Congrats, and good luck. I'm personally against the idea of UBI because I don't believe it works at a large scale because all it will do is create inflation, but I'm genuinely curious to see me proven wrong. That's the whole point of experimentation, so I fully support this.
We're officially launching UBI
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#62I'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.
A dollar a day to every US citizen is $114 billion a year. At that expense I would think scaling it at all once it reaches universality is nearly impossible. Even if we're theoretically giving every $10k/yr, upping that to $10,365/yr still costs well over $100 billion.
Make it a dollar a year, then. Or a cent a year. The point was to install and test the required infrastructure (identity check, payment method and so on...) and then increase the amount.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
The shoes don't have to come from Bomet County. Nor does the food, or the electricity, or much of anything else.
The poverty rate is just under 50%, per Wikipedia at least. If all the money is coming from the county (presumably it is), then it's going to be coming from the other 50%, and at a rate higher than neighboring (non-UBI) counties.
It will be in the rational self-interest of that non-impoverished 50% to leave. Labor will be more expensive as fewer people want to do less-desirable work due to no strong need. I don't know how freely workers can move between counties, but obviously I imagine some people in neighboring counties will want to move in for the free paycheck.
Over time, you've chased out the productive people and bolstered the less productive ones, and you're drawing from a smaller and smaller pool to pay for a larger and larger group of people.
I've always felt like UBI is unsustainable, but at least worth debating. I haven't yet seen even proposed what should be done if UBI fails this way, though.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#64Can 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.
Yup. In my guess, UBI is more overhead to run since there are literally more line items on people's tax documents (there's the UBI as well as the progressive tax that is used to pay for it).
But UBI's have the perceived simplicity of "I always get this", which might help encourage more people to pay in, even though the higher earners are losing money.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is the exact opposite of that. When you send free goods into an economy, you inhibit demand which in turn inhibits economic growth. When you send money into an economy, in increase demand and it will have the opposite effect.
To be clear the demand is the same — the price is the issue. UBI and inflation may well be tied tightly together.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is the exact opposite of that. When you send free goods into an economy, you inhibit demand which in turn inhibits economic growth. When you send money into an economy, in increase demand and it will have the opposite effect.
UBI doesn't send money in, it redistributes it.
And if solving economic problems were as simple as "just take more money from the rich people and give it to the poor people," this problem would have been solved centuries ago.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is the exact opposite of that. When you send free goods into an economy, you inhibit demand which in turn inhibits economic growth. When you send money into an economy, in increase demand and it will have the opposite effect.
Not necessarily. Increased demand solely from cash injections in an economy will increase prices without an increase in investments, since those investing can't know if the cash injections will continue or not.
So it will lead to short-term inflation, and without the long-term investments in production, that inflation will continue for as long as the injections continue.
As the cash injections aren't universal, those who receive it will benefit, while the ones who don't will see their purchasing power drop significantly, and their lives worsen.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#68 Now it’s time for us to do our jobs, and wait to learn.
For good arguments against UBI, cf Hazlitt : https://fee.org/articles/income-without-work/ .
- UBI is not a right because it would mean some have a duty to work and transfer wealth to others.
- Costs are always badly estimated. Proponents of UBI obviously never look at the big picture
- There's no such a thing as "living in dignity", more is always welcomed
- Old social welfare benefits will never die
- Money can't flow from rich people for a long period of time. They either stop having money or emigrate in others countriesRe: We're officially launching UBI
#69Maybe the post should state what "UBI" means.
Re: We're officially launching UBI
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can't even form a useful moral argument about it until we know its effects Of course we can. It's ok for people to donate their money and time for this kind of experiment. It's not ok for governments to tax citizens for a new social giveaway unless others social benefits are reduced accordingly (which will never happen).
The most popular UBI proposals that I've seen all contain some level of social safety net reduction (some more than others). None of the proposals I've seen suggest that social services remain at their current level and we give everyone $ N on top of that.
But, will it happen ? Are laws implemented according to the proposals ? Of course the most urgent thing will be to implement UBI. And then to raise it. No one will think about deleting previous welfare benefits