, meaning there’s no qualification to receive it. Basically it’s flat and it goes to everyone equally, rich and poor. A negative income tax is a progressive tax system that starts off in the negatives and works itself up as you move up in brackets or (ideally) on a smooth curve or line.

> A negative income tax is a progressive tax system that starts off in the negatives and works itself up as you move up in brackets or (ideally) on a smooth curve or line.

But if UBI says you get $30k/year in gross income and then if you choose not to do UBI, then you pay taxes on your income, isn't that essentially the same thing? Because if you get $30k/year in income from UBI, it wouldn't make any sense to tax an income that comes from taxes...right?

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#34

Post by Gargoyle »

I'd rather see someone work on the Universal part first. Get distributions, however small, into the hands of every individual.

Scaling up the distributions isn't a difficult problem to solve, the universal part is.

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#35

Post by s0rce »

whb07 wrote: post #32

I wonder what the differences are between UBI and the day to day life’s of people who get straight cash payments for being citizens like: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Native American tribesmen with successful casinos etc. To my knowledge, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows (technical term) for them either. They suffer stagnation, heavy dependency into oil money(for those in the Middle East), and it’s dsfinitely a time bomb whi…

Similar situation in Alaska, I'm not sure there are huge implications (although the relative magnitude of the payments might be vastly different).

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#36

Post by mbil »

Here's more info about the program https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income

  We will assess the impact of a basic income against a broad set of metrics, including:
  
  - economic status (income, assets, standard of living)
  - time use (work, education, leisure, community involvement)
  - risk-taking (migrating, starting businesses)
  - gender relations (especially female empowerment)
  - aspirations and outlook on life

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#37

Post by s0rce »

rory096 wrote: post #26
fenwick67 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is more psychologically palatable because you get it no matter what. Negative tax creates this dissonance that if you start to earn more money you don't get as much. So then everybody tries to get around it and manipulate it so it appears they don't earn as much.

This doesn't make sense. An equivalent UBI system would have the same marginal tax rates as an NIT.

Not everyone is logical or cares that things make sense, they decide based on how things feel or how they seem at first glance without thinking them through carefully

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#38

Post by skybrian »

moduspol wrote: post #27
chatmasta wrote: post #22

How can you meaningfully experiment with UBI if the “BI” is not even universal ? My understanding is that many of the criticisms of UBI are based on externalities that would only become manifest in a meaningfully large population. For example, price increases and inflation might arise from everyone having extra money. If you’re only testing UBI on a small population, then 1) it’s not even universal, and 2) there will…

I agree that it's tough to measure "success," but at least it would be presumably easy to measure failure. If we see exactly what opponents claim will happen, it would suggest a more strict implementation might be worse. My concern is that with this we're likely looking at an even worse version of the problems seen with sending shoes to Africa [1]. Over the duration of this experiment, it's quite possible you'll crea…

If you're sending money then people will spend it (such as on shoes) and increased spending and investment will tend to help local businesses much more than sending goods that compete with them.

So I'm not seeing why you think skills will atrophy? It seems like there's more danger of that when people are poorer? (For one thing, education becomes less affordable.)

Re: We're officially launching UBI

#40

Post by danielvf »

s0rce wrote: post #35
whb07 wrote: post #32

I wonder what the differences are between UBI and the day to day life’s of people who get straight cash payments for being citizens like: UAE, Saudi Arabia, Native American tribesmen with successful casinos etc. To my knowledge, it ain’t all sunshine and rainbows (technical term) for them either. They suffer stagnation, heavy dependency into oil money(for those in the Middle East), and it’s dsfinitely a time bomb whi…

Similar situation in Alaska, I'm not sure there are huge implications (although the relative magnitude of the payments might be vastly different).

Alaskan fund usually pays out about 1K per person per year. As long as you can live on three dollars a day, you are good. (And that’s not unheard of if you’ve built your own cabin in the wilderness, grow some of your own food, and hunt.)
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